Magical Christmas
If there’s one experiential marketing that
deservedly went viral last year in the holiday season, it’s Christmas
Miracle by WestJet, Canada’s second largest airline.
In it, Santa Claus
appears on life-size screens at boarding gates in Toronto and Hamilton, Ontario
and asks actual passengers what they want for Christmas, while WestJet
employees take notes behind the scenes. Once the planes take off, the employees
go on a mad dash of shopping, wrapping and labeling those very gifts for the
passengers. When the planes land in Calgary a few hours later, the gifts make a
grand entrance on the baggage carousel – from socks and underwear to a
big-screen TV – amid laughter, shouts of “No way!” and even a few tears.
If the unbridled
emotion of 250 unsuspecting passengers receiving their Christmas wishes doesn’t
warm your heart, you may want to consider a Scrooge-ectomy.
It’s the airline, though, that may have received the biggest Christmas
surprise. Richard Bartrem, WestJet’s vice president of communications and
community relations, told me that the company had expected perhaps 800,000
views from the video. But in the few short days since Christmas Miracle went
live, it had topped 13 million views, been seen in more than 200 countries and
made the news in the U.K., Australia, Japan, Poland and Malaysia. “We’re pretty
thrilled,” he said, with typically Canadian understatement.
Don’t be so modest, Richard. Christmas Miracle was a
huge undertaking. In the works since August and filmed in November, it involved
some 150 WestJet employees who did everything from coordinating logistics at
the airport to high-speed shopping and wrapping, clearing gifts through airport
security and serving hot cocoa at baggage claim.
The real payoff: good
will that advertising can’t buy, for a cost that Bartrem calls “nowhere near as
much as you would have expected.”
“For a traditional
commercial, you could spend well into the mid-six figures for the production
alone,” he says. While WestJet won’t disclose how much it spent on the video,
Bartrem calls it “a mere fraction” of that. And that’s before the ad buys,
which, he says, could normally run well into the millions.
With Christmas Miracle, “the community is doing the sharing,”
Bartrem says. “It’s something they want to talk about.”That makes Christmas
Miracle not just YouTube’s feel-good holiday sensation of 2013, but
the kind of branding that normally only Santa can deliver.
