From Our Family To Yours is the first owned Christmas campaign for the Consumer Products, Games and Publishing business at The Walt Disney Company. Launched on 9th November 2020 across 36 markets.

Developed as a digital-first advertising and marketing campaign, it centred on a hero brand advert, tapping into themes of nostalgia, magic and family traditions.

The campaign ran across Disney owned channels, including Disney+. More than 167 retailers adopted it across Europe - the largest total ever for a CPGP marketing campaign. Additional commercial spots featuring priority products, using the same music and creative ran across TV and digital.

The marketing strategy for CPGP in EMEA has always been to create high-impact, scalable campaigns that support our partners. We consistently challenge ourselves to find new ways to drive the business through innovation in our marketing, and we saw an opportunity to stretch this strategy with a Christmas initiative.

Previously, our Christmas campaigns have been retail-led, with partners receiving in-depth toolkits. However, with the new products available it made sense to run a fully owned and integrated campaign.

Objectives

- To connect with audiences in a way that felt inherently and uniquely Disney by leaning into the company’s heritage of storytelling

- To increase brand reach and engagement

- To drive commercial performance and retail sales value across Europe during critical trading period

- To support Disney’s long term partner Make-A-Wish® to raise funds and awareness and mark 40 years of partnership

- To strengthen relationships with key retail partners

To help us to develop our idea we talked to families across Europe to understand more about what they would like to see from a Christmas advert. They told us that it was about nostalgia, magic, traditions and bringing families together. This insight helped us to come up with our campaign tagline – From Our Family To Yours – which represents both the importance of family and the family of brands and characters that The Walt Disney Company is known for.

The animated story focuses on a young girl’s relationship with her grandmother Lola, who is given a Mickey toy as a child, creating a lifelong love of Disney. Lola’s personal tradition of crafting is key and shows the role Disney plays in creating moments of connection, ultimately bringing the family together at the end of the story. Our original soundtrack reflects this journey – the highs and the lows!

The commercial campaign strategy was to have a hero digital asset at the core, to be distributed on our owned channels across the region and be used by retailers on theirs. Additional commercial spots that featured priority products for Christmas, using the same music and creative as the brand advert ran across TV and digital.

The brand creative featured at a host of retailers from toy specialists to grocers, e-commerce to fashion as well as at The Disney Store and shopDisney. This included flexible creative solutions for retail POS and marketingin store and online.

The campaign was extended across all consumer touch points through TWDC-owned platforms and partnerships first, then enhanced with significant earned media value and commercial performance driven by tactical paid spend. The assets lent themselves to a digital-first approach and due to social distancing restrictions 96% of the marketing budget was used for digital and TV spend.

Initial teaser phase with two social posts and CRM of a 10 second clip directing to the ad and showcasing new characters.

Content developed appropriate to each channel, e.g. three-minute TVC, 30-60 second cutdowns and a standalone music video of the soundtrack performed by UK-based singer-songwriter Griff.

Our launch moment itself was highly orchestrated and eventised. We leveraged the power of our owned media channels, created an exclusive embargoed screening event with added extras and behind-the-scenes content for earned media, which contributed to the reach results.

Additional drivers:

- Packaging: we linked products already in development to the brand ad via a packaging guide

- NPD data: focused on ‘inspired by’ products featured in the brand ad or were creatively linked to it

- Exclusive product content opportunity for key licensees

- Exclusive retailer take over in selected markets driving ownership and based on significant owned and paid media investment

- Record-breaking day on shopDisney at launch

- 167 EMEA retail partners: 31,000 doors and 2176 windows

- Campaign trending on Twitter

- The advert is Disney EMEA’s most successful Facebook post ever with 105M views and strong engagement

- Over 3000 pieces of coverage across EMEA with 8.1Bn reach, including 54 TV clips

- 99+% positive sentiment

- The ad soft toy was top product referenced

- 88% of consumers said they ‘felt more positive about Disney’ as a result of watching

- 54% intended to buy a product

- Music track achieved 20M streams and featured on 50 international playlists

- CRM achieved 3.4M reach and CTR at 2.3% smashed the benchmark

- Disney+ ran the advert in key markets

- Disney Scan –users scan images and products to bring them to life –succeeded with a strong trial at Westfield, high engagement and 3.8M impressions despite UK lockdown