It seems that every year the battle of the Christmas TV ads is taken up a notch; this season we’ve seen John Lewis invest £7million in its ‘Bear and the Hare’ campaign, while Marks & Spencer’s brought out the big guns by hiring the likes of Helena Bonham Carter and David Gandy to star in its glamorous tribute to Alice in Wonderland.

For many, though (myself included), it has been Sainsbury’s which has really captured the heart of the British public with Christmas In A Day: a crowd-sourced compilation of home video clips, telling the tale of what Christmas means to ordinary people across the UK. Directed by Kevin Macdonald, the film was created from over 360 hours of footage filmed during Christmas 2012, submitted by 114 families.

Over the last few weeks, Sainsbury’s has been previewing clips of the footage during TV ad spots, and today the full 50-minute film was launched on YouTube, where (at time of writing!) it’s already had over 40,000 views.

My father was one of the 114 to have his footage selected (spot the man walking the dog on Christmas morning!), and last night I was lucky enough to attend the premiere at BAFTA’s Piccadilly Venue.

Having loved the clips I’d seen in the adverts, I had high hopes – and, happily, I was not disappointed at all. The film has been put together extremely cleverly; while it could easily have been disjointed or contrived, it was neither of these things – and judging by the crowd of women retouching their eye makeup in the ladies after the viewing, I wasn’t alone in finding it at once joyful and extremely moving.

Watch the film here:

Well done to Sainsbury’s PR team for coming up with something so refreshing. Christmas In A Day is a great idea, wonderfully executed. And I can’t wait to go home this evening and watch the whole thing again!

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Check out what other people are saying about the campaign via the Twitter hashtag, #ChristmasInADay:

Tweets about "#ChristmasInADay"

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This post is written by Emma Brown.