As part of the wider Christmas in Leicester project, we developed a paid-for social media campaign. We needed to encourage visitors from the primary target audience of Leicester and Leicestershire, but also aim to reach a wider target audience. Our primary objective with this brief was to sell ice rink tickets, and increase footfall to a range of family audiences.
We built the campaign around some ice-skating characters, a penguin and snowman, and created a series of simple animations with the characters skating across the screen, visiting each of the little Festive Adventures on the city trail. This motion-first approach helped to raise brand recognition as people retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video or animation in comparison with 10% when reading it in text. This inclusive approach didn’t rely on diverse lifestyle or stock imagery, but was fun and engaging and made the content shareable across social Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
Alongside the range of 15 second social ads, we also developed a 2 minute short film which was uploaded to YouTube and the Christmas in Leicester website.
To pull together the Festive Adventure theme of activity trail across the city centre, we created this central video advert which helped to celebrate and promote the individual attractions. At the same time, the video pulled together the brand messaging using the festive characters we illustrated to tell the story, creating an emotive animation to appeal to children and adults alike.
Although we love the escapism and fantasy of Christmas, it’s the nostalgic little things that people remember when times have been bad. This sentiment was especially apt as we were beginning to see the light at the end of the Covid tunnel. We developed a rhyming story which reflected this message and was developed into a magical animation. The aim was to evoke emotions and memories, reminiscent of ‘My Favourite Things’ from ‘The Sound of Music’. Narrated like a Christmas story book, the theme emphasises that families were back together and we were all counting our blessings that we can spend it with our loved ones.
The overall Festive Adventure campaign was a success, with all targets met including a 44% increase on ice rink ticket sales from the previous year.
To view how the rest of the campaign came together, take a look at our case study here.
