For several weeks leading up to Christmas, any tweets including the keywords “christmas” and “sucks” were aggregated and relayed in real-time from a speaker hidden in the branches of our agency Christmas tree. The keywords didn’t have to be consecutive, allowing the tree to exhibit a variety of emotions about Christmas such as, “Being single during Christmas time sucks”. Using social media to constantly pull and deliver a variety of specific opinions, anxieties, joys, or sorrows surrounding this time of year ensured our staff were constantly exposed to salient insights whilst working across all of our Christmas campaigns and communications.

As the tree was in the agency reception and could not be avoided, 100% of the agency staff were exposed to its outbursts. Tweets were relayed in real time, and averaged out at about one every 30 seconds. Over a three week period this meant that hundreds of insights about Christmas, some useful some just random, were aggregated. One particular insight, that when you give a gift for your family you’re often just using them as an excuse to buy something you want, led to a 360 campaign for one of our clients called, “Give Selfishly”.