With Holidays Comes Free Content

In the small world we live in, there are many different holidays and significant dates that we are so lucky to get to celebrate. These holidays bring our families and friends together, to take the time to reconnect and create memories. It is during these annual celebrations that we as marketers, need to think of a unique approach on how we can create unique content and campaigns based on these holidays. The great thing about these holidays is that each of them is different in their own ways, but the hard part is that they fall on the same day as every other business in your locality which means we must take time to think outside the box and create ideas that will make our clients stand out from the crowd. So, yes with holidays does come free content, but it is how you take the holiday and create something that gets people talking is how you truly utilize the free content.

Christmas is the festive season, Valentine’s a holiday for spreading love, St Patrick’s Day, the day we celebrate our Irish culture. For each of these holidays, we try and find new exciting ways to showcase our clients by creating content but making it original so it stands out and grabs people’s attention and is unique from others.

Let’s start with Valentine’s, is a day all about celebrating love. This year we wanted to create a unique campaign that would not only drive footfall to The VQ but also highlight the full VQ experience, encouraging the whole community to get involved.

And this is exactly what we did with “Valentine’s at The VQ”. We collected a variety of prizes from the various different businesses at The VQ and created 5 unique prize bundles for the lucky winners. To make the campaign stand out, we added a Cork twist which really caught the public eye, each prize was named with Cork slang such as “You’re Daycent” and “Shift Me”. This made the competition stand out from other Valentine’s day campaigns in Cork and gained great attraction to The VQ area. The competition gained a lot of publicity as the Cork humour resonated with the people of Cork.

I don’t know about other areas of the world but in Ireland Pancake Tuesday is definitely one to be celebrated, and you best believe we did exactly that. At the Babelfís office, what began as a simple pancake breakfast turned into an intense competition after Holly tasked us with creating self-portraits on our pancakes and let’s just say the competition was taken VERY seriously. Some of the ingredients we had to work with were; strawberries, sprinkles, chocolate chips and even carrots. Each person created themselves and we then each voted on who’s we thought was the best. We created fun TikToks and Instagram reels events with our followers. Instead of just having content with regular boring old pancakes we created something fun and original which stood out from other businesses.

St. Patricks Day is a weekend of celebrating our Irish culture and creating content around this festival can sometimes prove difficult as you can’t quite capture the atmosphere and joy of people celebrating through a lens. There are some businesses that have created well known recurring campaigns that are always well received. Some campaigns that stand out for me include Guinness promoting people coming together and McDonald’s iconic green milkshake which returns once a year for the festival.

And lastly, Christmas is the festive season which is surrounded by love, good food, family, friends and pure magic. Each year our screens are filled with campaigns and ads that capture those special moments therefore it is a battle to make your brand and business stand out from the crowd.

We collaborated with the Cork City Council on the well-known festive campaign “Thank Cork It’s Christmas”. This campaign was created to translate the magic and excitement that surrounds Christmas in Cork City after the “Switching on of the Lights” event was cancelled due to COVID. The video truly captured the build-up to Christmas.

Many businesses create content around the giving of gifts and  Santa Clause popping down the chimney but the real excitement is based around family members coming home, taking a well-needed break and creating everlasting memories. This video captures all these moments at the heart of Cork City centre.