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(cover version of Billy Joel’s She’s Always a Woman)
She can kill with a smile
She can wound with her eyes
She can ruin your faith with her casual lies
And she only reveals what she wants you to see
She hides like a child,
But she's always a woman to me
She can lead you to love
She can take you or leave you
She can ask for the truth
But she'll never believe you
And she'll take what you give her, as long as it's free
Yeah, she steals like a thief
But she's always a woman to me
She is frequently kind
And she's suddenly cruel
She can do as she pleases
She's nobody's fool
And she can't be convicted
She's earned her degree
And the most she will do
Is throw shadows at you
But she's always a woman to me
The last word: Never knowingly unsentimental - how to sell to a nation's emotions
By Tim Bradshaw
Published: May 7 2010 03:00 | Last updated: May 7 2010 03:00
James Murphy first had an inkling the television advertisement his agency had made for John Lewis might make an impact when he showed it to staff at the British retailer.
"Some of them were visibly emotional," he says. More eyes turned red and moist at a John Lewis supplier conference soon afterwards. "These are fairly hard-nosed people. I suppose when we launched it on TV, we wondered if it would have the same reaction."
But even these events did not quite prepare John Lewis or Adam & Eve, the agency Mr Murphy co-founded, for the response that greeted its 90-second commercial when it first aired last month.
Set to a cover version of Billy Joel's "She's always a woman", the spot shows the life of a woman: a little girl blows out her birthday candles, marries, moves home, has children, grows older and walks off into a parkland sunset, surrounded by dog, husband and grandchildren.
It is an old-fashioned weepy, prompting a very modern reaction: hundreds of thousands of YouTube viewings and spontaneous outpourings of emotion on Twitter. The song has been hastily released and is shooting up the charts.
The advertisement's sign-off is a reprise of John Lewis's venerable promise - "Never knowingly undersold" - with an addition: "On quality, price and service. Our lifelong commitment to you."
Repositioning that message was the aim of the spot, says Craig Inglis, director of marketing at John Lewis. The company's longstanding slogan, coined by its founder more than 80 years ago, had become too bound up in legalistic terms and conditions, he says. "It's become known as a straightforward price promise over the last five to six years and it was always meant to mean more than that."
The ad has put Adam & Eve in the spotlight after a turbulent year. Founded in 2008 by alumni of Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe/ Y&R, part of the WPP empire, Adam & Eve has only recently emerged from a legal battle with its co-founders' former employer.
Mr Murphy, who is still restrained from discussing the WPP dispute, had previously led the team that produced Marks & Spencer's "Your M&S" campaign, which was partly credited with reviving that retailer's fortunes with taglines such as "This is not just food, this is M&S food".
Yet in spite of ruthlessly pushing the emotional buttons of middle England, Mr Murphy, insists the reaction to the John Lewis campaign has come as a surprise. The aim was simply to make an ad that demonstrated John Lewis's presence throughout the life of a woman (women still comprise the majority of John Lewis's customers).
The emotion comes through the execution, Mr Murphy explains: "It's about the way the ad is directed, the casting of the various women, and the fact that it's quite a quiet piece of communication. It doesn't lambast you."
The campaign cost £6m ($9m, €7m), the majority of which has been spent on buying airtime to show the spot rather than producing it. Every item that appears is available in its stores - from kitchen units to clothing to toys - a logistical feat in itself.
Adam & Eve's success is hitched to that of the ad, and not just by reputation. Remuneration is partly based on sales increases and awareness of the ad.
Mr Murphy says that winning the account for a much-loved brand was daunting, as was trying to communicate the values that underlie the "Never knowingly undersold" slogan.
"It could have come across as quite pompous and self-aggrandising," he says. "It is a very arcane form of words . . . They come from a period when retailers' values were slightly different. The issue is that you try and create a modern slogan or endline and you could end up really not being true to John Lewis because you come up with something slick and glib."
The end result may be sentimental, but it plays to the existing strengths of the brand. "The reason it works isn't just because it's a good piece of advertising, it is because it is from John Lewis," says Mr Murphy. Or to borrow a line from his previous client: this is not just a TV ad, it is a John Lewis ad.
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