The perfect gift: Cutting through the christmas crowd
Our biggest project with Photobox to date was in 2019, leading the creative, video production, media plan and implementation across their peak sales period.
The Challenge
Peak sales time for Photobox and the photo printing industry is the months leading up to Christmas — we were tasked with developing an integrated creative and media response that addressed key challenges and considerations:
Staying ahead of the competition
We needed to position Photobox as offering the perfect gift for Christmas, differentiating them from the likes of Snapfish in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
resonating across multiple markets
With a core audience of mums in the UK & Ireland, France and Spain, our creative and media approach needed to resonate emotionally in multiple markets.
Messaging agility
With the campaign due to run over multiple months it was vital our messaging was inherently agile, flexing to align with key moments and product-specific messaging — all while avoiding viewer fatigue.
The Insight
Early on we were able to identify key audience aspects to focus on.
Parentally popular
While a passion of many consumers, personalised photo gifting is largely driven by female audiences looking for thoughtful gifts, with online mothers specifically over-indexing as creators and sharers.
Parents more broadly also closely aligned to the Photobox offering around Christmas.
Shoppers on the small screen
Video is fuelling shopper journeys, with people aged 35 – 54 — typically regular mobile users — driving 38% of Christmas shopping globally.
The SOLUTION
Our creative and media experts worked in tandem, developing a creative concept and producing a suite of channel-specific assets mapped against a media plan and localised for our four European markets.
The creative Concept
Our concept focused on parents already having the perfect gift: the hundreds of photos they take on their phone each day.
We wanted to demonstrate the ease with which these could be transformed into personalised gifts using Photobox, and focused on two key areas for production: authenticity and channel relevance.
Authenticity
Shooting with real families to ensured the moments we captured were unscripted and guaranteed to resonate more strongly with parents.
Channel Relevance
We used two different shooting approaches when capturing content. The director-led camera capturing the action was perfect for our 20-second unskippable YouTube ads, while the parent’s own phones provided more immediately relatable content for Instagram and Snapchat stories.
The Media Amplification
Having identified video as a key format for our target audience, we showcased our creative across a range of video formats on a variety of channels including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat.
This coverage boosted us towards the levels of reach we wanted for the campaign, while specific targeting across each platform ensured the campaign was being seen by the right people at the right time.
Optimising performance
To support the business and campaign objectives, frequent reporting and performance analysis was crucial.
We structured our reporting to highlight audiences, products, and creative formats that were delivering the best returns throughout the campaign, ideally positioning us to recommend optimisations to content and implement changes quickly.
Video length, style, format, branding and calls-to-action were all under review and tweaked throughout the campaign in an effort to hit campaign objectives and avoid ad fatigue.
By the end of the campaign we’d gone through six significant asset refreshes, using over 300 assets throughout.
Campaign IMPACT
Millions of views
11.3m completed
11.3M completed video views across all channels.
Measurable sales ROI
+48%
A 48% improvement on sales ROI driven as a result of campaign optimisation.
Increased web traffic
+5% YoY
5% YoY increase in traffic to the website, primarily from mobile devices, at a crucial time of year.
Long-Lasting Impact
Actionable Insight
By the end of the peak campaign activity we’d identified significant new audience segments to inform future campaigns.
Huge RECALL Potential
An average view time across all platforms of 8.6 seconds when videos were being optimised to deliver key branding and messaging in the first 8 seconds maximised chances of strong ad and brand recall.
