Ho Ho Hoping to Inspire Parents: Positioning Photobox as the Perfect Christmas Gift

Our biggest project with Photobox to date was in 2019, leading the creative, video production, media plan and implementation across their peak sales period.

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 ability

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.

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.

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.

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 (shooting with real families for unscripted moments which would resonate more strongly with parents) and channel relevance (using both director-led cameras to capture the action for our 20-second unskippable YouTube ads, and our parents' own phones for more relatable Instagram and Snapchat stories).

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.

By specifically targeting Photobox assets across each social platform, we ensured the campaign was being seen by the right people at the right time.

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.

Which resulted in:

  • 0M

    completed video views across all channels

  • 0%

    YoY increase in traffic to the website, primarily from mobile devices, at a crucial time of year

  • 0%

    improvement on sales ROI driven as a result of campaign optimisation

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