‘Tis the Season NOW, Mister!
It’s not your imagination. Xmas-related advertising is starting ever-earlier. Advertising Age reports, glumly, that Lowes Hardware stores introduced it’s holiday ad campaign about a week before Halloween. Boycott Lowes!
“People are starting to shop earlier and they are tapping into that,” said Bill Bruce, chief creative officer at BBDO, New York, Lowe’s agency, which has a trio of other clients — eBay, Dell and Campbell — launching holiday-theme campaigns earlier than ever. “There is a group of us that wait until the week before to do the shopping but others are getting out there early. This is jumping on that behavior.”
If you want to put a hard number on it, 40.4% of consumers started to shop for the holidays this year before Halloween, up from 40.1% in 2005. This according to a firm called Big Research. So for .3 of a percent, these companies are ruining the holidays for the rest of us.
Early shoppers aside, not everyone is cheered by Christmas creep. Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert, a Ralph Nader group critical of overactive marketing, called it “shrill.”
“It’s driving people nuts,” he said. “Advertisers think in order to stand out they have to start earlier, but it’s like a race to the bottom,” he said. “There is a certain amount of holiday-hype fatigue that sets in.”
I’m in that camp. In fact, I’m hoping to delay Christmas advertising to… oh, say the year 2106. Just to get it safely out of my way.