It’s a Bad Good Year to Give Bad Good Gifts
About
By mid 2020, audiences were sick to death of commercials thanking them for their bravery during these “unprecedented times”; PSAs imploring them to stay strong, that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. If it’s only summer and everyone can’t stand these supposed encouraging messages, how the hell do you make a heartwarming holiday campaign six months away? Answer: you don’t.
For the holidays, we leaned into the public’s collective exasperation and TeePublic’s established irreverent voice with a campaign that said what was on everyone’s mind as Christmas approached: please don’t make my year worse with a sh*tty gift.
My Role
ϟ Creative strategy
🗨 Creative direction
↗ Data and research
✎ Copywriting
☁ Concept and brainstorm facilitation
✂ Video Editing
⁂ Project management
Project Credits
Kate Melvin - Creative Director
Jillian Fisher - Art Director
Kyle Sauer - Director
The Outcome
Setting the stage with the most infamous bad gift of all, fruitcake, we delivered a series of tongue-in-cheeks spots featuring what not to give for the holidays, cathartically destroying them in an expression of rage against 2020. We then provided solutions available from TeePublic that your loved will actually not want to regift. We later turned all the footage into gifs for use on Giphy, where users were able to digitally express their own frustration with the year.
Unaired Creative Director’s Cut: Holiday PSA
How We Got There
The Challenge
TeePublic is an online retailer where people can shop the most unique designs on the internet, from mainstream pop culture to obscure sub-genres. They’re printed on hundreds of products including apparel and home goods, all created and sold by indie artists. The artist is paid with every purchase.
Our challenge was to express our value proposition through an irreverent integrated campaign in a year that, quite frankly, sucked. By mid 2020, audiences were already sick to death of PSAs thanking them for their bravery during these “unprecedented times”; commercials imploring them to stay strong, that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
If it’s only summer and everyone can’t stand these supposed encouraging messages, how the hell do you make a heartwarming holiday campaign six months away?
Answer: you don’t.
For the holidays, we leaned into the public’s collective exasperation and TeePublic’s established irreverent voice with a campaign that said what was on everyone’s mind as Christmas approached: please don’t make my year worse with a sh*tty gift.
Gifts from Above
TeePublic’s audience is made up largely of millennials, born in the 80s and 90s. To get them to trust our recommended gifts, we had to level with them. Sure, it’s the thought that counts but there truly is such thing as a bad gift. They probably owned a Chia pet or still have that unread romance novel from their Aunt Susan (which was deeply disturbing to accept as a gift on its own). From homemade gifts from grandma to the hottest trending presents, no gifts were safe from our hammers, fire, or wrecking balls.
With TeePublic’s commitment to diversity in mind, we cast a group of “real people” ranging in size, race, gender, and interest representing their passions through a bad gift and alternate good gift, available through TeePublic.
We delivered what we hoped was a fun and highly relatable campaign for a world that was ready to hibernate until the madness was over.
Before
After!
Just for fun…
Since you’ve scrolled all this way, I thought I’d share some copy our team came up with that we desperately wanted to use but didn’t pass muster with our legal team. Maybe next year…
“2020 was worse than my cousin Steve. And that guy’s terrible.”
“2020 was like if herpes and divorce had a child. And then that child died.”
“2020 was the worst year ever. Could you imagine something worse than waking up on January 1st and it’s 2020 all over again?”
“2020 sucked. It was as if there was a pandemic and a terrible President. Exactly as bad as that.”
“2020 was like pepperoni on a pizza. Expect the pepperoni is sadness. ”