All We Want for Christmas Is More Agency Holiday Cards

By Patrick Coffee 

You know it’s that time of year again, agency people…and we know it too, because we’ve received a steady stream of your holiday gift cards in their various forms over the past week or two.

You may have thought we’d forgotten these entries, because now we’re getting follow-ups from all the dedicated PR folks who want to stick to the important annual tradition of publishing aforementioned cards so they can attract praise and ridicule on this here weblog.

We’ve already shared Alpha Zulu Kilo’s allegedly controversial “Jingle Butts,” J. Walter Thompson’s “Santa Had Help,” DDB Chicago’s Christmas take on “Drunk History” and Publicis Groupe’s latest attempt to make Maurice Levy as relatable as a real-life human being.

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But we have so many more to share with you! First, here’s Mekanism with “As Seen on TV,” which just hit Vimeo today. It’s less about the holidays than the ad industry in general and television in particular–primarily the TV we came to know and love in the ’90s.

And it does feature CEO Jason Harris in a hair-band wig.

We’ve never had a hangover quite like that before. As Mekanism ECD Tommy Means puts it:

“The Mekanism annual holiday video is a shaken snow globe of televangelists, daytime dramas, off kilter magic shows and 90’s workout videos.  And like any good snow globe, If you shake it hard enough, you will stir some Mekanism holiday magic.”

Indeed. We want some of whatever they were taking before they made this.

Next, Droga5 New York was a bit less…colorful with its holiday card, but fear not: the shop recorded away messages making light of the fact that it will not be open over the holidays.

droga5 closed

Simply call 917-237-4295 to hear David Droga say “Have a happy whatever the hell you can think about” or Ted Royer doing his best impression of an Australian accent before falling off his chair for some reason involving a phone book.

We hear that there are 45 different messages involved, but we’d prefer not to sit through all of them, to be honest. As the dial-in number tells us, we’d rather be “out doing holiday stuff” or writing more posts about agencies adapting to deal with their clients’ changing needs by downsizing their staff.

Droga’s London office also pulled a stunt of sorts by hanging mistletoe in inconvenient places on the old tube, thereby forcing British people to do their very favorite thing: making painfully awkward faces in public!

mistletoe

Next in Australian People News, SapientNitro cemented its reputation as a home for all things digital with this video, in which a man with a funny accent takes a while to get to his point: he’s cool because he made an app that turns emojis into boring old English.

That was kind of fun, but we really expected to hear a shout out for poop.

For more on the humor front, North Carolina’s McKinney didn’t really create a wearable that objectively measures its wearer’s happiness by the movements of his (or her!) beard. But they did make a video joking on that concept!

That was damned close to being completely believable, and we feel like John Benedict’s beard should have its own account team. There’s also a “hacky holidays” site with more ideas like a tree that lights up when your dog pees on it.

Finally (for now), Omnicom’s RAPP dove a bit deeper into the spirit of the season with the interactive holiday card “Acts of Kindness.” Users click through various “do something nice” suggestions, and once they pick their favorite a RAPP employee will go out and do that very thing…which will then be documented on a corresponding “RAPP Acts” tumblr page.

Some of the options are classics like “serve a meal at a soup kitchen,” “bring flowers to an elderly person” and “let someone go in front of you in line,” but we are partial to this one for reasons you might understand.

rapp xmas

Does that include blog comment threads?

Don’t worry, fair readers…we will post more holiday cards for you to hate on in the days to come.

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