What it was
A holiday campaign for a retailer nobody buys gifts from.
My role
Social strategy
Holiday Campaign
Nobody wants office supplies for Christmas. So we gave them their co-workers instead.
Campaign cut
Extended campaign film for The Co-Worker Collection.
The situation
The holidays are the biggest retail quarter of the year and office supply is locked out of them. Everyone else is selling gifts; Office Depot watches its customers go elsewhere for six weeks. The brief was to find a way in.
The temptation is to compete on gifting and lose. Office supply cannot out-gift a department store.
The thinking
Don't compete with luxury gifts. Celebrate the people you actually spend most of your waking hours with, quirks and all.
I had worked in enough big companies to know the material — the in-jokes, the archetypes, the person who steals your pens. That specificity is what made it funny rather than generic.
The films did the setup. My job was extending the joke past them — digital shorts, stills and GIFs built to be passed between colleagues rather than watched. The 1980s infomercial register was the mechanism: absurd enough to be funny, nostalgic enough to be warm, specific enough that anyone who has ever worked in an office recognises themselves immediately.
Results
14% more new customers in Q4.
Gold Effie for Office & Delivery and Silver Effie for Seasonal Marketing. Recognised at the New York Festivals Awards for Integrated/Mixed Media and for Direct Mail & Collateral, and a Webby finalist for Creative Strategy and Viral Film.
The proof that mattered most wasn't in the metrics. It was the comments — co-workers tagging each other, using the campaign to call out a colleague's specific habit. The work became a permission structure for the office humour that already existed. That's the point at which social stops being broadcast and becomes conversation.
Awards & Recognition
- Effie Gold — Co-Worker Collection (2017)
- Effie Silver — Seasonal Marketing (2017)
- New York Festivals Awards — Integrated/Mixed Media, Direct Mail & Collateral
- Webby Awards Finalist — Creative Strategy & Viral Film
Holiday Campaign
