It’s a Wrap: Two Awesome Holiday Ads

As I was reading my email on Christmas Day (Oops! I guess I’m caught with my hand in the cookie jar), I opened this really clever holiday email from Google analytics. The e-mail itself wasn’t anything special just some news about upcoming improvements but the graphic really got me thinking. We get bombarded with so much holiday “cheer” this time of year that it all just melds together. If you want to stand out, then you definitely have to think outside the box and come up with something clever. Two of my favorites from 2009 are the Google email I received and the Gap Holiday Cheer commercials.

Happy Holidays from Google Analytics

This email postcard is a smart play on words that makes perfect sense to anyone who uses Google analytics. And besides being unbelievably clever, it is also super cute.

Holiday Cheer from Gap

I have also fallen in love with the Gap Holiday Cheer campaign. The first commercial in the series is classic Gap TV—attractive people, wearing great Gap clothes, dancing to a catchy tune. I welcomed it back like a long lost friend because I had not seen a new Gap commercial in a while. After seeing it a couple of times, I caught the Holiday Cheer tagline at the end and liked this campaign even more. I love how it combined the two meanings of word cheer so seamlessly. And once I saw the commercial with the little girls, I was in love. My husband and I are still razzing each other with chants of “retired, officially retired” and “talk to the moose.”

A lot of marketing experts have declared that traditional or “push” advertising is dead. I mostly agree. However, if you are going to do it then your ads better be clever and catchy—these two ads are perfect examples.