Each Christmas, the global advertising industry tries to steamroll over the traditional Czech celebration with its fat-and-jolly Santas and foreign reindeer. The Czechs dislike this westernizing cultural colonisation. Vodafone built on local insight and created a campaign with an offer built on the single tongue-in-cheek idea of “no tricks”. It would bring a fair, transparent offer to everyone with none of the trickery of the competition with its fake Christmas ornamentation and tricky offers with hidden catches. The key creative expression was to team up a little chihuahua with fake reindeer antlers and a well-known satirical Czech comedian. The rest was history.

We developed a tightly integrated multi-media campaign featuring clean layouts and a simple message delivered by a well-known Czech satirist: this year, no fake reindeer, no tricks – just an honest offer for ALL of our customers. We created an icon to embody this message: an empathetic and slightly ridiculous-looking Chihuahua with fake antlers. In addition to using TV, print, online and outdoor media, we also did a PR stunt when we “put the antlers on” (a symbol of cheating) our competitors’ phone booths and billboards that featured their Christmas offers – a mischievous act that garnered a plethora of positive press coverage.