Every year, Coal Creative sends a well-wishing holiday card to our collaborators, community members, and close friends. But everyone we know has been extra nice in 2024, so we decided to elevate our season’s greetings by creating a fictional marketing campaign centered around Santa’s renowned delivery services tucked inside our own very real holiday campaign promoting our creative services.
Saint Nick has landed in NEPA, but, instead of packing presents, he brought his own wishlist of promotional deliverables for us to fulfill. From a campaign video that rivals classic holiday tales to a billboard that modernizes Santa’s services, we took our holiday hero’s marketing presence to heights his sleigh could only dream of reaching— all while showing our audience what it’s like to work with Coal Creative.
This is the story of the holiday miracle that brought this campaign to life. So, slip on your flannel jammies, grab a cup of hot cocoa (or iced coffee), and curl up next to a yuletide log—not a creature is stirring, but Coal’s hard-hitting promotional content certainly is!
An Idea is Born
Coal’s holiday card is usually a solo project undertaken by one of our skilled creators. But this year felt different. As Chief Creative Officer Samuel O’Connell put it, “It felt important to pull in the entire team to collaborate on an internal project. Something that gave everyone an opportunity to learn, grow, and experiment.”
Togetherness is the spirit of the season, after all!
To accomplish this, we would need to create a campaign within a campaign. First, we needed to create a fictional marketing campaign for Father Christmas himself. Then, we needed to create our own promotion to announce to the world that Coal Creative can handle anyone’s marketing needs — even Santa’s.
When a routine Friday meeting turned into a seasonal brainstorming session, the idea for this promotional blitz burst forth into existence. We used a virtual whiteboard to plot out our resources, capabilities, and budgets before landing on ten key components of these campaigns:
- A video
- A teaser video
- A blog
- Coal Creative’s Social media posts
- Landing pages for both Santa and Coal Creative
- An e-blast
- Our classic holiday card
- A billboard for Santa
- A newspaper ad
With our deliverables set, we split up into groups based on our core skills. Our entire team of tinkering elves—err, every single member of all of Coal’s different departments—came together to create this campaign, and we really feel it shows in the final results.
The Campaign Comes to Life
From the start, we knew Santa’s campaign had to strike the perfect balance between timeless holiday magic and modern-day relevance. As Lead Web Developer and Designer Matt Simoncavage put it, “We aimed for a look that balanced tradition with modern appeal—something timeless yet sleek, designed to resonate with today’s fast-paced, instant-gratification world.”
Enter our slogan: The original overnight shipper. It’s the perfect nod to Santa’s iconic delivery skills while giving him a contemporary edge. We carried this vibe over to his seasonal landing page, blending the sleek design of our revamped Coal Creative homepage with a few festive surprises—like “instant answers” to your marketing gift list. After all, even Santa appreciates a little extra sparkle to stay ahead of the game.
For our own campaign deliverables, we aimed for a classic and whimsical holiday look and feel. However, while the two campaigns needed to have their own distinct looks, they needed to live in the same universe, too.
According to Matt, “While designing the campaign materials, I wanted to make sure all of the elements connected in some way to create the feeling of world-building. The holiday card we sent out has the same cover as the storybook Santa’s reading from in the video, and you can actually go to the website we built for Santa and fill out the form yourself. I think all of those little details make the whole thing feel more real.”
As all our creatives came together to work on the project, they shared ideas that would spread like holiday joy. Once the different aspects began to snowball and take shape, they started to inform each other. For instance, Campaign Manager Jesse Macko says, “The billboard and social media posts are deeply connected, but each serves a distinct purpose. The billboard is designed for quick impact, emphasizing the call to action. In contrast, the social media posts offer more room to engage and explore, giving users time to take in the details and connect with the visuals.”
All in all, however, the most involved and meaningful portion of the campaign is our promotional video—and it’s also where we let our Hallmark holiday spirit shine through.
Shooting Clips for Kris Kringle
We always planned for our holiday short to remind viewers of rhyming seasonal classics like The Night Before Christmas, but we didn’t realize just how much Video Director Alex Manganella would elevate the script. Everyone at Coal brainstormed together, but as our internally-elected comedy writer, he took the reins on the dialogue.
The results had us all rolling with laughter, and we knew we needed to shoot a trial run as soon as possible. So, we put our improv skills to the test: The cast of our first take featured whoever was available in the office that day, and we used whatever props we had on hand.
After laying the groundwork for an exceptional final product, we ironed out a few other finer details, like:
- Hiring a Santa actor (the incredible Lou Lyons) to enhance the professionalism of the official clip
- Having our Web Developer, Technology Specialist, and Resident Composer Travis Antoniello create an original score in the style of, as he puts it, Grant Kirkhope, Danny Elfman, John Williams, and Koji Kondo
- Ensuring every member of Coal Creative had a role to play and got to show off their acting chops
Creating this pre-visualization test reel before filming ensured production ran smoothly. We watched it as a group before shooting any final scenes, so everyone knew what to expect and how everything should be timed out. This left us even more time for brainstorming, allowing us to tweak the design of the set (our office) and pitch additional improvised scenes to each other. The final shoot was some of the most fun we’ve had as a crew. If you’re a fan of Coal Creative’s past skits, this is the holiday present of a lifetime.
Coal Creative’s Marketing Magic is the Gift That Keeps on Giving
Our holiday campaign has been shot, coded, illustrated, and shared with the world—but the seasonal fun is just getting started at Coal.
Just like our collaborators, we’ve been pretty nice this year—especially to the big man himself—and we hope Santa will bring us an extra special present this season: The chance to work with you.
We’ll be honest: This campaign isn’t just for Santa’s benefit. It’s also a call to potential collaborators to add Coal to their wishlist in 2025. As CEO Holly K. Pilcavage sums it up, “This campaign highlights the power of collaboration, showcasing how working together can bring creative ideas to life. By blending storytelling and humor, we’ve demonstrated our unique approach to marketing that balances fun with strategic insight. This campaign was also designed to highlight the full spectrum of our services, from digital to traditional marketing efforts.”
Put simply, we’ve got a bag of promotional skills as endless as Santa’s sack of surprises. This year, skip the gift cards and tube socks and get the one gift every brand truly wants for the holidays: Coal.
