Secret Santa

Background

Action for Children helps to improve life for children in the UK, so every child and young person has a safe and happy childhood. They have been running their flagship campaign, Secret Santa Christmas for a few years and wanted to update the messaging and creative to ensure this year was their best yet.

The brief

After a successful few years, Action for Children invited us to pitch for work to help elevate their brand awareness and ownership of the campaign. The Christmas market is notoriously busy so they wanted to ensure the campaign delivers cut-through and relevance and wanted support in moving the campaign forward, making it more relevant and urgent. They had also identified an opportunity to grow a new audience and a chance to refresh their existing creative. We were thrilled to partner up with them on this exciting campaign!

The work

We started by reviewing all their existing data from previous years, identifying opportunity areas and new audiences. From this, we created a messaging hierarchy for those groups. The creative stage of work was fantastic, off the back of our pitch, Action for Children were already sold on one of the concepts we presented, so this just needed a few tweaks, an extra dusting of magic and then it was good to go!

We saw an opportunity to increase brand awareness on their existing creative by enhancing the red and white on the ads, we also brought the creative into it’s own paper cut out world, reminiscent of traditional Christmas cards, which also offered flexibility for them to take the designs in house for future years.

We worked through a range of assets for Secret Santa, ranging from digital assets to OOH ads, static and animated end frames to a creative toolkit.

We developed a case study film alongside our extended family agency Progress, to run on their social channels. We developed the initial script and storyboard, sourced and recorded the voiceover, animated the film and did all post-production work.

Another area of support was developing activation ideas to help further publicise the campaign. We facilitated a co-creation workshop with Action for Children and their media agency to help generate lots of initial ideas. From that we developed the top ideas and worked up in more detail. Off the back of this, Action for Children made a decision to pilot the Secret Santa Choir idea, which, due to the tight timings, will run at a smaller scale this year with plans to expand in the following years.

Lastly, we were thrilled to partner with Action for Children on their TV ad, again with Progress. In the ad we brought to life the characters in their paper cut world and showed the transformations in their life, thanks to the Secret Santas all around us. We supported on every step of this process, through storyboarding the initial concept, scripting, recording the VO, animation and design, music, through to editing, post production and delivering to all the TV stations.

The results

The campaign raised £1.7 million.