Tesco and M&S: seamlessness will be the new 'sadvertising' this Christmas

As the line between traditional and digital marketing gets blurrier, consistent, easy experiences will be what makes brands successful this holiday season.

Black Friday is seen as the official start of the holiday season, but not for marketers – or a growing number of customers. CreditCards.com research found that 32 million Americans had already started shopping by the time its survey was published, in September.

At the same time, there’s also a large subset of consumers who refuse to think about the holidays until Thanksgiving is over – “Christmas ostriches,” as Tamara Duschl, head of brand value at Tesco, calls them. How do you appeal to one group without alienating the other?

According to Duschl, the digital age makes it a lot easier to do that.

“People leave traces of who they are and what they’re looking for, which provides marketers a great opportunity to serve them when they most need it,” she said at Shift London.

Tearjerker marketing: out

Having an official Christmas ad is common for U.K. brands, such as John Lewis, which is known for tugging at the heartstrings. Last year’s ad was about a little girl trying to send a Christmas present to a man on the moon, who she thought must be lonely.

“Sadvertising” has been a big theme over the last few years. The 2014 Sainsbury’s ad starred World War I soliders. Last year, an old man in German supermarket Edeka’s holiday ad faked his own death to get his (awful) children home for Christmas.

Duschl believes sad ads are over and this year’s holiday marketing will be more humorous. What the two have in common is tapping into universal human emotions. Another universal emotion is wanting a consistent experience from retailers, whether they’re online or in-store, said Ira Dubinsky, head of brand marketing for Christmas and home at Marks & Spencer.

“It’s time to start judging holiday campaigns to a much more holistic extent. What are customers really getting from every touchpoint and every channel?” asked Dubinsky, who sold his first Christmas tree in August last year. “Are you making things easier, faster, more engaging, more interesting?”

To do so, you can use social listening in order to capitalize on negative experiences people have had elsewhere. Last year, Tesco deployed a TurkeyTaxi to deliver pre-made turkey meals to consumers who tweeted complaints about never having received turkeys they ordered from a competitor. That bit of opportunism would never have worked pre-digital.

“Rather than predict what people want, you can listen and respond,” said Duschl.

Dubinsky added, “Zeroing in on customers with negative experiences is a really clever tactic. The next step to that is what we’re looking at and trying to figure out in 2016.”

Consistent experiences: In

Everything Duschl and Dubinsky said came back to seamlessness, the hallmark of brands merging their physical and digital experiences.

“You can have the flashiest ad, but if you go online and it doesn’t marry up, there’s a lot more disappointment than anything else,” said Duschl. “Getting the basics right is worth a lot, using digital as the glue to bring that whole experience together.”

Dubinsky compares the alignment of physical and digital brand experiences with matching luggage. For Marks & Spencer, it’s about investing in the right data technology behind-the-scenes and being “agnostic.”

In other words, a conversion is a conversion, regardless of the channel. If a customer bought a dress, who cares if she first saw it on a sale rack or on a search ad? All that matters is that Marks & Spencer made it as easy as possible, taking all the potential discovery points into account.