Camelot Lotto, a national lottery in the UK, has taken a page out of Miller Light’s book with a TV advert featuring Christmas lights. The 20-second advert starts with a view of a dimly-lit suburban house. A snowman on the porch is the only allusion to it being Christmas. The scene suddenly comes alive to a piano soundtrack (sounding very much like Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s Wizards of Winter) – and lights on the hedge in the front garden flash on and off in rotation, in time with the music.
After a couple of seconds, the tempo of the music picks up. Lights come on and go off all over the house in time with the beat – from the roof, to the snowman, to a star on top of a large outdoor Christmas tree, showering light down on its pine needles. The white picket fence along the front of the house takes on the form of a piano keyboard, with the fence panels lighting up as the music scales up and down. As the advert progresses, the scene gets more and more lively with an ever-increasing amount of objects taking part in the musical light show. Click on the image below to play the video.
Reindeer are lit up over the garage, icicles of light are suspended from the sloping roof, a second snowman is illuminated on the other side of the front door. What seems like a small forest of mini Christmas trees are lit up in turn all over the front lawn. Baubles of light are suspended on the porch roof and as they light up in syncopation to the music, numbers can be seen in the middle of them – and they are revealed as lottery balls. Towards the end of the ad, in time to a break in the music, all the lights go on at once. A large Lotto bauble appears on the right hand side of the screen as the voiceover says: “Imagine if you won this Christmas”.
Daniel Heale, Head of Media & Marketing for Camelot said: “The ad is designed to capture the spirit of what people might do if they won a Lotto jackpot this winter. In 12 years of running The National Lottery we have seen people spend their money on so many different things – and there’s usually at least one crazy and spontaneous purchase in there somewhere. “We’ve had a millionaire tiling his winning numbers into the bottom of his new swimming pool, another framing her big cheque and giving it pride of place in her living room – so putting Lotto numbers up in Christmas lights on the front of a house follows a Lotto tradition.”
Credits
The Christmas lights advertisement was developed at Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO, London, by copywriter Rob Webster, art director Chris Kelly and producer Lucy Sherwood. The brief issued to them by Camelot was to create something which brought together the optimism and good will that Christmas inspires, while encouraging people to dream and about the possibilities a Lotto win could open up.
Filming was directed by Jim Gilchrist at Thomas Thomas Films, with producer Abbie McLean and director of photography August Jakobson.
See my post from December 2005 on the Miller Light Christmas Lights campaign