During the holiday season, sales opportunities are at their highest, but so too is the level of advertising noise from competing brands looking to engage shoppers. This is why creative needs to be a top priority. Effective creative cuts through clutter, captures attention, and drives action.
To produce effective creative for the holiday season, you’ve gotta adopt smart, suitable strategies that not only provide creative quality, but also the production speed and scale that the end-of-year period demands.
This article showcases five examples of brands that have achieved this. For each example, we will examine how different strategies are being used to provide the advertiser with creative that will give them their best chance of meeting their holiday campaign objectives.
1. Garnier generates hype & urgency for the 12.12 Mega Sale
Some of the key dates during the holiday season are the many different eCommerce sales or “mega sales dates”. Some of these – such as Cyber Monday, Black Friday, and Singles Day – are promoted globally, whereas others are confined to certain regions. The latter of which applies to 12.12, one of SEA’s biggest sales dates, and the one being promoted by Garner in the example above.
However, no matter what mega sale day you’re promoting, there are consistent creative strategies that should be adopted. The most important of which is generating hype and urgency. Mega sales are all about offering big savings in a short period. For brands to make the most of this, it’s important to generate as much hype as possible leading up to the sale; and then capitalize on the hype through urgency messaging.
Garnier achieved this in the creative examples above. The first two videos were used to tease the sale in the days leading up to 12.12. This was done using messaging such as “coming soon”. Then the video on the right was released on 12.12 itself, creating a sense of urgency in it’s messaging (“today only!”) and it’s CTA (“shop exclusive deals now”).
2. Skincity uses lo-fi video to drive Christmas engagement
No matter what sale you’re promoting, an effective creative strategy to drive engagement is to use lo-fi video. It may sound counterintuitive, but one of the best ways to stand out during the holiday season is to blend in among organic content. Lo-fi video techniques help you achieve this.
In the example above, you can see how Skincity took this approach for their Christmas creative. The video uses raw UGC-style footage combined with platform-native copy, voice-over, and emojis. The result? A video that doesn’t feel out of place within organic feeds, and drives engagement through authenticity and relatability.
3. Lemon Perfect remixes product shots into festive videos
As touched on earlier, producing creative at speed and scale need to be prioritized during the holiday season. Speed is important as the holidays are unpredictable, with the likelihood being that you’ll need to quickly turnaround new or revised creative at different times throughout the period. Scale is key as the list of deliverables brands require during the holiday season is extremely long.
The best way to unlock speed and scale? Remixing.
Remixing sees you leverage content that you’ve already invested in, transforming it into new creative. This approach keeps production costs low and turnaround times fast – the perfect equation for scale.
In the example above, you can see how Lemon Perfect remixed a selection of static product and packaging images into three different festive video creative concepts. This shows remixing enables you to achieve a lot with a little. Existing assets don’t even need to be holiday-themed. Designers can hol-ify your creative by adding festive or sales-related touches during the remixing process.
4. So... tests a diverse set of Christmas creative
A major benefit unlocked from remixing-enabled scale is that it allows you to test a diverse range of creative concepts. It’s difficult to precisely predict what type of visuals and messaging is going to resonate best with holiday shoppers. That’s why it’s best to remove the guesswork by producing a range of diverse videos.
Creative diversification is especially important, with most platforms now recommending that advertisers begin their campaigns with broad targeting. Diverse creative helps algorithms test and optimize so that your ads are being shown to the highest-intent audiences.
Makeup brand, So…, used creative diversification for their Christmas creative. In the example above, you can see six different creative concepts, each with it’s own unique visuals and messaging.
5. Twang tests different Halloween hooks
Diversifying your creative doesn’t necessarily mean creating completely different creative concepts. Sometimes subtle changes are effective.
You can see an example of this with Twang’s Halloween creative. Across the different concepts, the visuals remain the same (albeit configured slightly differently) but the ads feature different opening messaging hooks and follow-up copy.
By testing these messaging variations, Twang has a better chance of finding a messaging option that really resonates. They were then able to use these learnings to further optimize their campaigns going forward.
Start producing effect holiday season creative
If you’re looking for a creative solution to help your brand thrive during the holiday season, Shuttlerock is here to help. We’ll ensure that your holiday campaigns are firing on all cylinders by supplying you with impactful video creative at speed and scale. To learn more, please feel free to request a demo, or get in touch.
For more holiday season strategies and inspiration, please visit our 2023 Holday Season Hub.
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