Iceland ‘Rang-tan’: the Christmas advert that was never banned

The most repeated fact about Iceland’s 2018 Christmas advert is wrong. It was not banned by the Advertising Standards Authority. Clearcast, which is not a regulator, declined to clear it for broadcast because the film had been made by Greenpeace and the BCAP Code restricts advertising by bodies whose objects are wholly or mainly political. The distinction matters, and it is also the reason the campaign worked.

The one-line take: a supermarket handed its Christmas slot to a campaigning film it did not make, lost the airtime it had already bought, and got a bigger audience for nothing.

Credits

• Client: Iceland Foods. Original client: Greenpeace
• Agency: Mother
• Animation: Passion Pictures
• Directors: Lip Comarella and Simon Griesser
• Narrator: Emma Thompson
• Media agency: the7stars
• Released: August 2018 by Greenpeace, ahead of World Orangutan Day. Submitted to Clearcast by Iceland in November 2018

The problem: a promise that needed an audience

In April 2018 Iceland announced that it would become the first major UK supermarket to remove palm oil as an ingredient from its own label food, with a deadline of the end of that year. That is a genuine supply chain commitment across hundreds of lines, and it is also the kind of thing customers never hear about. Frozen food retail does not have a natural platform for a rainforest argument.

Christmas is the one moment when British supermarkets get uninterrupted attention for their advertising. Iceland is not in the arms race that the seasonal grands projets represent, and it could never outspend the field on snowmen. Its options were to make a small version of everyone else’s ad, or to spend the slot on the one thing it had that nobody else did.

The idea: don’t make an ad, adopt one

Greenpeace had already released “Rang-tan”, a 90 second animated film narrated by Emma Thompson, in August 2018 to mark World Orangutan Day. It tells a child’s story about an orangutan that has appeared in her bedroom, in rhyme, and reveals in the last thirty seconds that the animal is there because its forest has been cleared for palm oil. Iceland’s contribution was not to commission a Christmas ad. It was to take that film, strip the Greenpeace branding, and put its own name on the end.

That is a strange and underrated act of brand discipline. Every incentive in a marketing department pushes towards commissioning something new and owning it outright. Iceland instead accepted second authorship on its biggest media moment of the year, on the grounds that the film already existed and was better than anything it would have briefed.

The catch was structural and Iceland appears not to have anticipated it. A film made for a campaigning organisation carries that organisation’s regulatory status with it, whether or not the logo comes off.

The craft: a nursery rhyme with a trapdoor

Mother wrote it as a children’s poem in loose anapaestic rhythm, the metre of a bedtime book, which does two things at once. It disarms an adult viewer who thinks they are watching something for children, and it makes the reveal land as a betrayal rather than a lecture. The animation, by Passion Pictures under directors Lip Comarella and Simon Griesser, keeps the orangutan in a warm hand-drawn register and the machinery in cold hard lines.

Emma Thompson’s read is the control on the whole thing. She plays it as story time, quiet and unhurried, and never raises her voice at the point where a charity film would. The restraint is what allows the last line to work.

It is worth saying plainly that this is a campaigning film, not a retail one. There is no product, no price, no store, no Christmas. The only commercial content in the Iceland version is an end frame, which is precisely the point at which the regulatory question arises.

Not banned: what Clearcast actually did

Clearcast pre-clears television advertising on behalf of the broadcasters. It has no power to ban anything, and it said so at the time. Its managing director Chris Mundy put it bluntly: “Clearcast doesn’t ban ads as it isn’t a regulator; that is the job of the ASA and, in the case of political ads, Ofcom.”

The stated reason for not clearing the film was its origin. Under Section 7 of the BCAP Code, advertising inserted by or on behalf of a body whose objects are wholly or mainly of a political nature is not permitted, and Clearcast said Greenpeace had not demonstrated compliance in that area. Its statement at the time was that it was “concerned that it doesn’t comply with the political rules of the BCAP Code” because “the creative submitted to us is linked to another organisation who have not yet been able to demonstrate compliance”. Mundy later added the sentence that sums up the whole episode: “The truth is that it is a matter of broadcasting law.”

Nothing in that decision concerns palm oil, orangutans or the accuracy of the film. It concerns who made it. If you want the broader framework, we cover it in our guide to the UK advertising rules, and the ASA’s actual caseload in this month’s rulings.

Iceland did not appeal. It had already spent around £500,000 booking primetime airtime through the7stars, and marketing director Neil Hayes moved straight to a plan B: release the film online, push it through video on demand, and let the argument about the decision do the media buying.

The results

By mid-December 2018 Iceland reported 70 million online views and more than a million signatures on a petition calling for the film to be shown on television, achieved with zero spend on airtime. It also sold 50,000 Rang-tan soft toys, which went in hours, with profits donated to an orangutan sanctuary. Those are the company’s own figures, and the “most successful Christmas ad of all time” claim in that post is Iceland’s own.

What is not available is the number that would settle it. No independently published effectiveness study, sales analysis or brand tracking has been released for the campaign, and Iceland’s founder Malcolm Walker said at the time that it was far too early to say what Christmas trading would look like. Reach on this scale is remarkable, but reach is an input. We score on demonstrated business effect, as set out in how we score, and here the evidence stops short.

The legacy: what happened to the pledge

This is the part the anniversary posts leave out. In January 2019 Iceland published its own account of how far it had got. Every one of its 911 own label lines manufactured after 31 December 2018 was free of palm oil as an ingredient, but around 30 frozen lines containing it were still selling through, 17 lines had been temporarily moved out of Iceland own label because suppliers could not switch in time, and 15 chilled lines were moved permanently to branded because reformulation was not technically feasible.

Then the commitment moved further. Iceland’s current published position is that in 2022 it reluctantly and temporarily reinstated certified sustainable palm oil in a limited range of own label products, because removing it had increased its dependence on sunflower oil and the war in Ukraine took most of that supply out of the market. The alternative, it says, was clearing the shelves of staples including frozen chips.

None of that makes the 2018 campaign dishonest, and Iceland deserves credit for publishing the retreat as openly as it published the promise. But it does change the verdict. An advertisement that stakes everything on a commitment inherits the fate of that commitment, and this one has been partly unwound in public.

What to steal

• If a better film already exists, adopt it. Authorship is worth less than the idea.
• Check clearance before you book the airtime. The provenance of the creative can disqualify it however clean the content is.
• Write the argument as a form the audience will not defend against. A nursery rhyme gets further than a manifesto.
• Have a plan B that treats the refusal as the story rather than the setback.
• Give people something to do. A petition and a soft toy converted an audience into a number.
• Only advertise a promise you can keep, because the campaign will be re-read against the outcome for years.

The verdict

“Rang-tan” is the best thing on British screens in Christmas 2018 and Iceland did not make it, which is both the campaign’s bravest decision and the limit on its score. The Clearcast refusal was not a ban and not a censorship story, but the brand played the confusion perfectly and got a national argument for the price of nothing. Where it falls down is the follow-through: no published effectiveness evidence, and a palm oil pledge that Iceland itself has since had to partly reverse. Superb nerve, uncertain arithmetic.