Why Dentsu Creative made an impact at Christmas
To set out is stall as Dentsu Creative for the year ahead the agency pounced on the agency Christmas Card to make its 3D mark. Here is the award-winning case study.
The agency Christmas card. A chance to spread a little joy and do some good. In our first year as Dentsu Creative, how can we show our capacity for modern creativity and collaboration to all of our clients, while creating a piece of work that makes some noise in the industry?
We started by looking at culture. 2022 was the year of AI. It’s painted like Rembrandt, predicted the future and driven our cars. But can it go where no computer has gone before… can it be funny? To find out, Artificial Intell-a-Joke D25 was created to give cracker jokes an upgrade.
Users entered their name and chose a cheesiness level, before a sleek, sophisticated digital 3D cracker animated between festive shapes – including brussels sprouts, baubles, a snowglobe, a gingerbread person and a candy cane – as if ‘thinking’ of its jokes in real time. The cracker told over 1,000 jokes on its launch day alone across 3 continents, bringing cheer (and a dodgy gag) to all those who tried it. There were also multiple animation sequences, ensuring no two user experiences were exactly the same, and the process was something people could enjoy again and again.
In the weeks leading up to our December launch, we built up a social presence with daily teasers. The cracker went live on 9th December, accompanied by the B2B launch and the 3 AI films to parody the style of a big tech launch. 12 Jokes of Christmas immediately followed, sharing a joke each day on our social channels, all the way up until Christmas Day, after which it was replaced with a festive Out of Office message. In total we created and ran 33 assets.
We built the cracker entirely in-house, meaning we could donate the budget to Mind UK, as the best humour comes from human minds after all.