…is crowdsourced. And donates to charity. Clever, BBH.

One can only imaging with horror what a Christmas ad from Coles or Woolies will be like but in the UK, retail chains present ads that top the viral charts because people love them.

Last year’s fave UK retailer Christmas ad, John Lewis, The Bear & The Hare, by Adam & Eve DDB.

BBH London has already launched Waitrose’s Christmas campaign, Donate Your Voice, because it’s crowdsourcing its ad. Between October 18 and 28, Waitrose is calling on the UK, and its own staff, to donate their voices to its Christmas advert this year. The voices will become a choral version of Dolly Parton’s which will become the soundtrack to the ad and be available to download as a single with 100% of the profits going to charity.

2nd fave, Sainsbury’s Christmas in a Day, by AMV BBDO

When members of the public donate their voice online, they will also be asked to put a virtual green token in a box to support one of the three charities involved, Age UK, Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity and The Trussell Trust.

It will work in the same way as a Community Matters scheme in Waitrose stores, with the votes of those donating their voices determining how much goes to each charity.

On the Donate Your Voice website, users are guided through the process of uploading their voice with an online tutorial and easy steps. They can listen to the song and then decide whether to record themselves singing the tune or the harmony. Music producer, David Kosten, will then mix the recordings together to create a virtual choir for the ad, which will run in the lead-up to Christmas.

The retailer has chosen Dolly Parton because she is having a renaissance in the U.K. at the moment after her appearance at the Glastonbury Festival. So is choral singing, following the success of a number of related reality TV shows.

Rupert Thomas, Waitrose marketing director, Rupert Thomas, commented, “We really hope Donate Your Voice will put the fun into fundraising for the festive season, especially with the growing popularity of people joining a choir. Not only will we be able to create a totally unique soundtrack which has never been produced for advertising in this way before, but the public will be raising much needed funds for three fantastic causes.”

The most controversial, Marks & Spencer’s, by Rainey Kelly Campbell

One cannot imagine that there will be anything flash coming from Tesco this Christmas ad season. The chain that used to be Britain’s largest grocery chain and the world’s third-largest retailer by sales, has hit a rocky part of the road, with big industry shifts and management turmoil adding to its shrinking market share and dwindling stock price, which has fallen almost 50% this year.

…And all of that happened before it had to announce the results of an internal investigation into an overstatement of profits.

In total, Tesco had overstated profits by £263 million pounds, or about AU$481 million. Of that shortfall, £118 million related to the first half of this year, with an additional £145 million linked to the past two years. Chairman, Richard Broadbent, has announced that he will resign.