At the core of the Believe campaign was an activation idea where we asked people to prove they believed by writing a letter to Santa Claus and mailing it at Macy’s. For every letter collected, Macy’s donated one dollar to the Make-A-Wish Foundation - a charity devoted to fulfilling the wishes of children with life-threatening illnesses. To collect the letters, we installed Believe mailboxes in every one of Macy’s more than 800 stores nationwide. Our goal was stated from the beginning - we wanted to collect more than a million letters and donate $1 million dollars to the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Nielsen IAG rated the “Yes, Virginia” TV commercial as the #1 most-liked and the #2 most recalled commercial of the holiday season and amongst the top ten most-liked commercials across any category for all of 2008.

Free press for the campaign generated over 38 million combined impressions and more than 17 million broadcast impressions.

The Believe site achieved over ten million page views in seven weeks and each user spent over four minutes on the site.

Most importantly, we collected 1,079,206 letters to Santa. And on December 23, we presented the Make-A-Wish Foundation with a check for $1,000,000.