Situation: The Christmas ad space has incredible heritage, especially in the UK, and we knew we wanted to create a compelling emotional connection with our audiences.

Brief: Music is part of Disney's heritage. It plays a critical role in our storytelling and is pivotal to the success of many of our movies. There was no dialogue in the advert to ensure it resonated globally, so music was crucial in terms of driving audience connection. From the early planning stages, we were looking for an uplifting and ideally original soundtrack from an up-and-coming artist. Music was also a shared theme between brand and commercial campaigns so it needed to be recognisable and catchy.

Objectives:

- To connect with audiences in a way that felt inherently and uniquely Disney

- To increase brand reach and engagement

- To support long term partner Make-A-Wish®, raise funds and mark 40 years of partnership

To help us to develop our idea we talked to families across the region to understand more about what they would like to see from a Christmas advert. They told us that it was all about nostalgia, magic, traditions and bringing families together. This insight helped us to come up with our campaign tagline – From Our Family To Yours – representing both the importance of family and the family of brands and characters that The Walt Disney Company is known for.

The animated story focuses on a young girl’s relationship with her grandmother Lola, who is given a Mickey toy as a child, creating a lifelong love of Disney. The story shows the role that Disney plays in creating moments of connection, ultimately bringing the family together at the end of the story. The music had to reflect this family journey – the highs and the lows!

The commercial campaign strategy was to have a hero digital asset at the core, to be distributed on our owned channels across the region and be used by retailers on theirs. Additional commercial spots that featured priority products for Christmas, using the same music and creative as the brand advert ran across TV and digital.

The music strategy was to create a poignant charity single with upcoming artist 19-year-old Griff and build the profile of both across national traditional radio play, streaming platforms and interviews. The emotional pull of the song would tell the story when watching the advert, but be able to stand as a beautiful track on its own. We focused on securing play for Love Is A Compass to reach a wide, general audience.

Our launch moment was highly orchestrated and eventised. We leveraged the power of our owned media channels and created an exclusive embargoed screening event with exclusive extras – such as a piano performance from Griff, as well as behind-the-scenes content for earned media, which contributed to the reach results. We also ran a teaser campaign on social 48 hours in advance to maximise the impact.

Working with Warner we secured key UK radio play for our charity single Love Is A Compass by Griff on BBC and commercial stations, alongside placement on streaming platforms Spotify, Apple and Amazon. The track was listed on multiple international playlists including new Music Friday, Breakthrough UK and A-list: Pop.

- Record-breaking day on shopDisney at launch

- 167 EMEA retail partners: 31,000 doors and 2176 windows

- Campaign trending on Twitter

- The advert is Disney EMEA’s most successful Facebook post ever with 105M views and strong engagement

- Over 3000 pieces of coverage across EMEA with 8.1Bn reach, including 54 TV clips

- 99+% positive sentiment

- The ad soft toy was top product referenced

- 88% of consumers said they ‘felt more positive about Disney’ as a result of watching

- 54% intended to buy a product

- Music track achieved 20M streams and featured on 50 international playlists

- CRM achieved 3.4M reach and CTR at 2.3% smashed the benchmark

- Disney+ ran the advert in key markets

- Disney Scan –users scan images and products to bring them to life –succeeded with a strong trial at Westfield, high engagement and 3.8M impressions despite UK lockdown