M&S Teaches the Art of Back to School Ads

The Autumn school Term begins this week, so we’re at the time of year where Summer campaigns are giving way to Back To School ones, which come with their own set of challenges for retail brands. Back To School campaigns are a chance to show happy kids – always an emotional winner – but of all the seasonal events it’s the one that gives a brand the least chance for variety. Uniforms, shoes, stationery – every brand will be selling broadly the same things with limited opportunities to stand out.

M&S solve this problem with an ad which goes big on mess and colour to show its products in action, with resilient clothes, shoes and school equipment which can survive all the rigours of the school day. It’s a dynamic ad which focuses on one schoolboy whose wild science experiments, puddle-jumping and exploding paint jars create all kinds of mess but whose good humour can’t be dented. And nor can his M&S gear.

So it’s an ad which packs a lot of craft into its 30 second running time. The brand is prominent all through, product benefits are prominently mentioned but don’t overwhelm the emotional narrative, and by following one kid the ad tells a story. This story ends with a lovely bit of human togetherness, when the boy reunites with his Dad who says “Good day, then?”, ensuring the ad ends on a peak.

Special mention too for a well-chosen soundtrack, upbeat and melodic thanks to using the famous whistling riff from Peter, Bjorn And John’s “Young Folks”, a hit in the late 00s when many of the parents of school-age kids would have been kids themselves. Melodic music and nostalgic cultural references are both elements which do well at attracting the attention of the right hemisphere of the brain, important for building longer-term brand-building effectiveness: see Orlando Wood’s Look Out for more details!

M&S’ very well-constructed ad earns its excellent results on Test Your Ad. It gets a 4.5-Star Rating, our headline metric which predicts the potential for an ad to drive long-term brand growth. This is a full 2 Stars above the clothing category average. And the ad does even better on short-term Spike Rating and on Brand Fluency, scoring Exceptional results in both, again well above the category norm. In other words it succeeds in both being a clearly recognisable M&S ad and in generating high emotional intensity and positive feeling. When it comes to Back To School ads, M&S has plenty to teach its competitors.