Claire Beale on Advertising: A budget Christmas? Call in the ‘Hamster’

Jamie’s cooking cheese on toast, Twiggy’s partying in polyester and Richard Hammond’s been tempted back from the Arctic by the bargains at Morrisons. Shame. It’s going to be a crunchy Christmas, just look at the ads.

Gone are the expensive celeb fests (remember the Spice Girls at Tesco last year, rumoured to have cost £1m?). Forget the extravagant mock merriment under the mistletoe – shot in June and the pricey stars would rather be swapping insults than gift boxes if it wasn’t for the money. This Christmas it’s all about value, and that includes the casting.

Take Marks & Spencer’s Christmas fare, by Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe/Y&R. It’s not a big number, there’s no Shirley Bassey or Antonio Banderas this year. There are the girls, Twiggy and co, frolicking while they can because M&S is about to slash its ad budgets and maybe the girls won’t survive the snip.

At least they’ve got Take That to play with, and there’s tinsel, candles, a roaring fire, snow. It’s not the showtime of previous years but it’s homely and cosy and just right.

John Lewis has also gone for a tastefully modest tack. Its ad by Lowe matches people with the right gifts: sleepy man gets espresso machine, boffin boy gets a science kit. It’s simple and charming and not quite as cut-price as it sounds: licensing a version of The Beatles’ “From Me to You” for the soundtrack didn’t come cheap, but it absolutely makes the ad. Value, see.

Jamie Oliver’s palled up with Ant and Dec, but they’re serving their cranberries with cheese on toast this year. At the other end of the market, the Morrisons ad by Delaney Lund Knox Warren has gone for a handful of bargain celebs; blink and you’ll miss some of them, which might be just as well. Richard Hammond, ahem, stars. Then there’s Denise Van Outen, a Morrisons trouper, Diarmuid Gavin and that bloke who used to host They Think It’s All Over.

But please don’t moan that this year’s Christmas ads just don’t feel luxuriantly Christmassy enough. It could be worse. Most were filmed back in the early summer when there was still a tinge of economic optimism around. If you were doing it now you’d probably have a few more price bursts and a bigger logo and sod the famous faces.

The latest Deloitte Christmas Retail Survey suggests that British shoppers will be spending 7 per cent less this Christmas than last. If you’re wondering what exactly that means for your bank balance, apparently we spent an average of £655 each last year. Mind you, is saving £45 this Christmas really going to stave off penury come a brutal 2009?

Of course not, say the 19 per cent of people Deloitte found who are actually determined to have a blow out Christmas, presumably in the hope that the hangover will comatose them well into the financial chill of the new year.

Scrape beneath the gloomy headlines, though, and you’ll find that for the average consumer (if they’re still clinging on to a job), recession is for now just a spectre. Ad strategists will tell you that we’re being conditioned to be cautious even though few of us have yet to feel the pain in our purses. So mixing a value message with a “oh, go on treat yourself while you still can” one is underpinning most ad campaigns this Christmas.

Retailers, though, are bracing themselves for a dismal season. Analysts are predicting that retail sales could be down as much as 10 per cent. That would make Christmas 2008 the worst since the dark days of the Seventies.

Still, some brands make as much as a third of their annual revenue in the run-up to Christmas, so, downturn or not, they can’t afford to give up. Though ad production budgets may have been trimmed, media budgets are holding up and ads are getting as much exposure as possible. The good news here is that value is certainly on offer from the purveyors of advertising spots and space: Television advertising is at its cheapest for years.

Ah, finally, some good news then.

Best in show: Barclaycard (BBH)

Now, really, we shouldn’t be thinking about pumping up our credit card debts this Christmas, should we? But oh, the new campaign from Barclaycard is such fun in the midst of all the doom and gloom.

Bartle Bogle Hegarty has come up with a gloriously feel-good idea for the brand, beautifully cast and guaranteed to make you smile every time you see it.

It features a bloke sliding round the sunny city on a giant water flume, paying for things on his Barclaycard as he goes. The Bellamy Brothers soundtrack is simply gorgeous. And its all such a long way from the cold dark days of a credit crunch Christmas I just want to get my bikini on and join him.