Following a 2020 Christmas, which many families and friends spent apart, The United Methodist Church wanted to celebrate the joy of connecting in 2021. With a media buy that included connected TV, OOH, and multiple digital boards in and around Times Square, the client challenged us to come up with an idea that would capture the joy of the season, and the attention of the millions of eyeballs moving through Times Square during the holiday season.
A limited production budget made it challenging to show a variety of people celebrating Christmas together. And with the Times Square buy delivering the majority of the campaign impressions, we needed a campaign look and feel different from the traditional glitzy executions in the crossroads of the world. We chose a simple animation style that captured the feel of New York while standing out in a warm and inviting way.
Spread across seven boards in and around Times Square, the :15 animated videos showed an urban landscape, moving from window to window to see how people were connecting for the holidays. Over the four-week timeframe the boards were live, they generated more than 31.7M impressions. Keeping the animation work in-house at LOOMIS allowed the non-profit to put production dollars to good use elsewhere. As the boards were live through January 2nd, the boards made TV appearances all month on Good Morning America and during televised New Year’s Eve celebrations.
The client was so enthusiastic about the animations for Times Square, they asked us to create a :30 version to use in their connected TV buy. Adding voiceover and music, it became a warm and joyful spot generating more than 2.8 million impressions over the four-week flight and had a video completion rate of 97.84%.
Extending the illustration style into traditional OOH, we created a snowy landscape to depict more scenes of connection and joy. Driving to both a general market and Hispanic-focused landing page, more than 53 boards posted across the Church’s top 10 markets. Boards were placed in high visibility, well-traveled areas with a branded message.
Using the artwork in paid social, static, and motion display ads kept the continuity of the campaign going, and resulted in 18 million impressions, as well as more than 41k click-thrus to the two landing pages over the four-week run. Once seekers went to the landing page, 77% of the clicks on the page were on the FIND A CHURCH button which led them to find local churches in their area. UMC also extended the joy message to Tik Tok, a newer media channel for the brand. The creative, depicting three different scenarios of joy around the holidays, garnered almost 2 million impressions; 19,000 likes with a click thru rate of .17% — more than double our goal.
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