Holiday commercials focus on death this season

A strange number of commercials have been focusing on celebrating the holidays while having an emphasis on deceased loved ones.

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I have noticed a strange trend as this holiday season gets rolling in the United States: There are a lot of ads centered around death and the loss of loved ones this year.

What spurred this phenomenon is anyone’s guess, though my theory is that it’s meant to remind us of those we have lost due to covid or other causes that may have claimed people we might not have lost so soon otherwise. So naturally, in the interest of selling things, advertisers are all too happy to pour salt in the wounds sustained by those who will have an empty seat or two at the holiday table this year.

If you’re thinking that it’s devious to resort to tugging at one’s heart strings when selling something, I’m right there with you. It isn’t anything but an attempt to get you to open your wallet. And don’t think I’m a tree-hugging socialist, far from it. I just think that a little tact goes a long way. But then I’m not beholden to shareholders who demand constant growth in perpetuity, so maybe I’m speaking from a place of ignorance. Still, there’s a lucrative reason for the practice of utilizing emotional advertising: it works.

According to the IPA ( Institute of Practitioners in Advertising ) rational advertisements that tell you what you need to know about the goods and services being offered provided a 16% increase in profits generated.

As one might expect, informing interested parties makes it more likely for those who see the ad to make a purchase, but it does very little to offer the benefit of virality or word-of-mouth about the ad. A combined approach utilizing emotional media along with rational information in an ad increases profits by 26% — 10% better.

Utilizing purely emotion advertising, however, has the most profound effect. Profits soared as much as 31% based on the emotional advertising model, nearly doubling the rational ad’s effectiveness — 16% versus 31%. I know which one I would choose.

This is largely why charities utilize emotional advertising, in order to evoke a sympathetic response in the viewer to drive the urge to offer a donation or assistance in some other form.

Ever seen those Sarah McLachlan ASPCA commercials with the animals in cages, looking sad and neglected while she croons her song ‘Angel’ in the background? They’re utilizing emotional advertising to maximum effect against you. It’s enough to make a man cynical. It’s too late for me, save yourselves.

Massive companies certainly know the power of emotional advertising as well. Holiday commercials are usually at least a little emotional in some way, often using the sights and sounds in their ads to make people nostalgic about the holidays and to use that longing for good times with family and friends to influence our purchasing decisions.

This year in particular, with many people being considerably more strapped for cash thanks to inflation brought on by massive failures of economic policy that is driving us deeper into a recession that President Biden refuses to admit even exists — and went the extra mile by effectively attempting to redefine the word ‘recession’ — advertisers are going fully emotional with ads that focus intensely on celebrating the holidays while acknowledging the loss of loved ones.

Here are a few examples:

#1: Kroger

Kroger, a massive retail company that operates grocery stores around the country, seems to have taken a little inspiration from the Disney movie ‘Up’ by creating an ad depicting an old widower’s journey through memories of his life, though in this one the elderly gentleman happens upon his apparently departed wife’s cookbook, which seemed to also be a scrapbook of sorts with many cherished photos held within.

Naturally, the elderly gentleman needs to go buy groceries to prepare these holiday treats, so where else would he go in a Kroger commercial but to a Kroger grocery store?

As a cover of the Goo goo dolls hit song ‘Iris’ plays in the background, the man starts cooking his holiday meal by preparing an hors d'oeuvre that triggers a memory for him. He and his wife apparently enjoyed this very dish together as children, depicting the kindling of a lifelong bond.

The next recipe is an apple pie, which precedes the attaching of another memory of his wife bringing him a pie and giving him a kiss under the mistletoe, likely symbolizing the dating phase of their relationship.

As he tastes and enjoys his creations, numerous memories of the past play out, from his wife being pregnant with their son, to that son hugging his mother at his graduation party, etc. It’s a beautiful depiction of a life well-lived, and the widower’s undaunted smile shows that, despite having lost the love of his life, he has many memories to look back on happily, encouraging the viewer to remember that as long as those you love exist in memory, they’re never really gone.

When the time comes and the turkey has been cooked, the old man once again cuts off a bite to try, but by this time his apparent granddaughter is there with him, and she points to a post-it note stuck inside the cookbook that reads ‘Enjoy with family’, prompting him to instead give that bite of turkey to his granddaughter instead.

