Top 5 Christmas Social Campaigns

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5 December 2014

It’s hard to find a brand that is not using Christmas as part of their December marketing campaign. However, whilst some brands are just getting in the Christmas spirit because they feel they should, other brands are doing are doing an incredibly good job. We have selected 5 Christmas social campaigns that we think stand out the most.

This tool has existed as long as social media has, OfficeMax’s Elf Yourself first went live for Christmas 2006 and has reappeared every year since in everybody’s feed. For those who have been in hibernation/living under a rock, this app allows users to upload photos of others and turn them into elves that are hilariously bad at dancing. P1D couldn’t resist having a go:

This year, they’ve added a new touch by developing an iPhone version and have been running competitions where users can win an Elf Yourself calendar of their friends and family. Since its debut, people have “elfed” themselves in 196 countries across seven continents to create over 480 million customised videos. This has done great things for OfficeMax – with more than 338k likes on Facebook, Elf Yourself is a great example of a brand with a relatively mundane offering (sorry to all stationery fans) using a fun campaign to create a more lively image.

Everybody loves the Christmas generator apps, they are a great way of sharing Christmas spirit on social channels with a bit of a personal touch (The Elf generator success). Coca-Cola have jumped on the band wagon and created a Christmas Sweater Generator where you can make the Christmas jumper you always wanted and then compare it with other ones and rate.

Coke Zero Sweater Generator from We Are Royale on Vimeo.

Everybody loves John Lewis’ touching and emotional Christmas ads. They are almost as expected as Micheal Buble Christmas songs on the radio. Every year they try to top the previous ones, but we think the video from 2011 is still the best one ever. Plus the slow Millie track “Please, please, please” is just heart melting… Watch it for yourself:

M&S have opted for an interactive Facebook app, allowing users to send parcels to 40 Facebook friends per day in the hope of unwrapping one of 3,000 M&S prizes –a very clever way of getting users to share the page with their friends. As a result, Pass the Parcel has taken M&S over the 1 million likes mark this year. To celebrate this, M&S donated a million pennies to charity and made an Art Attack style video of using the pennies to create a giant “thanks a million” message for their Facebook users – a nice touch, and an original way of showing customers that their “like” is indeed worth something.

Innocent‘s marketing team are superstars. Not only do they keep up to the standard the whole year round, for Christmas they run a charity campaign to help raise money for Age UK. The campaign encourages people to knit tiny hats for innocent bottles. For each bottle sold with the hat, part of the profit goes to the charity (25p per bottle). It’s a fun and uplifting campaign and everybody wants to have the tiny hat and feel that they’re doing their part to help the elderly. And Innocent is boosting sales of course.