A Christmas Carol

The agency Christmas card is a tough project to work on. On the one hand, you can do something creative that gets noticed by a lot of people. But it’s not all mistletoe and wine. With great power comes great responsibility; you’re creating something that is representing your agency to a huge number of important people – suppliers, clients, other agencies, and even new prospects.

And these people receive a veritable winter wonderland of cards every year…so how do you make one that will stand out? You have to do something really different when it comes to Santa, baby!

This year, the brief landed on mine and Craig’s desks. We knocked a few ideas around and came up with the concept of The Twelve Metrics of Christmas. Rather than sticking with the traditional card, we thought we’d make a festive online book, based on some fun facts about the twelve days of Christmas. We figured it was a great fit for Marketecture’s ethos of Serious Fun and would make for some interesting Christmas reading.

So off we set, looking for exciting nuggets to include. Let me tell you, this little drummer boy soon learnt the true meaning of the phrase “making a rod for your own back”. A few Google searches later, we discovered facts around the theme of the twelve days of Christmas may be harder to find than we thought.

Some serious research was required.

Our first email went to The British Christmas Tree Growers Association (naturally), to get some facts about Christmas tree sales figures. This was swiftly followed by a look at the British Turkey Information Service website.

So far, so glamorous.  But the really tough work came when we were looking for birth and marriage rates and information from the Office of National Statistics. After a few back and forths and a few days of sending them on wild goose (or should that be turkey) chases, we got all the data we wanted. However, rather than dreaming of a white Christmas during the silent night, I was left dreaming of excel spreadsheets.

In the end though, all of the to-ing and fro-ing and rocking around the Christmas tree was worth it. We got all the fun facts we wanted and set off on making it look beautiful. We based the idea around the look of an old book; parchment pages, simple pencil illustrations and elaborate gold etchings for the cover.

This is the first Marketecture Christmas project that Craig and I have worked on together, and we’re pretty proud of how it looks. You can take a look at it below.

Merry Christmas!