Christmas Adverts “Unwrapped”

Christmas Adverts – they make you feel all christmasy, don’t they?

Here’s what we learned from running our own Christmas Advert.

Holidays are coming, holidays are coming, holidays are coming. Another year has passed and the time has come to:

• a) Hunt around the house for that Christmas tree light bulb that you put somewhere safe in case you needed it.
• b) Bring out last year’s bottle of Baileys (which is now looking slightly thicker than it should).
• c) Break out the Christmas advert.

We’ve said it before, Christmas is a perfect time for adverts. They are very specific, people are more receptive and they can evoke more emotion, which means that it beats the pants off sending someone a Christmas card.

Last year we ran our first Christmas film campaign “The Magic Of YouTube”.

The film was designed with a single aim in mind – to breathe a little warmth into the viewer’s life (cheesy, we know).

We did, however, learn a few things in the process.

1. Relevance is incredibly important. Let’s take a look at the analytics from last year’s campaign. You’ll see that the relative audience retention during the Christmas period was well above average, yet throughout the rest of the year, it was below average.

It comes as no shock that people don’t want to watch a film about Christmas in the middle of summer.

However, it does demonstrate that when people are in the right mood for a topic, relevance can give your retention rate a real boost.

2. People like films that evoke some form of emotion. Instead of a highly targeted campaign, we decided to run the film as an open pre-roll ad, to see which audiences it resonated with the most. This can also help the video to gain authority by gaining views (a risky strategy if the content is sub par as you will attract lots of thumbs down). With a higher view count, people are more inclined to watch it organically. Positively, almost a third of viewers did not skip our advert after 5 seconds.

With the right emotional appeal, your video can work for a wide range of people. You can then retarget your ad to a specific, more receptive audience.

3. People share films that they like. 20% of the views (which ran for the 12 days leading up to Christmas) were not generated by paid advertising. People enjoyed the video enough to motivate them to share it.

4. It made us happy. Ok, please forgive our mushy side, but it is the festive season. At Curveball, we’re all about watching the expression on a client’s face when we show them their film for the first time. It’s about creating something that not only fulfils its function but also entertains and prompts action. This was the first film that we’d produced for ourselves and to experience that feeling directly was an education in itself.

It’s important that we learn from every video we make, and creating one for ourselves was an especially enlightening project. We had a fantastic response from e-mail marketing have since incorporated this into our campaigns for clients.

Happy Christmas from the team at Curveball Media!