before the present is gone.
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EST 10:14:15
Hint: ask your audience.
The holiday season has arrived — and with it, an avalanche of messages, appeals, stories, and seductions from our favorite brands, each promising to make our days a little brighter and our pleasures a little more plentiful.
For most brands, planning for traditional campaigns started several seasons ago, and the fruits of that planning have already been filling our screens for months. But that doesn’t mean the work is done. In today’s crowded landscape of fragmented channels and abundant touchpoints, winning campaigns are never static. And the messages that connect with consumers at scale don’t exist in a single dimension. So, as we hit the final stretch, there’s still work for brands to do to connect with audiences in ways that let consumers become participants in brand storytelling — not just recipients of it.
Getting there begins by acknowledging that there’s not a single narrative that encapsulates “the holidays.” Religions and customs, family and geography, attitudes and personalities and preferences — there are countless elements that allow the phrase “the holidays” to mean something unique for each of us. The real work of modern brands is to give consumers the platform to share stories that reflect the texture of their own lives (and show how the brand fits into that portrait). In this sense, we’re not talking about the “reason for the season,” as we may have done in days of old, but instead it’s the “reasons for the season” that complete the picture.
This is a lesson we can see play out in real life through REI’s nearly decade-old Opt Outside campaign, which hits every Black Friday when the company closes its doors and encourages its 16,000 employees (plus countless consumers) to go experience the great outdoors in their own ways. Rather than saying, “This is the great outdoors, according to us,” the implicit message behind the campaign is, “Go experience the great outdoors for yourself (on a day when most people are congregating indoors) and let us know what you find.” With nearly 20 million Instagram posts at #OptOutside, REI invites user-generated content that not only reflects its core brand values (and, almost coincidentally, spotlights its consumer offerings), but also that presents a diversified, nuanced, and genuine portrait of how a major holiday + a connection to nature + unique consumer experiences can converge to tell a powerful, one-of-a-kind story.
Of course, this isn’t a holiday-only strategy. At Artemis Ward, we partner with clients year-round to help them create brand experiences and storytelling platforms that consumers can contribute to — and, as a result, see themselves in. Whether working with Ray-Ban Meta to let social audiences discover how smart glasses can enrich their everyday lives or teaming up with Truly Hard Seltzer to build a strategy — and craft the creative — that mixes user-generated content into a holistic digital framework, we never forget that strong brands serve up authentic, layered, real-time narratives that reflect their core identity and resonate deeply with audiences, making any season feel like it belongs to everyone.