Campaign Trail is our evaluation of a few of the best recent creative efforts from the marketing world. View past columns in the archives here.
Unwrapping presents during the holidays is a timeless source of joy and connection. For the last 180 years, some consumers have been happiest when tearing away wrapping paper to disclose a box in a selected shade of robin’s egg blue. With that in mind, Tiffany & Co. and artistic agency partner Anomaly this 12 months put the jeweler’s iconic blue boxes at the center of its holiday campaign, titled “Love is a Gift.”
“Those boxes are literally keepers of those love stories. They’re a logo of the holiday magic made real,” said Caitlin Slack, group creative director at Anomaly, of the campaign. “What for those who take this blue box to recent heights and have it’s this enduring symbol of affection that may actually be explored even further and used to heighten emotion, as well?”
In a 90-second hero spot, actor Anya Taylor-Joy explores a cityscape made up of blue boxes which double as portals that allow her to view love stories across the world: of familial love in Tokyo, self-love in New York and romantic love in London.
“We desired to have a little bit of that nostalgic glamor, but then modernized in the current day,” Slack said.
Launched on Oct. 28, the campaign spans online video, paid digital, retail and social channels. Along with the hero spot, three 30-second cutdowns deal with individual city sequences, while a fourth weaves all three together. The effort is soundtracked by The Pied Pipers’ “Dream,” a song from 1945 that features the apropos lyrics “dream whenever you’re feeling blue.”
“There’s romance, there’s a little bit of nostalgia that the track has,” Slack said. “We definitely desired to infuse that feeling of heat into this dream state that she’s in through the music.”
The next chapter
“Love is a Gift” builds on Tiffany’s holiday campaign from last 12 months, “With Love, Since 1837,” which also starred Taylor-Joy, who Slack describes as a figure of effortless, carefree glamour. The 2024 effort generated 57 million organic views, grew the brand’s social following by 135,000 and won two awards at Cannes Lions. Both efforts were developed by Anomaly.
Each vignette in the campaign connects a form of like to a selected Tiffany design: HardWear, based on a design from 1962, as a logo of self-love; Lock, a logo of familial love from 1883; and T, based on a motif from 1975 that represents love and possibility.
In the same way that the designs are inspired by pieces in the Tiffany archive, “Love is a Gift” looks to update the brand’s timeless iconography for a contemporary lens. To achieve this, the agency enlisted Lol Crawley, the cinematographer for epic drama “The Brutalist,” and production designer Nathan Parker, who crafted practical sets.
“This 12 months was all about creating the next chapter of the Tiffany holiday stories… and constructing on that magic of last 12 months with a brand new type of beautifully evolved approach, where we get to dig deeper into different narratives after which push the craft of the campaign even further,” Slack said.
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