In China, young people are starting to celebrate Christmas more and more. Since Christmas and Chinese New Year fall so closely together on the calendar, we wanted to link the two holidays together. We did this by combining the two holidays’ iconic characters Santa Claus and the Prosperity God to create Prosperity Santa.

The interactive video ran on the brand’s official website. People were driven to the site via banners, social media and PR.

Once at the site, users played the video and were introduced to our Santa Claus character. As the video played, he began to take on more and more features of the God of Prosperity and transformed into our new character Prosperity Santa. Using the slide at the bottom of the video, users were able to control the transformation to completely become Prosperity Santa or a combination of the characters.

In the scene around our character were a number of Easter eggs that users could click on to immediately unlock funny content. This is a first in Asia.

For the entire campaign we were only given RMB 900K (US $144,500) from the client from which we needed to spread it across the mini-site, video content, production costs and an on-ground event lasting for eight weekends in two cities. The shooting and post-production was done in Paris and the mini-site was done in Shanghai. The on-ground event happened in Qingdao and Shijiazhuang, meaning the entire production required a lot of management within our limited budget.

We allocated RMB 500K (US $80,000) for the film, 150K (US $24,000) for the mini-site, 150K (US $24,000) for the on-ground event and 50K (US $8,000) for the documentary team.