Taking two of Christmas’ most loved icons, the ubiquitous snow globe and the joyfully-familiar soundtrack of the season ‘Winter Wonderland’, we created a film that would cut through the news footage scenes that felt all-too familiar, and made us switch off.

We took the real-life images of desperation, fear and trauma felt by refugee families and recreated them as snow globe scenes, then shot them as snow fell alongside the Grammy nominee Lianne La Havas’ haunting, almost ironic soundtrack of ‘Winter Wonderland’. The Winter Wanderland campaign was created specifically for Facebook mobile feed where cheerful seasonal messages from friends sat juxtaposed against the intriguing and poignant film, cinemagraphs and stills of the campaign.

The campaign was briefed, concepted, produced and delivered in just two weeks. And took a three phase approach to delivery, first starting with the awareness film, followed by a ‘consideration’ phase execution of moving snow globe cinemagraphs, then finally carousel ads to convert donations. It ran for 5½ weeks, targeting specifically those more likely to be sympathetic to the refugee cause, the left-wing middle-classes of the UK and Germany. Plus targeted ‘lookalikes’ of existing UNHCR website visitors. And when the floods hit the UK, the targeting was able to exclude the worst-hit locations who would inevitably be less willing or able to help. The campaign resonated far and wide, even being shared by government departments and NGOs across Europe.

The campaign reached 22 million people

With 7 million video views

It saw donation intent at a 4(UK) and 11 (DE) point increase

The campaign gathered donations to help thousands in need.

And people who had seen the campaign were 1.24 times more likely to donate even after the campaign ended.