My favourite holiday experiential campaigns
We love a good brand experience. I started my career launching the iögo brand across Canada and it had some great experiential elements like flash mobs (back when they were super popular) and an exclusive VIP event where attendees didn’t know what the brand was – only that it was a new launch.
While that was a cross Canada campaign, you can execute experiential marketing at any budget. When I first launched SongBird, I worked with a brand to do a smaller VIP event that featured a mocktail class and a beer sommelier who walked attendees through a non-alcoholic tasting.
With that being said, the holidays are a PERFECT time to draw people into a great brand experience. Here are a few that I’ve come across that were really creative and/or effective. We’ll also talk about WHY they are effective and how you can use elements to recreate for your own brand.
Ashely X Pentatonics
I may or may not be listening to Pentatonics right now while writing this blog… In November 2023, Ashley furniture collaborated with Grammy Award-winning a cappella group Pentatonics to set up shoppable listening rooms for the holidays. The brand experience was around the same time as Pentatonics’ release of their latest Christmas hits album.
Why I love this:
I love when brands consider all of the senses when putting together a brand experience. Furniture and home décor is so tactile, and to pair it with music and holiday emotion it would just envelop attendees to create a memorable experience.
Starbucks Holiday Cups
There are groups of people that wait for the Starbucks holiday cups to launch every year. This campaign has everything – holiday cheer, coffee… SCANDAL! Wait, what? You’re never going to appeal to everyone, but this annual campaign, meant to spread holiday cheer has often been met with condescension. Not everyone holds the same belief system, so there have been a couple of years where the cups were quite polarizing on social media. HOWEVER… Starbucks taps into their brand loyalty each year with their cups and it results in tons of buzz and engagement on social media that’s NOT driven by scandal.
Why I love this:
You’re doing it right if you create opportunities for User Generated Content on social media. It creates a sense of FOMO (do people still use that acronym??). There is a chain reaction of see it, want it, get it. If you have brand loyalty, build it into your campaigns – especially experiences. Your loyal fans will want to talk about it to their friends and family.
Spotify Wrapped
Since 2016, we live for the Spotify Wrapped campaign. I enjoyed the campaign before I even used Spotify. For those of you who aren’t in the know, Spotify Wrapped takes all the user data from the current year and tells you trends about your listening habits. It’s fun to see what you listened to most throughout the year as kind of a year in review. However, they also use aggregated data to create their ad campaigns. With high engagement on social media and hilarious messaging, I hope this campaign sticks around for a long time.
Why I love this:
Not all experiential campaigns need to be physical. Spotify took a trend like year in review posts on social media and turned it into a digital experience for users.
LEGO Holiday Pop Up Market
LEGO will always hold a special place in my heart. I LOVE their play-based messaging and how specialty sets are created. I had the pleasure of working with LEGO on their 50th anniversary of LEGO Star Wars when they created a giant storm trooper helmet out of mini figurines in Toronto’s Union Station. We even dragged a larger than life-sized LEGO statue of Yoda in for TV segments. This time around, LEGO is setting up Holiday Pop Up Markets throughout the GTA during the 2024 holiday season. There will be life-sized LEGO fireplaces, a LEGO Santa surrounded by giant wrapped gifts, and the opportunity to build LEGO ornaments.
Why I love this:
Two words: Photo opportunity. A great brand experience will consider how people are using their phones these days. Everyone is looking for a cool photo opp to share on social media. Tap into that.
Skittles Last Minute Gift Shop
Skittles tends to nail a lot of their marketing… This experiential holiday campaign was very clever. Back in 2018 (seems like FOREVER ago), they decided to tap into the holiday procrastination discussion where people will always wait until the last minute to do their shopping. On Christmas Eve, they opened the Skittles Last Minute Gift Shop in Toronto at 11:59 PM (literally that last minute) for one hour of shopping. There were 60 unique gifts available in-store that were all with a Skittles twist (think ukelele covered in Skittles candy).
They took it one step further by launching an e-Commerce site at 11:59 PM for ONE MINUTE only.
Why I love this:
Skittles never seems to take itself to seriously and customers eat this up every time (pun intended). Also, when you KNOW a topic comes up every year, it’s the same as tapping into a trend. The other thing that was great about this is that it felt exclusive. Sure, you could show up just before it closed to grab a bag of Skittles and say you were there, but the cool items would have been long gone. When you create scarcity of something, it makes people more excited to jump head on into what you are doing.
Have you ever thought about trying to put together a brand experience? Tell us in the comments what the biggest challenge is you think you’d face.