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PayPal The Grinch? New UK TV Ad ‘Tells’ Kids There’s No Santa Claus [Video]

By Anne Sewell
Published on: 21:54 PST, Nov 7, 2015

PayPal went into full Grinch mode when the company launched its new ad for the festive season on UK TV. The trouble is they virtually told everyone’s kids Santa Claus doesn’t exist.

Now the well known money transfer system is coming under fire from parents who keep up the Santa tradition with their kids, saying the new ad suggests there is no such thing as Santa. The new PayPal ad clearly gives children the idea it is their parents that put the Christmas gifts under the tree and not the big, jolly red and white Santa Claus with his merry sleigh pulled by reindeer.

Reportedly the Advertising Standards Authority in the UK has received hundreds of complaints since the ad starting running on UK TV last Sunday evening. The commercial was introduced during prime time viewing, so it’s quite possible that tens of thousands of children were watching at the time.

Meanwhile angry and disappointed parents are striking out at PayPal on Twitter in their droves.

The ad shows two young children worried about why their parents haven’t been out and about shopping for the festive season. Both kids start getting a little worried when they note that their parents don’t appear to be interested at all in the idea of Christmas gifts and nothing is appearing under the festive tree. As reported by RT, it turns out the savvy parents had been secretly using PayPal to buy the kids Christmas presents online.

The many critics complaining about the new commercial say it ruins Christmas by clearly making the point that parents buy the gifts, and not Santa, as many kids still believe to this day.

After the Advertising Standard Authority received so many complaints, they will now decide whether to run an investigation into the “Grinch-like” ad. With the Twitter onslaught continuing and with the possibility of even more potentially angry parents viewing the ad, PayPal has since issued an apology.

A spokeswoman for the online payment giant said, “We just want to take a moment to say we’re sorry that some people have been upset by our new UK Christmas TV advert.”

“Our ad aims to take a fun look at those Christmas presents kids know come from their parents, and not in any way say Father Christmas doesn’t also deliver presents to them.”

Marketing Week quotes PayPal’s Rob Skinner as stressing they never meant to suggest Santa doesn’t exist.

“We take feedback from our customers seriously, and don’t want to be seen as Scrooge. So we’ve made arrangements for this ad only to air after 9pm, the ‘watershed’ after which it is assumed that young children won’t be watching.”

PayPal even added they want “every child to experience the magic of Christmas.”

Playing the ad after prime time doesn’t help much, however, as PayPalUK also uploaded their Christmas ad to YouTube, where it is available to anyone online. It is to be noted, however, that comments on that video have been disabled for obvious reasons.

Also changing the ad viewing time might be too late for many UK kids, as pointed out to RT by Stephen Patterson of the Society of Santa, who feels the damage has already been done to tens of thousands of children watching TV when it aired in prime time.

Patterson said that “clearly, whoever put the ad together was not thinking and had no idea they would be speaking directly to a child, about the child’s beliefs.”

He added that obviously PayPal didn’t think things through carefully enough and that he thinks it is a tragedy that children may have inadvertently lost their beliefs in Santa. Patterson went on to say that if he were PayPal, he would immediately remove the offending ad.

[Photo via Flickr by Gerald Stolk / CC BY-NC 2.0]

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