The agency wanted another holiday greeting worthy of its long, award-winning history — clever, impactful, and relevant to the work. But the holiday approach had settled into a familiar rut: write a script, write an email, send a video.
There was appetite for innovation and a single mandate to clear the bar — the new idea had to feel genuinely fresh, not a reskin of last year's.
I started ideating before the team's official brainstorm — and used what's actually possible with technology to protect the idea from "it sounds hard" and "we've always done it this way." The concept: the Magic Snowball, an AI-enhanced prediction engine that borrowed the nostalgia of the Magic 8 Ball and wrapped it in holiday sparkle as an interactive landing page tuned to new-year-prediction season.
Unlike the original toy's purely random answers, this version first runs an intelligent search to read the sentiment of a question — positive, negative, or neutral — before answering, so "Is the sky purple?" never comes back "All signs point to yes." Shake-to-ask on mobile recreated the original gameplay, and the Q&A format opened the door to both topical levity and business messaging. It ran across video, email, the interactive landing page, and social.
A decade-old holiday habit, disrupted — and the agency's strongest holiday engagement on record. Email click-through rate hit 2.5× the prior year, open rate climbed 74% year over year, and the landing page held roughly twice the site-wide engagement time.
Campaign social engagement outperformed platform benchmarks across LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook — proving an AI-enabled idea could be both playful and measurable.