THE SANTA CLAUS PARADE: YOU BETTER BE GOOD

Credits & Description:

Category: Travel, Entertainment & Leisure

Advertiser: SANTA CLAUS PARADE

Product/Service: SANTA CLAUS PARADE

Agency: COSSETTE MEDIA

Date of First Appearance: Nov 1 2009 12:00AM

Entrant Company: COSSETTE MEDIA, Toronto, CANADA

Vice President/Associate Media Director: Terry Horton (Cossette Media)

Art Director: Josh Day (Cossette)

Copy Writer: Caitlin Keeley (Cossette)

Account Director: Jason Lorencz (Cossette)

Media placement: Posters, Flex Form - Place Based/parade Route - 01/11/2010



Results and Effectiveness

Attendance increased by 20% year over year, a record high of 650,000+ visitors.

The campaign budget of $4,000 was leveraged and negotiated to deliver 8 times more production value and 30 times more media value.

We garnered hundreds of thousands more in free PR. The daily newspapers printed our parade route and provided links to our website, radio and TV stations provided on air mentions and the #1 TV network covered the event live, which was re-broadcast around the world.

Online, thousands of fans joined Facebook, individual blogs were created and Flickr was used to disseminate pictures of the event.



Creative Execution

Hundreds of small decals with the message: “YOU BETTER BE GOOD, SANTA IS COMING” were placed on existing public signs along the proposed parade route to promote the event and highlight the actual route.

When seen in context with our message, the signs took on a double meaning: if you chose to disobey what the sign prescribed, Santa would put you on the “Naughty” list. People were faced with decisions that would result with them ending on Santa’s “NICE” or “NAUGHTY” list!!!

The generic message enabled us to find dozens of contextually relevant environments that could be repeated hundreds of times, which helped ensure we would get the most out of our tiny $4,000 budget.

Graphic charts illustrating the outcome of the two opposing actions, one “NAUGHTY” and one “NICE”, where “NICE” clearly dominated, gave the impression that most people had been in favour of being on Santa’s “NICE” list.



Insights, Strategy & the Idea

Adults love to propagate legendary stories and mythical figures such as Santa Claus. Every year, to get children of all ages to walk the straight and narrow, they torment young ones with the myth that “Santa” only brings gifts to those who are “NICE”, the “NAUGHTY” ones get a lump of coal.

This year the tormentors would become the tormented so to speak.

To work within our budgetary constraints and support our campaign objectives, we elected to make the actual parade route our media channel of choice. For two weeks prior to the parade, everyone passing along the route encountered our message (You better be good – Santa is coming).

We connected with them whilst faced with the split-decision dilemma to be “NAUGHTY” or “NICE” (eg. SHOULD I – “RESPECT SPEED LIMITS”, “OPEN DOORS FOR OTHERS”, “RECYCLE”, “NOT LITTER”, “NOT SMOKE”, “PICK-UP AFTER MY DOG“ etc…) – Simultaneously connecting the message, the benefit and the moment.