BMF creative director Alex Derwin takes us through the agency’s work for ALDI and its recent Christmas campaign ‘Meet the Tinkeltons’.

THE BRIEF

We’ve done ALDI’s Christmas campaigns for a few years now, but this time it was all about bringing it back to an Aussie Christmas. Last year it was all about ‘Christmas is a pain in the arse’ but this year it was all about what makes an Aussie Christmas so unique.

THE ORIGINAL IDEA

Our relationship with ALDI is so strong they push us to do crazy stuff. They’re the challenger brand in this market and we take a lot of pleasure in playing the upstart. It’s easy to skip ads these days, to tune them out, so we wanted to make something that stood out.

HOW DID THE TINKELTONS COME ABOUT?

The idea was to show an Aussie Christmas through the eyes of people who don’t understand an Aussie Christmas. The creative team came to me with the idea and it just felt so right. I think people from overseas, particularly from the Northern Hemisphere, think it’s not a real Christmas in Australia, a real Christmas is snow and log fires and it’s always inside. I think we chose an American family because they so often find things so alien that aren’t part of their own world.

THE BRAVE CLIENT

ALDI are a daring client but they’re still a very serious business. It’s taken BMF a lot of time to get them warmed-up to the idea of being brave. When they saw that (previous campaigns) worked for them they’ve kept it going and they wanted to stand out from, say, Coles and Woolies, where it’s often hard to pick which brand they’re for as their marketing is so similar. But for sure, it’s great when you have a brave client, although you don’t always need to use that challenger brand mentality. I still think there’s a lot of fear among clients to do things that are unproven.

Want to find out why there was such an Aussie flavour to the ad or how BMF reacted to the criticism of it being ‘too cheesy’? Then click here to get yourself six months free B&T magazine subscription.