M&S Food’s Double Dawn French Kickstarts Christmas Ad Season

In 2021 M&S Food brought us an all-new Christmas character, an animated fairy ornament who can bring fellow decorations to life and magic up scrumptious M&S festive food. Voiced by Dawn French, Fairy was an instant hit and last year’s team-up with some dancing mittens scored M&S Food its first ever maximum 5.9-Star Rating on Test Your Ad. It secured Fairy’s status as a Christmas ad icon but it left M&S Food with the best kind of problem: how do you follow that?

Well, the first Christmas ads of 2024 are rolling out and we have our answer. This year, M&S Food are giving us a blockbuster ad in which Fairy meets… Dawn French! Bringing together the actress and the character she voices is a simple but brilliant idea, and the team-up is going to stretch over several more ads between now and New Years, with M&S Food promising some more famous face guest stars.

This kickoff ad sees Dawn loving Christmas but exhausted by the preparations. Enter Fairy (to a bloodcurdling shriek from a shocked Dawn) who helps her get into party mode with a wave of her wand. One magical makeover, and a table full of M&S treats later, and Dawn and her neighbours are bopping to Elton John, with the hostess grudgingly giving some of the credit to M&S…

It’s a witty and surprising ad which brings out the best in both the brand mascot Fairy and her human actress, who gets to use the comic skills she’s best known for. And it’s got plenty of elements which we know from Orlando Wood’s work (in Lemon and Look Out) speak to the right side of the brain, whose “broad-beam” attention drives long-term effectiveness.

There’s cultural references, of course, with Dawn’s party reluctance reminding viewers of classic Vicar Of Dibley Christmas special plots. There’s plenty of connection and between-ness with Dawn and Fairy, with a big range of non-verbal communication brought to life by the animators. And there’s a big, much-loved, melodic soundtrack once the party gets going and “Step Into Christmas” hits the stereo. All aspects likely to boost effectiveness.

So how do viewers respond? M&S Food can join Dawn and Fairy in a celebration – they’ve done it again, becoming one of the rare brands to score top marks two years in a row with another 5.9-Star Rating. They’ve also earned an Exceptional short-term Spike Rating, meaning those M&S goodies should fly off the shelves over the festive season. It’s as good a result as a brand could hope for.

Beyond the double dose of Dawn French and the light-hearted storytelling, there’s another secret to the ad’s success. M&S Food themselves have talked about how “consistency” is one of their key ideas for this run of Fairy ads, and consistency has proved to be the key to Xmas success for more than one brand in recent years.

Our latest report, Compound Creativity, digs deeper into the idea of consistency in advertising, coming up with the world’s first accurate measurement of it, a Creative Consistency Score which predicts how likely a campaign is to generate extra business impact based on its consistency. It’s a concept that stretches well beyond what audiences see on screen, with metrics like the length of relationship between brand and agency just as important as re-using successful ads and building lasting brand characters and assets.

It’s the brand characters and assets element that you see on screen in this M&S Food ad, though. With four years of Fairy ads and now two Test Your Ad maximum scores, it’s clear that M&S investment in creative consistency is paying off. And with more to come from Dawn and Fairy this Christmas, it’s a very strong start to the 2024 Christmas Ad season.

Get into the Christmas Spirit with Our Christmas Advertising Playlist!