The best Christmas advert of all time?
Ah Christmas, it really is a special time of the year where you eat until you feel sick and drink yourself silly whilst being surrounded by the ones who mean the most to you, not to mention the best part receiving gifts! What is there not to like about Christmas? Well one section of the world that can’t get enough of Christmas is the retail industry. They have been able to commercialise the Christmas holiday in the UK and US and major companies with the aid of retail translation services the rest of the world.
In the UK we are all too familiar with the battle of Christmas TV adverts mainly from companies such as John Lewis and Marks and Spencer’s who use their advertisements to manipulate our emotions like any advert to be fair but these certain ads always seem to garner so much more attention so it is reasonable to say that it plays a key role in how well these companies are likely to perform over the Christmas period so much so that they are prepared to spend millions in order to see a huge financial translation in sales.
But this year even though Buster the Boxer ad by John Lewis and the Amazon ad involving an Imam and a Priest, just to name a few have caught the eyes of many this year in the lead up to Christmas in the UK there is one advert that has seemingly topped them all, not from John Lewis, M&S in fact not even from the UK.
The ad in conversation is from Poland by Polish based online auction website Allegro. The advert has been viewed nearly 13 million times on YouTube and is titled ‘English for beginners.’ This heart-warming advert begins with an elderly man receiving a package from Allegro which consists of Polish to English translation audiobooks as well as English for beginner’s books. He then gets himself completely immersed in the English language in the following comedic scenes which involves putting sticky notes with English words on objects around the house including his dog as well as copying rude phrases he hears from the movie.
Eventually we see the man as he prepares to board a flight which sees him arrive in the UK to a nice house where he embraces his son who now lives there with his wife when rather timidly, a little girl appears out of a room to which he walks up to her and says “HI, I am your grandfather”. The conclusion was he learnt to speak English in order to be able to speak to his granddaughter the first time he met her. The response for social media was massive with many saying that this is the best Christmas ad ever and even more saying they shed tears just watching it.
We dare you not to cry!
Image by: Art DiNo
