Mother and Stella ‘Give Beautifully’ for the Holidays

Mother and client Stella Artois released a series of spots this week that put a light twist on the sentimental holiday classic: real-life stories starring real-life people!

The campaign, which will roll out over the globe in the coming weeks, centers on a series of short films illustrating truly unexpected gifts in an effort to showcase “loss and redemption, love and community, timeless romance and artistic beauty.”

Here’s the first film, “Lights,” which coincidentally stars the owner of a Christmas tree farm:

Three more below.

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IKEA Makes the Most of Small Spaces with Terrifying Doll Heads

From Mother’s UK shop comes a new two-minute spot for IKEA kicks off the new ‘Make Small Spaces Big’ campaign.

Featuring the vocals support of soul singer Elayna Boynton covering Aretha Franklin‘s “One Room Paradise,” we’re taken inside a doll house stocked to the brim with IKEA furniture. There we meet a single mom with a creepy doll head raising her similarly creepy doll-headed son, both adept at finding solutions for making their tiny house bigger.

Now, for U.S. audiences, the doll heads are a bit off-putting and hard to get over. But, once you do, you come to realize what a rarity it is that we see single parent households depicted in advertising, especially for a global brand like IKEA. Mother does a wonderful job in not only demonstrating the products’ features, but also giving the spot some emotional weight. If it was only something other than doll heads…

Take a virtual MTV Cribs-style tour of the apartment from the spot here, and view credits after the jump.

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