Ultimate Edge Communication’s Digital Marketing Strategy Yields The Most Effective Christmas Ad of 2018 for RedBalloon

Recently, our RedBalloon “Break with Tradition” campaign was named the most effective Christmas ad of the year for 2018. Independent research agency, Cubery, compared 13 major Australian Christmas campaigns – and after rigorous customer testing, our RedBalloon Christmas campaign emerged as the winner.

The leadup to Christmas is the most popular time of the year for many advertisers. Our challenge was to cut through all the noise in the marketplace and strike a chord with the target audience – adult gift-givers. These are people looking to give a great Christmas present to their loved ones. To talk to this segment and bring the unique selling points of RedBalloon to life, we created an awareness strategy that followed a three-staged approach.

First, the strategy aimed to inspire shoppers with interesting gift ideas for Christmas. The key was to heavily feature marquee gift experiences in the campaign – either with exciting lifestyle imagery or by showing peoples’ reaction to receiving the amazing gifts. This approach would give people a taste for the many RedBalloon experiences on offer and prompt them to discover more (there are over 5,000!).

Next, we reminded the audience of the benefits of shopping online with RedBalloon. With its newly revamped website, the Christmas shopping experience was made effortless. It was now easier than ever for gift-givers to order gifts anywhere, without stepping anywhere near a crowded mall.

Thirdly, we wanted to show how RedBalloon made it simple for shoppers to get what they needed, especially those last-minute gifts. “RedBalloon has over 5,000 gift experiences to choose from, so we knew once the customer arrived at the site, there would be a good chance they would find the perfect gift,” said Elliott Layland, creative director of Ultimate Edge Communications.

These three stages, when combined, increased the consumer’s awareness of RedBalloon as a source of great gift experiences.

For the next phase of the campaign, we used high-impact ad formats to drive consideration for RedBalloon during the all-important, time-sensitive Christmas shopping period.

The advertising campaign also featured out-of-home placements on billboards and outdoor media, to make sure RedBalloon is top of mind at Christmas time.
Offline, we drove consideration further with media in office towers, on radio, and roadside billboards with call to action messaging and specific offers to create a sense of urgency.

All these came together to drive consumers to the RedBalloon website, giving them the chance to explore the full RedBalloon product range for Christmas.

Ultimate Edge Communications also created written advertorials to engage the key female demographic and provide them with helpful content for Christmas shopping. These written advertorials were strategically placed on nine.com.au, Mamamia, News Corp, and Yahoo! – and the articles were amplified by the brand’s social pages. In this way, we were able to inform the audience of the benefits of RedBalloon, while also adding a little value to their day-to-day lives.

Ultimate Edge Communications created a strategy that took the audience on a journey from awareness to consideration. This laid a solid foundation in the customers’ minds, before leading them from the intention stage to conversion. This strategy worked to elevate the gift-giver, placing them in the spotlight as the hero of the campaign. To reinforce this idea, we focussed the communications on the gift-giving moment, inspiring the audience to make Christmas unforgettable with RedBalloon.