Add Some Play
to Your Holiday
Challenge
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 fallen into a familiar pattern: come up with an idea for a video script, write script, write email, send video to mailing list.
There was appetite for innovation and a single mandate to clear the bar — the new idea had to feel genuinely fresh, impactful, and relevant to the agency's work.
Approach
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.
Performance vs. Benchmark
- Email Click-Through Rate2.5× the prior year
- Email Open Rate+74% year over year
- Landing Page Engagement Time~2× the site-wide average
- Social EngagementAbove platform benchmarks across LinkedIn, Instagram & Facebook
Outcome
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.
Experience Live on rep-ink.com →