The last images of the commercial show that the old man’s son, his son’s wife, and their children have joined him for the holiday feast he prepared, thereby affirming the foregone conclusion that the old man’s wife had indeed passed on.

The moral of this story is obvious: Cherish the time you have with those you love, you never know when they’ll be gone. That’s a beautiful message but I just wanted some groceries, man. When I go for food I expect heartburn, not heartache.

This theme is very much continued in the next ad.

#2: Amazon

Amazon has created an advertisement that is entitled ‘Joy is made’, that seems to mimic the style of tearjerker ads from places like Thailand where extraordinarily sad stories play out in the course of their ads, often with no dialogue, as is the case with this ad by Amazon.

This ad in particular involves a father and his daughter. The daughter seems inordinately fascinated by a snowglobe that she seems to want to take with her everywhere, from school to the dentist’s office. The father seems slightly annoyed by this peculiar behavior at first, but as the ad rolls on we see more context in the form of him gradually developing understanding when the child places the snowglobe down on the table on an empty placemat.

The next shot that is shown is the father taking the snowglobe from the sleeping child and placing it down next to a picture of himself, his daughter, and a woman who we can naturally presume is the mother that is no longer in the picture. The somber tone of things would naturally lead us to assume that the mother has passed away fairly recently, and the snowglobe is likely either a cherished gift that the mother had given the child, or a possession of the mother’s that the child has latched onto as something to fill the void left by her mother’s untimely passing.

This is the point in the ad where capitalism gets its due, as the father orders a paper shredder from Amazon. The reason becomes clear shortly, but not before he collects several other items from neighbors and friends, that include a potted evergreen tree, fans, and newspapers.

The child sees the father shredding the newspapers in his snazzy new paper shredder he had ordered from Amazon which seems to make utter confetti out of it in short order even with thickly folded newspapers. Not sure of the wizardry there, maybe I’ve never owned a good paper shredder, I don’t know.

Anyway, the point is, this all builds to a pay-off in the form of the father’s vision being realized as he takes his daughter out to a seemingly innocuous greenhouse, opening the door to her confusion, as it’s fairly dark inside. Upon giving the signal to the friend who presumably helped him build it, the father shows his daughter a rather thoughtful surprise: he had effectively turned the greenhouse into a snowglobe of sorts that they could walk into and enjoy.

The papers he had shredded earlier provided the ‘snow’ and many other props, including the evergreen tree he got from a neighbor came in handy to replicate the scene inside the girl’s cherished snowglobe, culminating in a joyous climax to the advertisement, likely not leaving a dry eye in the house. All to sell a paper shredder.

Naturally I’m being facetious and I see that they’re implying that Amazon can help make holiday dreams come true, but I think we could have done that without the caveat that there is a mother who is no longer alive to see her child grow up. Granted it does provide a very human element and it makes what would be a cute scenario into a touching one that all of us can relate to in some way, and that’s the point I think. It didn’t make me want to buy a paper shredder, but it gave a thought-provoking and very human moment to think about. And Amazon’s name is inexorably attached to that moment.

#3: Coca-Cola

Finally, we have Coca Cola’s entry on this list. Their offering is a little more straight-forward, an ad meant for normal television instead of playing like a short film, though it does its job well all the same. The ad shows a man preparing a holiday meal with his mother supervising his efforts while he intermittently glances at a well-worn cookbook.

Despite the bumbling nature of the man’s cooking, he manages to prepare the meal on-time just as family begins arriving at his home. His mother looks at him proudly as he’s preparing to take the food to the table, and then we find out Mom wasn’t there at all, at least not physically, as a mirror image that depicts her presence turns out to not be real, and the man is merely reminiscing.

As the family sits down to their holiday meal, the man tips his Coca-Cola bottle toward a picture of his mother, acting as a quiet salute to the woman depicted in said picture overlooking the table, acknowledging her memory and the fact that without her recipes, that feast would not have been possible.

The theme is similar throughout these ads — paying homage to the dearly departed, and selling things while they’re doing it.

Don’t think me a hard-hearted man, these ads get me emotional, too. I’ve lost people in my life before their time as well, so it’s a theme that is near and dear to my heart. I just don’t particularly enjoy the cheap manipulation being employed by billion-dollar corporations to fatten up their bottom lines around the holidays.

Instead, I suggest that you take from these ads the advice that you should make memories with those you love while you still can.

They won’t be around forever.