THE CHALLENGE

Christmas was right around the corner and we had a captive British audience who were starting to turn on their ‘out of offices’ to curl up in households across the country over heartwarming festive fare on their home screens and devices. The lull before Christmas is a reflective time to cheerfully ponder your travel plans for the new year. So naturally, Visit Jersey wanted the island to be front of mind in their holiday planning.

But between Love Actually, Elf and every streaming service and consumer brand vying for their attention to buy Christmas socks and mini sausage rolls, Visit Jersey needed an original, fun and shareable idea for a piece of social content to cut through the festive noise.

What we understood about booking lead times told us that it was unlikely that visitors would actually book a flight this close to the Christmas holiday, but we could capture future visitors in the dreaming stage of their booking journey. We could raise a smile, attract more followers and inspire action to start planning a trip in the new year or simply discover more about Jersey.

WHAT WE DID

Pre-production

Concept development

Shoot coordination

Script writing

THE TRUTH

With our destination marketing Santa hats on, one of the best ways of telling visual stories about your destination is to show, not tell, and this is especially powerful through the eyes of local ambassadors. The Jersey Reds Rugby team are outstanding ambassadors for the island, playing regional games across the UK to large audiences. They had a big home game coming up right before Christmas, and this presented a timely opportunity to become their cheerleaders and work with these rugby legends to champion the island.

With a tough and challenging winter ahead for many households across Britain, the nation sorely needed a laugh, so the time was right for some lighthearted festive cheer. So what’s the funniest thing to do in Jersey with a rugby squad of big burly blokes at Christmas? Dress them up in glittery antlers and make them pull dainty festive poses of course!

WHAT WE DID

Pre-production

Concept development

Shoot coordination

Script writing

THE SOLUTION

What was the big idea? Three rugby lads would perform a ‘fearsome festive workout’ in iconic beauty spots and heritage sites around the island in the vein of a vintage movie training montage.

Move over Rocky or Highlander, we’re talking very silly moves stretching our pun-ability to the limits: Elf on a shelf, Santa’s Slayer…

Sure, each location would represent a category of product experiences that would appeal most to our best prospect target audience segments. But mostly we just wanted to create a fun, highly watchable piece of content that showcased the breadth of visitor experiences on offer in Jersey and captured our beautiful island from shore to not so distant shore. 

So we teamed up with the social-first content creators, Reel Creative, and the aerial videographers at BAM perspectives to do just that. 

We shot a vertical video in one day from dusk till dawn in five iconic film locations. We optimised the video content for vertical to create a social-first piece of classic Christmas entertainment. We shot fast, edited and rolled this out in 3 days to create a fast, fun piece of festive content for social reels. 

WHAT WE DID

Pre-production

Concept development

Shoot coordination

Script writing

Prop sourcing