The Background
Action for Children works to improve life for children across the UK, giving every child a safe and happy childhood. They'd been running their flagship Secret Santa Christmas campaign for a few years and wanted a creative refresh to make this year their best yet.
The Brief
After several successful years, Action for Children invited us to pitch for work to help elevate their brand awareness and sharpen their ownership of the campaign. Christmas is a crowded market, so cut-through and relevance were everything. They wanted the campaign to feel more urgent, reach a new audience, and give the existing creative a proper update. We were delighted to get the call.
The Work
We started by digging into the data from previous years, mapping out opportunity areas and new audiences, and building a messaging hierarchy to shape the proposition.
The creative stage was a joy. Action for Children had already fallen for one of the concepts we'd presented in the pitch, so it was a case of refining the details, adding a final layer of polish and getting it ready to go.
We saw a clear opportunity to strengthen brand awareness by dialling up the red and white across the ads, and brought the whole campaign into its own paper cut-out world — a style reminiscent of traditional Christmas cards that also gave Action for Children the flexibility to take the designs in-house in future years.
We produced a full suite of assets across Secret Santa: digital and OOH, static and animated end frames, and a creative toolkit to keep things consistent.
We developed a case study film alongside our extended family at Progress, to run across their social channels. We handled the initial script and storyboard, sourced and recorded the voiceover, animated the film and took it all the way through post-production.
We also ran a co-creation workshop with Action for Children and their media agency to generate activation ideas and help the campaign travel further. From a strong shortlist, Action for Children chose to pilot the Secret Santa Choir — a brilliant idea that, due to timing, will launch at a smaller scale this year with bigger plans in the pipeline.
Finally, we partnered with Action for Children and Progress on their TV ad. We brought the paper cut-out characters to life on screen, showing the transformation in children's lives thanks to the Secret Santas all around us. We were involved at every stage — storyboarding, scripting, voiceover, animation, design, music, edit, post-production and delivery to all TV stations.
The Results
The campaign raised £1.7 million in donations.