When my Seattle creative department took over the See's account from our San Francisco office, they were about to leave because they were so angry for the work.
I hopped on the phone with See's, listened to their complaints, took responsibility for the work, and started addressing how we were going to fix it. Trust had to be earned, and it wasn't going to happen overnight.
After a month, we had already started to change course, and by the end, they were so happy with our work that they brought us a big problem for them to solve. They wanted to acquire new customers during the holidays.
After defining the problem for the team I assembled, I led them through an exercise that focused on how we could entice new people to try See's and sign up for their email list.
We conceived "Countdown to Christmas," built the user flow, and developed the entire tracking and execution.
Based on an advent calendar, we came up with a game that gave everyone a free gift every day while selected participants won prizes above and beyond the daily offering.
We built all of the creative assets, the site, the prizes and back-end development to make it work.
The promotion was a huge success that they used for several years. We acquired more than 64,000 new customers in the first year.
An infographic we created that was shared during one of the Countdown days.
The initial screen users saw after entering the contest site.
This screen asked the user to share more information for gift receipt.
The account verification screen after they shared their email.
Users saw this when they hovered over the current countdown day.
If they hovered over past or upcoming dates, they saw this.
When a lucky user won, they were alerted with this overlay.
But not everybody won...
This coloring page was one of the daily gifts for everyone.
Other daily gifts included recipies using See's Candies.
Horizontal promotional ads that ran no targeted sites.
Square banner ad example.
Vertical banner ad example.