The question
Key assessment one
This exam contains one question. This question requires an extended response and will be marked accordingly.
Total time allowed: 45 minutes. With extra time: 60 minutes
For question one you will be shown the 2025 John Lewis Christmas advert twice. John Lewis is a UK department store.
• You will be allowed one minute to read Question 10.
• The advertisement will be shown three times.
• First viewing: watch the advertisement.
• Second viewing: watch the advertisement and make notes.
• You will then have five minutes to make further notes.
• Third viewing: watch the advertisement and make final notes.
• Once the third viewing has finished, you should answer Question 10.
10 - Explore how this advertisement uses media language to communicate meaning [15, 45 minutes]
The mark scheme
Band 5 - 13 - Excellent knowledge and understanding of media language and the theoretical framework. Excellent consideration of how media language combines to create meaning. Examples given are detailed, relevant, and accurate. Appropriate theories will be accurately applied.
Band 4 - 10 - Good knowledge and understanding of media language and the theoretical framework. Good consideration of how media language combines to create meaning. Examples given are good, and generally accurate. Theories may be accurately applied.
Band 3 - 7 - Satisfactory knowledge and understanding of media language and the theoretical framework. Satisfactory consideration of how media language combines to create meaning. Examples given are reasonable but straightforward, and may have inaccuracies.
Band 2 - 4 - Basic knowledge and understanding of media language and the theoretical framework. Basic consideration of how media language combines to create meaning. Examples given will be limited. There will a tendency to describe.
Band 1 - 1 - Minimal consideration of how media language combines to create meaning. Basic, or no supporting examples
The grade boundaries
A* - 14-15
A – 12-13
B – 10-11
C – 7-9
D - 5-6
E – 3-4
U – 0-2
The indicative content
Meanings created through media language may include:
• A sense of nostalgia
• The selling of a middle-class lifestyle
• The conflict between exploring one’s hobbies and family life
• Gender roles: men and women: sexist gender standards
• The past and the present
• The relationship between fathers and sons
• Emotional manipulation
• ‘The meaning of Christmas’
• The sexist ideology that women do not have hobbies or interests
• Capitalism, consumerism, and the perfect lifestyle obtained through buying things
• Hegemonic norms of the nuclear middle-class family, the idea family…
• Britishness
And these may be constructed through media language in the following ways:
- Codes and conventions – Advertisement is highly conventional of Christmas adverts for department stores, as it uses narrative conventions to sell a middle-class lifestyle. A clear, easily identifiable narrative is constructed for the target, middle-class, middle-aged audience. Positioning them as a middle-aged father experiencing Christmas with his teenage song (and presumably less important wife and daughter
- Cinematography – a range of shot types are utilised, most notably the use of close-up shots, positioning the target audience with the father, and forcing them (manipulating them?) to identify with his emotional response
- Fonts and graphics – The John Lewis logo is simple, classy, somewhat minimalist and classic. It is sans serif, denoting a certain degree of confidence.
- Mise-en-scène – colour – For the home scenes, a range of neutral, even bland tones are selected, functioning as a symbolic code for a sort of hegemonically acceptable middle-class lifestyle. This provides a diametric opposition to the intense coloured lights and high key spotlights of the club sequence. Here colour is used to construct a reality where middle aged family life and hedonistic clubbing lifestyles are incompatible
- Lighting – The lighting in the living room setting is low key, flat, yet bright, with no particular emphasis. Once more this proves a binary opposition to the darker yet high key spotlights of the club, constructing drama and intrigue for the target audience
- Setting – The living room is stereotypically middle class. The bland furnishings and abstract art suggest a stereotypical cliché of white, British middle-class lifestyle that John Lewis wish to evoke. The club scene is messy by contrast, although there is no explicit drug use or other adult activity associated with clubbing, suggesting a nostalgic mode of address
- Roland Barthes and myths – Barthes suggests that myths construct our understanding of the world. In this advertisement, the myth is one of fatherhood, with the cliched montage of high key lit close-up shots of a grinning infant and the slow motion shot of the father’s sweating, emotion wracked face. The myth constructed here is that fatherhood is preferable to youthful excitement, and that at some time in our lives, we become middle aged and accept the next stage of our journey in life. This notion is highly conservative, hegemonic and widely accepted.
- costume/dress – The costumes are largely stereotypically appropriate for a middle-class family, and differ wildly to the early 90s clubland sequence, which sees shaved headed ravers dancing to insipid mainstream dance music. Once more, this binary opposition reinforces the importance of a middle-class lifestyle and suggests that buying John Lewis products will help this to be accomplished.
- Language – slogan – The slogan ‘if you can find the words/find the gift’ is displayed across a screen featuring a stereotypically middle-class household. It reinforces the ideology that the most important thing in life is to buy consumer products. This capitalist ideology is at the heart of all advertising and explicitly suggests that love can be purchased through commodities.
- Elements of narrative – The advert uses a conventional narrative to appeal to the target audience. The trope of the crying father seeing his new born son is well worn, and the emotional impact of this advert has been carefully considered to help audiences associate John Lewis with an emotional, middle-class lifestyle
- Props – The record being unwrapped functions as both a proairetic code and a hermeneutic code. As an audience, we are forced to question the value of this product to the father figure, which only becomes clear after the flashback sequence
- Camera work – movement – The club scene uses roving tracking shots, in contrast to the static cinematography of the living room sequence, suggesting that these two locations form a binary opposition
- Editing – pace – The pace of editing changes dramatically, as we move from the internally diegetically situated reverie of the club to the extradiegetic flashes of memory. The use of slow motion here emphasises the importance of this moment. Combined with the sudden drop out in sound, an almost drug-like address is constructed, perhaps signifying to the audience that to have a child is as exciting and emotional as taking drugs at a nightclub!
- Sound – music – the diegesis of the sound is complex and confusing. Initially diegetic and situated through a record being played on a high-end turntable (which of course can be purchased at John Lewis!), the switch to the club setting sees the presence of the music increase, symbolically suggesting nostalgia. Finally, the song completely changes instrumentation, and we hear perhaps the father himself crooning in a high-pitched voice at this son. This suggests a narrative where the excitement of youth has morphed into a different excitement of adulthood
- Selection of song – the song itself is melodic and middle-of-the-road, with no aggressive bass or breakbeats, allowing it to appeal to conservative audiences
- The lifestyle being sold in this advert is an idealised middle-aged lifestyle, of wealth, privilege and the nuclear family. It suggests that an exciting life can be lived at home, if it has been furnished with John Lewis products!