At the core of the Believe campaign was an activation idea where we asked people to prove they believed by writing a letter to Santa Claus and mailing it at Macy’s. For every letter collected, Macy’s donated one dollar to the Make-A-Wish Foundation—a charity devoted to fulfilling the wishes of children with life-threatening illnesses. To collect the letters, we installed Believe mailboxes in every one of Macy’s more than 800 stores nationwide.“Believe” was executed in every facet of Macy’s holiday communications from in-store and online, to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, print, PR and specially made “Believe” merchandise. We teamed with the CBS Early Show to provide regular updates on our letter count, and received an enormous amount of positive press about the campaign. A commercial featuring our cast of famous designers spread the word on TV.

Nielsen IAG rated the “Yes, Virginia” TV commercial as the #1 most-liked and the #2 most recalled commercial of the holiday season and amongst the top ten most-liked commercials across any category for all of 2008.

Free press for the campaign generated over 38 million combined impressions and more than 17 million broadcast impressions.

The Believe site achieved over ten million page views in seven weeks and each user spent over four minutes on the site.

Most importantly, we collected 1,079,206 letters to Santa. And on December 23, we presented the Make-A-Wish Foundation with a check for $1,000,000.