Boots has a new brand platform, and it is built on the parts of getting older that most beauty advertising edits out. “Give it Some Boots” launched on 9 September with a 60 second film on the retailer’s own channel. It is the first substantial positioning move since Charlotte Lock took over as chief marketing officer roughly a year ago.
The film moves through women at different life stages: skin problems, grey hairs, a sports injury, perimenopause, and hair loss caused by cancer treatment. Each one is met with a product or a member of staff. One of them is a real No7 Macmillan Beauty Advisor, trained to help customers dealing with the visible side effects of cancer treatment. It closes with a choreographed dance outside a store, set to a re-recorded version of Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.
An integrated WPP team made it. Creative Review, which reported the launch, credits Ryan McManus as UK chief creative officer, Simon Lloyd as deputy chief creative officer for EMEA, and Emily James and Alex Hesz as strategy leads. The film is supported by creator-led content and by karaoke booths, which Boots is rolling out around the country so customers can sing and tell their own stories.
The word the team keeps using is “brutiful”, a blend of brutal and beautiful. Lock told Marketing Week the platform is a “rallying cry”, and framed it against the retailer’s 180 year history and the next 180.
The shape of it is familiar, and deliberately so. Boots’ best remembered advertising is Here Come the Girls, the 2007 campaign by Mother that turned an Ernie K-Doe record into a Christmas fixture and put customers rather than products in the centre of the frame. Give it Some Boots reaches for the same three ingredients: a borrowed track, a crowd, and a street.
The difference is the endline. Here Come the Girls was a song, and when the song went so did the campaign. “Give it Some Boots” is a line that works on a poster, on a shelf barker and in a shop window without any music behind it, which is what separates a platform from a very good advert. Whether the public ever says the word “brutiful” out loud is a different question, and probably not the one that matters. See how it stacks up against the year’s other launches in our ranking of the best TV adverts of 2026, and the long game in Specsavers.
He plans, buys and reviews advertising for a living, and helps score campaigns on the site against the same five Crown Score criteria alongside other authors and contributors.
The Boots advert song is a specially re-recorded These Boots Are Made for Walkin', the Nancy Sinatra hit written by Lee Hazlewood. Who is in the film, who made it and where it is running.
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