Each year, Perth City holds their Festival of Christmas – a month-long programme of Christmas activities to entice people into the city for their Christmas shopping. Unfortunately, in recent years, they were reporting dwindling numbers with many people choosing to go to suburban malls to do their Christmas shopping, rather than the city. Perth City wanted us to create a campaign that positioned the city as Western Australia’s home of Christmas.

The difference between doing your Christmas shopping in the city rather than a suburban mall is that the city offers an experience: there are decorations, Christmas lights and activities on every corner. So, instead of shooting a traditional TV commercial, it made sense to create an event that people would actually experience. As a result, the TV spot shows people enjoying the colour and activity of Christmas in Perth City.

Christmas isn't white in Perth, Western Australia. It’s red hot and full of colour. So we decided to create a campaign for their Festival of Christmas that celebrated the colour and activity of a Perth Christmas. To achieve this, we gave Perth its own version of snow – colourful snowflake-shaped confetti. And to introduce it, we surprised city-goers by creating a blizzard of this specially made confetti in the middle of the city. Cameras caught the reactions for a TV commercial.

Following the initial event, countless pictures and videos of the event appeared on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, providing the city with a huge amount of earned media. Hits to their website increased by 120% with them racking up 170,000 unique hits (that’s 10% of Perth’s population). Perth City reported a record number of attendees at their festival events as well as shoppers throughout the Christmas period.