As online competition hots up and technologies advance at lightning pace each year, brands and retailers must continually innovate to keep customers engaged. The holiday season is a great time to see what digital progress has been made over the last 12 months. Here’s our pick of the five best seasonal digital campaigns from Britain and the USA.
Michael Kors
Michael Kors’ Christmas campaign employs Pinterest whilst also getting consumers to interact with the brand’s main website. Landing on the Celebrate With page, visitors are encouraged to type in the different ways they’ll be celebrating the holidays, which then changes the background image. It’s cute, but better still is the product linking which elevates the page from game to shopping potential. Type in ‘Celebrate With Sparkle’ and the background image changes to a Michael Kors watch and a link to buy floats up.
Over in Pinterest, each of the ways to celebrate is pinned to one of the Michael Kors boards allowing the campaign to gain traction with minimal effort from Kors staff. Worth noting that the most repinned way to celebrate is neither ‘With Love’ nor ‘With Family’…but ‘With Shoes’. Ka-ching!
Farfetch
Farfetch’s Christmas offering is a true stroke of genuis. Their game of global Pass the Parcel gives you the chance to win a daily gift (unwrapped onscreen with a nifty bit of animation) and then you get to pass the parcel onto your Facebook friends to offer them the chance to win. A good way to capture consumer’s details and to let them spread the brand, but the real fancy stuff comes in the form of the real-time ‘Who’s playing now’. Watch a global map as the parcel is passed from country to country, seeing the names of the lastest person to sign up. It’s got that same mesmerising quality as Net-a-Porter Live.
Whistles
Whistles have brought back their popular advent calendar – a daily gift giveaway, the most exciting of which so far has been a year’s supply of shoes! This year’s version taps into the gamification trend, as each day is a scratch card that you have to etch away to reveal the prize.
Urban Outfitters
It’s a simple tactic, but one that’s surely welcomed in offices around the globe. As the office Secret Santa creeps up and you realise you’ve only ever asked John from Procurement if he’s seen your stapler, the panic of what to buy sets in. Urban Outfitters have been one of the retailers to pull together a Secret Santa shopping edit in an email newsletter this year. It’s a shame this didn’t turn into a section on their website, although the ‘Gifts for guys which don’t suck’ gets the best-titled section regardless. John is sorted.
Warehouse
Warehouse have triumphed with their “Morning After Edition” video. Having received over a 120,000 views, the funny vid charts the office hangover of one Christmas party goer. As her memory of last night’s antics return, the only thing to rescue her shame is a 90 minute Warehouse delivery. We see our protagonist slip into her delivered goods and shimmy out of the office head held high. It’s perhaps an all too familiar story and the accompanying hashtag #ChristmasSOS has helped it go viral. Incidentally, a better planned hashtag than Michael Kors’ slightly clumsy #celebratewith, which sees a lof of usage unassociated with their campaign.
Warehouse gets our thumbs up for not going down the sappy route with their festive tidings, though it does seem a shame that the featured dress saw its price drop from £85 to £50 at the height of the video’s viral appeal.
Have you got a holiday favourite that’s enticed you to spend? Tell us about it at @EDITD.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAj0MQYHzBo&list=UU5Zd0OWaiJFQH1shk_CZFUA&index=1
Katie Smith
