Blogs
John Lewis: You Didn’t Need a Telescope to See This Coming
Wow. That advert. I’ve lost count the amount of times I’ve watched it this morning (as has YouTube, which has been stuck on 304 views for about an hour!). It’s everything you would expect from a John Lewis Christmas advert and more, telling the story of how our elderly loved ones can feel so alone and that we should do more for them. The link with Age UK is a tremendous one./span>
But let’s put our commercial hat on and talk about its social media impact.
As soon as I walked in to the office this morning I knew that the John Lewis advert would be trending. When I logged in to Twitter I saw #ManOnTheMoon as the top trend, with over 18,000 tweets, and at this point the ad had only been online for around an hour. That’s an incredible volume of posts.
Craig Inglis, Customer Director at John Lewis, uploaded a video to his personal Twitter feed, showing the sheer amount of tweets the @JohnLewisRetail account was receiving every second, tracking the hashtag alone.
My TweetDeck is quite busy today… Thanks everyone we are all very happy @johnlewisretail @age_uk #ManOnTheMoon pic.twitter.com/jml36gmygy
— Craig Inglis (@CraigInglis) November 6, 2015
We predicted this moment would be huge on social media as soon as John Lewis announced its release date – and they’re not the only retailer reaping the rewards of a Christmas ad campaign.
All week, Fieldworks have been tracking Twitter’s response to the big festive ad campaigns. You may (or may not) be surprised to hear that John Lewis has already increased their following by over 6,500 people since Monday. More than 5,000 of these have followed John Lewis since the night before the advert was released.
I did some quick maths around this. Within the five minute period I monitored, their followers had grown by 76 people. That equates to over 900 new followers an hour. In terms of the video being retweeted: it was posted at 07:57 and in four hours it had been shared 19,211 times.
According to my calculator that works out as around 4,802 retweets an hour. Impressively that’s 80 retweets a minute!
In a previous blog I said that not trending doesn’t mean you haven’t had success. But I’m certain that John Lewis will be looking at today as their biggest social victory since… well… since last Christmas.
