Just as police officers get younger and coins get smaller, so Christmas starts earlier each year. The supermarkets already have their Christmas aisles stocked, but the true signifier that Christmas has come is when the festive TV ads sound the start of the Yuletide commercial steeplechase. And Christmas has officially started today, with the news that this year’s John Lewis Christmas ad song is Tom Odell singing Real Love, the John Lennon song exhumed for the Beatles’ Anthology series in 1996.
This is a boom time for record companies and music publishers: Christmas ads need songs and the resulting synchronisation (sync) deals are substantial earners for the music industry, for labels and artists alike, with the fairy on top of the cash tree being the John Lewis commercial. Get your wistful cover version into the John Lewis ad, and you’re pretty much guaranteed a No 1.
This is the biggest gun in the Christmas ad market, with huge speculation about what song will be used and who will sing it. Winning the ad is the holy grail for sync departments and the pitching process is as long as it is secretive, with all entrants silenced by hefty non-disclosure agreements. The secrecy doesn’t just cover John Lewis, though: sync departments are also hugely superstitious about talking about what they are pitching this year until the deals are signed and the ads aired.
The first piece of the John Lewis jigsaw is deciding what song to cover and securing the publishing rights. Jim Reid, SVP of sync for Europe and head of production music at Warner/Chappell UK, licensed the Smiths’ Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want (covered by Slow Moving Millie) for the 2011 John Lewis ad. His conversations with the retailer and its ad agency started in July that year. “They request a number of different songs from a number of different publishers based on the brief they give us,” he explains. By early September, John Lewis will have settled on the song, agreeing the licensing terms and fee.
“I went to see Morrissey about it and presented the idea,” says Reid. “He was incredibly enthusiastic about it.” Morrissey? “Incredibly enthusiastic”? Really? “He was!” asserts Reid. Morrissey, who rarely grants such licences, was told who would be recording the song and was sent different versions as it progressed. “He couldn’t have been better about it. From start to finish he was thrilled about it.”
The song agreed on and the publishing rights locked down, record labels then enter a protracted audition process, putting forward several of their acts to perform it and submitting demos for consideration. Rich Robinson is VP of sync for UK & Europe at Warner Music and has won the pitching for the last two John Lewis ads – Lily Allen’s version of Somewhere Only We Know last year and Gabrielle Aplin’s cover of The Power of Love in 2012.
“There are a lot of people in the process and we enter it relatively late,” he says. “Mostly they have already shot the ad and the creative idea is there so they are playing with the idea of two or three songs.” He will work with the label’s marketing and A&R departments to shortlist acts and, when the green light is given to one of them, they will have “a week or two” to do the recording – in versions that run for 120, 90, 60 and 30 seconds for the different ad edits – before it airs. John Lewis will often provide a rough recording using a session singer so the ad can be edited before the final recording of the song is finished, meaning the artist who gets chosen has to follow that quite closely in their version.
“The timelines are always tight,” says Ian Neil, Sony Music UK’s head of sync. “We see who is available, ensure they want to do this and make sure it fits in with the wider marketing plan that is happening around that artist. You work to the brief, keep your fingers crossed and hope your artist is going to get it.”
Marc Robinson, the MD of Globe – the brand partnership, sync and TV format division of Universal Music UK – says Ellie Goulding’s cover of Your Song in 2010 was the sync that really changed how the music industry approached such ads. “Because we had a bit of time on our side, Polydor really got involved and released it as a single proper,” he says. “A video was produced, it was part of her marketing, she performed it [live and on TV]. It wasn’t about catching up with a campaign; it was going into a campaign prepared.”
Digital technology allows labels to capitalise more efficiently on high-profile ads than used to be the case. These days they will deliver tracks to Shazam so viewers can find out what the song is and who has recorded it the minute it’s on screen. The John Lewis ad song is also available to purchase as a download as soon as it airs, and time-consuming and costly CD single manufacturing is removed entirely from the equation.
“With iTunes now you can instantly see a connection from a song on an ad,” says Marc Robinson. “That changed everyone’s mentality about songs at Christmas.”
John Lewis may be the strutting peacock of Christmas ads, but the regular work for sync teams involves placing Christmas-specific songs in ads that only have a window of a couple of months per year to make as much money on syncs and radio plays as they can. “Those out-and-out Christmas songs, unless they are used ironically at another point in the year, have that one moment to shine,” says Rich Robinson. “So if you want to use it up and forsake all others, then you have to pay extra for that.”
Some brands will look to have the exclusive on a song or a recording, but the sync fee they have to pay shoots up accordingly. Sometimes, though, the same song will crop up again and again. Neil says one Christmas he had three versions of As Time Goes By synched simultaneously in three different ads. Increasingly, Neil says, brands are increasingly looking for “something with a winter feel” rather than an explicit Christmas song, although Marc Robinson says they have to stay away from anything with a religious message because of advertising restrictions. Interestingly, Christmas ads tend to be quite localised, tapping into specific cultural reference points. “You are more likely to use a rock track in a country like Germany,” suggests Rich Robinson. “But Slade and Wizzard feel a bit more colloquial and English.”
Just how much can a sync make? Labels and publishers are hesitant to name precise prices, all pulling out the length of string analogy to explain that every deal – time period, level of exclusivity, how desperately the brand wants the song and so on – is different. Neil, however, offers some ballpark figures for ads in general. “A short-term campaign can cost £5,000 for a couple of weeks on air – each side, publishing and master,” he reveals. “When you get to the likes of the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, you are talking high seven figures [for a global ad].”
Marc Robinson adds: “Anything from 20 grand to the hundreds of thousands. There is no rate card.” Could it ever cross the symbolic £1m mark in the UK? “That would be lovely!” he exclaims. “In my career, I have never done a seven-figure Christmas sync.”
While most recording artists and songwriters will be grateful for the seasonal windfall a Christmas ad brings, they can veto what brands their music is associated with. Reid suggests they constantly talk to their acts about what they will and won’t license music to, with products like cars, oil, alcohol and meat being potentially objectionable depending on the artist’s politics. My suggestion of ironically licensing Meat Is Murder for a Bernard Matthews turkey ad is met with a firmly evasive laugh.
Unworkable poultry suggestions aside, ads are not just for Christmas, but the ones that run at Christmas can be the most profitable. God bless them, proclaims the music business, each and every one.
