Beware the Christmas Creep!

At Acart, we did something a little different with the agency Christmas card this year. It's an old fashioned morality tale, written in reaction to the way Christmas marketing seems to start a little earlier each year.

This "Christmas Creep" (as Consumerist calls it) is starting to overwhelm the fun of Halloween and Thanksgiving. Worse, it has broken the old taboo of not being festive on Remembrance Day. After Shoppers Drug Mart made headlines by delaying the onset of Christmas music, after customer complaints, it seemed like an opportunity to push back against the trend and make a stand for putting Christmas in its place.

With illustrations  rhyming couplets and online parallax scrolling, it's Dr. Seuss meets Dr. Frankenstein with a 21st Century feel. We had fun with it. It even made Ads of the World.

See the English version here
Or the French version here

You can read more about it on our agency blog, changemarketing.ca

Related: Last year's card, Paranoël Activity

"Warm Wishes from Adland" shows the true Xmas spirit in the industry

Currently trending, "Warm Wishes from Adland" is an anonymous compilation of 21 bitter and cynical comments about other people's work, compiled from comments on Ads of The World, Agency Spy, or elsewhere. (But oddly, not Adland.)

Lovely.

Now who is going to take credit?

Via Twitter

UPDATE: Adfreak's David Gianatasio identified the culprits as "a bunch of staffers at BBH in New York":

Tim Nolan, the interactive group cd who heads up BBH Labs, tells AdFreak: "As we approach that time of year where we all wish each other the warmest, we thought we would look at how we, as an industry, extend our 'warm wishes' throughout the year and under the veil of anonymity. After carefully curating some of the worst 'semi-safe-for-work' comments from around Ad Land, we picked our favorites and gave them all a dip in holiday cheer." 

He adds: "Traffic has been pretty steady since launching [Tuesday] afternoon. Most of the original visits came in from Twitter and Facebook, since each 'Warm Wish' is individually sharable. I'd say we are more pleased with the 'trending-ness' of it all, rather than being surprised. I mean, everyone likes to share a bit of 'naughtiness' around the holidays."

F'd Ad Fridays: Under the Cameltoe

AdFreak called this labialicious iPhone thing by the UK's Lean Mean Fighting Machine "the crassest holiday card of the season."

Yup.

Arnold Worldwide's Christmas "card" is cute

And labour/planning intensive. Acart could never pull this off. Our building only has 6 storeys.

Paranoël Activity

I'm pretty damn pleased with our agency Christmas card this year. Written and Directed by Acart Copywriter/Videographer Christopher Redmond, it takes a different perspective on that supernatural old guy who breaks into your house once a year while you and your children are asleep:



Thanks to DOP Karl Roeder for helping out.

And some of you may recognize the scary little boy. He has certainly kept me up on many a night.

Why do ad agency xmas cards usually suck?

The clichéd answer is because we're our own worst clients.

But I think this year's lighthearted effort has managed to break the Curse of the Agency Card. All it took is for us to step back and take a hard look at how ridiculous our industry can be — and then let off steam through the magic of satire. Focus groups, memes, sexism, fads, personal agendas... we all deal with them. But at the end of the day, sometimes a simple idea is really worth saving.



I wrote the script. Christopher directed the voices. Kerry and Marco did the animation. Vernon, John, Lynn, Jason, Meeta and many others kicked in. And Al let us do it.

Merry Christmas to those of you on an early vacation. I'll be updating all next week.