In years past, we’ve done a little bit of everything to wish our clients, partners and friends a very Merry Christmas. If you can dream it, we’ve probably done it, or some play on it, from elaborate food collage videos on the huge table we have in our office kitchen, to 12 days of Christmas wishes.
Since our rebrand in the spring of 2017, the teams at WS have been hard at work defining and refining what will best represent us as a brand.
One of the things we know for sure is that our commitment to the community is important to us, and so we looked for ways we could use our Christmas project to give back.
We also wanted to ensure we communicated the focus of our agency – the concept of food, a way to bring us closer – to each other, to our communities and to agriculture.
With those two things in mind, we realized that the perfect partner for our Christmas project was Mealshare.
Many great ideas start with a great brainstorm, and so our first step in creating the plan for #MyWishDish was to get all the big creative minds in our office together to throw ideas on the wall. Over the course of several weeks, we shared inspiration, scribbles, mockups and ideas. We talked about elaborate, over the top plans, and smaller scale visions. No idea was too wild at this stage.
As we moved towards refining the vision, we started to look at what we could reasonably execute, and what we couldn’t. We tested our ideas on friends and colleagues. We talked to Mealshare to see if they had anything they’d been dreaming of that we could help them make into a reality.
The team kept coming back to the word “Wish”. It perfectly aligned with one of our core words “Wonder”, and it also just happened to have our company name hidden inside it.
And so, the concept of Wish Dish was born – the meal that brings you back to the nostalgia and warmth of the holidays, an opportunity which many deserving kids miss out on. To tell that story, we would use a series of interview style videos of members of our team, sharing their Wish Dish stories.
With idea in hand, we started the process of sourcing a neon sign maker, storyboarding the videos, hiring a videographer, and scheduling our team (including some of our children and dogs) to be in the videos. We planned out the publishing schedule, and narrowed down a set of questions we’d ask each staff member (or staff member pair), in order to discover the main concept of the Wish Dish video series – what’s your favourite holiday food?
Filming took place on a Friday afternoon, under our newly installed neon Wish sign. Our digital team spent hours editing the videos, until we had a series of seven videos which told a variety of stories about holiday food traditions.
But we weren’t done yet. We wanted to encourage people to share the video, in a way that would benefit our partner in the project, Mealshare. And so, we added the #MyWishDish hashtag, and the call to action – for every share of the hashtag on social media, we’d donate another meal to Mealshare. We also made a secondary video for Mealshare to use on their own social channels, which didn’t include our branding.
The #MyWishDish campaign launched on December 19, and ran until January 1. During that time, we posted seven videos total – a one-minute video which included clips of all staff, and six, 30-second videos which highlighted individual stories or concepts.
These videos reached an audience of approximately 26,000, and performed extremely well. The clickthrough rate was 2.38%, more than twice what is considered an average rate. The videos were viewed nearly 1,000 times over the holiday season, a time when web traffic is usually a bit lower, as people are away from work and busy with family and social commitments.
The most important result though, in our opinion, was that we helped raise awareness for Mealshare.
“Our staff knew what day they would be filmed, but they didn’t know what it would be about. One of our goals was to ensure that their reactions were as authentic as possible, to ensure people didn’t have time to practice what they might say. This led to some very nervous people in the office, but it was worth it.” – Stephanie Ostermann
“Finding a neon supplier proved to be a hell of a lot harder than we anticipated. Let alone finding one that was willing to work on a tight timeline and cooperate with our art directors.” – Evan MacLeod
