The great sins of business

INNOVATION:An unspent budget is one of the great sins of business; it is an idiot that leaves money in the kitty.

'Getting home for Christmas . . . Priceless." Tell me that Mastercard advert is not the best 30 seconds of television you've seen in the last five years. It's got everything: it's a proper story of a middle manager going through a Planes, Trains & Automobiles nightmare only to end up at the front door, his little boy's face lit up like the tree behind him. I'm welling up just thinking about it. And it's not even running this year.

It just proves that December is a dangerous month, when we suspend our cynicism, even toward grasping, rapacious credit-card companies.

Another favourite is the "Holidays are coming, holidays are coming" Coca-Cola ad, with the red lorries running through the snow-covered hills. Or, going back to the mid 1970s, the "I want to buy the world a Coke" spot, that has kids with candles singing along before the camera pans out to find the lights form a giant Christmas tree. What about Gap with Johnny "When a child is born" Mathis? Lovely.

The big ads of this year are very similar in structure, and are celeb-heavy.

The Spice Girls are currently working their reunion via the aisles of Tesco. Twiggy and Antonio Banderas have got a Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint thing going on for Marks and Spencer.

There's a very peculiar ad in the UK that has Lulu offering up cheap food at Morrisons, the supermarket, while, bizarrely, Nick Hancock, the erstwhile host of They Think It's All Over, throws snowballs from behind a tree. Inside the store, Alan Hansen loads up three tins of Quality Street in to his trolley before getting into some banter with Lulu, who, having started the ad with an English accent then comes on all Glaswegian. All this to a Take That theme tune. Confused?

It doesn't matter, this is the season when all creative thought goes out the window.

The advertisers take advantage of this open goal and then ladle the stars on top. Celebrities act as a shorthand, representing a dream version of ourselves.

This form of self-identification was a major part of the Spice Girls' success, then and now. The band consists of five different archetypes, allowing most women to see themselves up there on stage, or shopping in Tesco. Veterans of the advertising business put forward good reasons for Christmas campaigns. Most of these play on our romantic notions of Christmas, which often recall Dickensian London.

Added to this is the deep-rooted concept of storing up for winter, one ad man told me. For many retailers, the three months before Christmas account for more than 50 per cent of annual sales.

But there is another, more cynical view of these celeb-laden ad campaigns: they are a last-minute attempt to spend the marketing budget.

An unspent budget is one of the great sins of modern business life; it is an idiot who leaves money in the kitty. Why not just send a letter telling the boss not to give you as much next year?

Or, e-mail your client, saying sorry but we fleeced you for a whopping great fee back in March, and despite our best efforts we've not been able to blow it all. But are we okay to do it again next year?

It is even more important to spend the money when belts are tightening. And this Christmas, the signs are that the money for advertising is drying up. The marketing business has spent the last week worrying about the results of a new survey, conducted by an leading industry body. The most striking features of it are that the percentage of turnover spent on marketing is set to fall, as is the advertising budgets earmarked for next year.

The ad world is just a high-profile example. The signs are there for us all to see. For the first time in years, confidence indicators are falling and there are genuine worries about next year.

But confidence is such a peculiar thing - just mentioning it makes it worse. So take a lead from the advertisers and just focus on Christmas, and spending the budget.