Christmas Campaigns: It’s All About Advent Calendars

On the eighth day of Christmas my true love sent to me, some Gold Class movie tickets and some lovely CDs.

Right now, you’d be hard pressed to find a brand that doesn’t have some sort of Christmas campaign and a number of companies have adopted the good ol’ advent calendar theme this year.

Fairfax Media, music streaming site Guvera and creative agencies Huckleberry and Yoke have all had a crack at it.

Aiming to spread some love with its 12 Days of Christmas initiative, Guvera launched a rewards program for its existing customers and some festive themed ads on Facebook to harness new recruits. The rewards execution was a competition hosted on Facebook with users providing creative answers to a question to be in the chance to win the daily prize.

Michael Wallis-Brown, Guvera’s Asia CEO, says they doubled last year’s page-view results. He says: “We had more than 72K views of the posts over the 12 days, which marked a significant spike in normal Facebook activity. The 12 days of Christmas campaign was a simple way to say thank you to all our customers.”

The music labels Guvera works with contributed a prize each for one day in the 12, with a pair of headphones hotly contested for, followed by a merchandise pack of teen-heartthrobs 5 Seconds of Summer. The competition also supported the music labels. Wallis-Brown says: “This was beneficial to them as it gave them an opportunity to profile their artists.”

The ads as well saw a number of new users sign up to the music streaming site. Wallis-Brown says: “We can’t give exact numbers at this stage, but we acquired thousands of customers especially in the 31-45 and 46-64 demographic as a result of this advertising. The campaign featured artists like Mariah Carey, Human Nature and Michael Buble – all artists with fans bases within this demographic.”

Fairfax Media too had its own version of 12 Days of Christmas this year with its Christmas Conversations. The trade marketing promotional emails were delivered to the inboxes of advertisers from December 1-16, one each business day.

The emails showcased a different Fairfax title with a question of the day related to the brand. Those who answered correctly went into the draw for that day’s prize with the winners being announced in 2015.

Fairfax Media’s national trade marketing director Chelsea Wymer said: “Fairfax Media creates conversations that matter every minute of every day of the year. We wanted to extend that message through a client Christmas gift that was practical, imaginative and promoted our signature brands.

“Our Advent calendars were extremely well received, prompting more than 600 entries per day – which just goes to prove that intelligent, thought-provoking conversation can absolutely cut through silly season distractions.”

Melbourne-based creative agency Yoke reinvented the advent calendar with its own industry spin. Behind each door each day is one of 25 best ads that have been shown online and on TV, handpicked by the Yoke team.

While the agency had tough some decisions to make about which ones to include, each ad that was chosen moved the team in some way.

Similarly, Huckleberry Agency wanted people to celebrate the other days in Christmas that don’t usually get a look. Designing a calendar called ‘Otherdays’, these days included ‘Chocolate covered anything day’, ‘Put on your own shoes day’ and ‘Ugly Christmas jumper day’.

Go on, chuck on your hideous Chrissy jumper and dip your fingers in chocolate.

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