Etsy defied the increasingly tired conventions of the festive TV spot with a Mission: Impossible-themed quartet of ads. Refreshingly, none of them hinged on a singular “hero”; instead, the star of “Your mission” was a marriage of idea (completely on-brand) and execution (exemplary and witty).
The work, which marked Orchard’s debut for the purveyor of personalised gifts after the agency won its account in June 2023, was aimed at both US and UK audiences. Yet Orchard managed to craft a campaign that avoided the clunkiness that so often imbues cross-Atlantic work.
Each ad in “Your mission” had at its heart a central performance from a character struggling to think of what to buy their loved one for Christmas.
Earning a ±±¾©Èü³µpk10 Pick of the Week, the ads played on the Mission: Impossible premise of a hard-to-achieve goal. Each spot opened with the words, which appeared as if being typed, “Gift mission:”, followed by the name (also the ad title) of the person for whom they need to buy a present: “Twins”, “Dad”, “Niece” and “Tim”.
Each of the stars sing-speaks their narrative in time with the Mission: Impossible’s morse code-punctuated score, cramming in the words to fit the rhythm.
Thus in “Dad”, the daughter watches her hapless parent struggling to gather logs, piling them in his arms before dropping them. “But when he gets, logs for the fire… Sad to watch,” she sings before perusing Etsy to buy him a log bag.
In “Twins”, a father opens with: “Twins, twins, twins, twins” to the theme’s dash-dash-dot-dot riff. He continues: “They look the same, they’re not the same, different gifts… Help me.”
In “Niece”, an uncle muses: “You are six, I’m not six, what do kids like?.. No clue.”
Lastly, a woman sings of her boyfriend, “Tim”, considering that “nothing fits… Giant”. The action includes such impeccably timed comedy as Tim cracking his head on a door frame as she sings “He’s so tall”.
The easy humour is not least thanks to the pitch-perfect but unostentatious direction by Steve Rogers through Biscuit Filmworks and creative conception by Perry Morton and Grady Linnihan.
The idea of an ad based on a seminal TV series and film franchise is potentially highly cheesy. But Etsy and Orchard seemed to have achieved the nigh-impossible. Mission accomplished.
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