‘Tis the holiday season, which means strategy will be posting all of the holiday greetings, seasonal messages, techy tools and quirky products Canadian agencies have created this year, as they come in. If you want to submit your own holiday card, get in touch.
Fuse Create
The skyrocketing cost of housing in Toronto in recent years is the subject of this year’s holiday video from Toronto-based indie marketing agency Fuse Create.
Switching gears from its usual holiday card approach to the season, Fuse is raising awareness about the housing market which has become out of reach for many in Toronto, by releasing a video on the “Gingerbread House-ing Crisis.”
Fuse built a 1:1 scale model of a typical Toronto home out of gingerbread – that’s one square foot in total area – and listed it on Kijiji and FC Realty’s business pages for exactly $1,000, the average price of one square foot of Toronto real estate.
“Gingerbread houses connote feelings of warmth and comfort – something a lot of people are struggling to find in this city’s housing market,” Fuse Create creative director Linda Carte says. “Taking such a well-known holiday symbol and using it to illustrate the reality of 2023 is a stark commentary on where this city and country are struggling.”
As part of the campaign, Fuse Create is encouraging visitors to donate to Toronto’s largest non-profit housing agency, Mainstay Housing. The agency has also donated $1,000 to support the initiative.
Klick Health
Pharma/healthcare shop Klick Health is launching its “Happiest Holiday Video,” informed by staffers responding to fun questions on its Klick-Happy Slack channel.
The three-minute, confetti-filled production takes viewers inside Klick’s New York, Philadelphia and Toronto offices, and into people’s home offices on Zoom, to bring the Slack posts to life.
With surprises that include everything from Broadway shows, box seats at a Toronto Raptors game and skydiving experiences, Klicksters react with looks of disbelief, tears and smiles. The video also features user-generated footage filmed by the recipients, as their #Klick-Happy experiences unfold around the world.
“We started our #Klick-Happy channel in keeping with our culture and to help our team get through a really challenging time in the world, and we love how it’s become a daily ritual for Klicksters,” says chief people officer Glenn Zujew.
Pound & Grain
Creative agency Pound & Grain is heating up the frosty holiday season with its own signature hot sauce.
The agency ends each year with a physical holiday gift sent to its clients, and this year it worked with Jonny Hetherington Essentials in Vancouver to create Control+Alt+Heat, a peach habanero-flavoured hot sauce. Pound & Grain also developed a new website, powered by AI systems ChatGPT and DALL-E, that generates recipes based on the ingredients users enter, based on what’s in their fridge.
The concoction was inspired by the rising hot sauce market, and follows the agency’s efforts in previous years to make its own coffee, records and gin.
Elemental
Twitter’s rebrand to X was one of the internet’s biggest stories of the year, and to cap off 2023, Elemental released a satirical video in time for the holidays playing off of the story.
Elemental’s breaking news parody video covers the idea of X owner Elon Musk acquiring Christmas and rebranding it as C, because the holidays “aren’t epic enough.” The video also comments on elves facing layoffs, reindeers being fired and asked back to their old jobs, paid nice list verification and online feuds with other holidays, skewering what was a challenging year for X.
The agency’s message in this holiday card is that unlike Twitter, the holidays can’t be bought.
