Cutting through the Christmas clutter
Phantom brings magic to Wellington’s streets.
Three-hour queues, people pulling up on bikes to snatch away chocolate and a determined threeyear-old boy are just a few indicators of the success of last year’s Wondrous Wellington Advent Calendar campaign run by the Wellington Regional Economic Development Agency. Here’s how the agency combined the digital with the physical to bring joy to city-dwellers.
We’re all familiar with that deserted feeling that comes over a city during the Christmas period. And for the past six years this is where the council-controlled Wellington Regional Economic Development Agency has stepped in, to make sure people are still spending money in the city after many of its residents have fled to more pastoral areas, so that local businesses can continue to thrive.
The annual Wondrous Wellington Advent Calendar has been a great way of achieving this, bringing together 24 deals from local businesses, in different areas with a new treat hiding behind a door in an online digital illustration done by a different artist each year (the most recent was by Tim Gibson and the website was built by Touchcast).
Users could click an open door to collect the corresponding voucher for the day, after which it was emailed to them, to help drive spend during December and January.
“We think about how we can make it bigger and better every year,” says Positively Wellington Tourism digital marketing manager Helen Player.
“Last year was the sixth year and we are pretty lucky in that the expectation is pretty high from Wellingtonians.”
She says prior to the launch she and her team go out and consult with the retailers that provide the 24 deals in the lead up to Christmas.
But, last year, in addition to the usual and everpopular digital aspect of the campaign, it decided to team up with Phantom Billstickers to extend the calendar onto the street.
“So ... we used Phantom Billstickers as the primary media to push that out and it worked really well and was really cost-effective, so they were one of the first we looked at when we were thinking about running a street-level campaign.”
The “offline” physical advent calendars, which basically look like small cupboards attached to large posters, were placed on Phantom poster bollards close to the businesses promoted in the online calendar and helped drive traffic to the online version. The doors contained delicious salted brittle caramel chocolate from the Wellington Chocolate Factory.
“We had little prototypes and agreed on that and then Phantom did a custom build to house the chocolate, with moulds inside the doors that held the blocks in place.”
The agency had to do up to four restocks of the doors throughout the day. “Some people waited up to three hours. We had some people pulling up on bikes, some people driving down and others jumping out of cars, grabbing the chocolate and then driving away again.”
Player says one heart-warming aspect of the campaign was when a three-year-old boy was desperate to get some chocolate from one of the physical calendar doors and had kept missing out because he had to go to pre-school.
“Then his mother got in contact with us and asked if we could open one just for them, so he got to open one of the doors and they came back with this really great response and he was so happy ... [The campaign] created real community engagement and people loved it.”
She says there were 260,000 visits to the calendar site within the 24 days, with 101,000 unique users, 94,245 vouchers were emailed to users, there was 8,067 newly acquired users to Positively Wellington Tourism’s channels and over $160,000 in direct revenue was made from the vouchers.
We tried to ask what was in line for this year’s campaign, but Player says it’s top secret. Whatever the plan is, we’re sure Wellingtonians will again be clamouring out of their cars and off their bikes to get a piece of the action.