Apologies for that awful play on “A Visit From St. Nicholas” (we haven’t actually shed any tears over the overwhelming number of holiday cards, we swear). We also apologize if there were any agency holiday cards we were unable to get to before Christmas (there were). At any rate, for part four in our agency holiday card roundup series, we have entries from redpepper, RP3, Sid Lee and SS+K.
redpepper celebrates the 25th anniversary of Home Alone, paying homage to one of the agency’s favorite scenes with the interactive “Home Alone Holidaython.” The scene in question comes when Kevin McCallister strings together a fake holiday party with little more than a toy train and a cardboard cutout of Michael Jordan. redpepper gives the scene a bit of a tech upgrade, allowing visitors to select a cutout character and keep the party going. According to the agency, the whole thing runs on “MeteorJS, a projector, magic and Christmas cookies.”
RP3 puns on its name with the VR offering “RPTree,” but watch out for the yetis. The agency is donating to three DC are non-profits — Junior Achievement, Children’s National Health System and the Washington Area Women’s Foundation — on behalf of friends, clients and colleagues. But they decided to go a step further and make the donation project fun, distributing Google Cardboard headsets and allowing visitors to rp3agency.com/v to choose for themselves which charity to donate to in a 360-degree VR experience. And visitors without a Google Cardboard headset can still play on standard mode and tweet their high score for a chance to win one.
SS+K changed things up a bit for its holiday card intro, opting to forego more traditional elements for a “Merry Auction.” Visitors to the site can choose from items such as “A Day with Donatella the Dog,” an ad internship for a day, cookies and a “Delightful Party Playlist.” Bidders on these “bespoke human-crafted gifts from everyone in the office” can rest assured that the money will go to David’s Work, the agency’s charitable organization.
Sid Lee’s effort, The Christmatizer, provides a service of sorts, replacing pre-roll ads with a series of short holiday videos from the agency, not a bad way to get viewers to pay attention. The agency also seems to have had a lot of fun in crafting the series, creating a total of 21 comical shorts to celebrate the holiday season, ranging from “The Bipolar Bear” to “How to Make Extra Festive Brownies” to “Santa’s List.”