For 7 years he has played on chairs in front of the Warsaw Central Station. They call him Paul “The Chair”.
Since no one knows chairs better than Paul, JWT Warsaw decided to get IKEA Warsaw fans to chose which chairs Paul could test in their latest Facebook Campaign.
The results were posted on the IKEA Poland Facebook page and within 7 days the number of IKEA Warsaw fans increased by 70%!
The city of Santa Claus is situated in the state of Indiana, USA. The museum in the city brings together different objects related to Santa Claus and has long received letters from people around the world, described as doing so for more than 70 years.
Coca-Cola with its ad agency Ogilvy Brazil selected 75 forgotten letters and set out on an impossible task to find the writers and give them exactly what they asked for. The result was a touching movie that reinforces the magic of Christmas.
The mechanism is straightforward and brutal in effort. Find a place where old letters to Santa were kept. Read through decades of messages that never got a reply. Select a small set of letters. Then track down the original writers and recreate the exact gifts they once requested.
“Forgotten letters” here means letters that were written to Santa as children, then stored and left unanswered for years.
In global FMCG holiday marketing, the fastest route to belief is to make generosity observable in the real world, not just promised in a tagline.
Santa’s Forgotten Letters is a Coca-Cola Christmas campaign by Ogilvy Brazil that turns archival letters into real deliveries, using the act of fulfillment as the proof of the story.
This works because it reverses the usual Christmas-ad formula. Instead of asking the audience to feel something while watching a film, it shows a real-world action first. The emotion is earned by the logistics.
The letters also do the writing for the brand. Each request is specific, personal, and time-stamped by childhood. That specificity makes the surprise feel less like marketing and more like closure.
Coca-Cola is reinforcing a familiar role in the season. It wants to be the brand that protects the “magic” adults quietly miss, and it does that by staging a story people retell without needing to mention product features.
This is brand meaning built through a single, high-signal act that generates a long tail of earned conversation.
It is a Christmas film built around a real-world fulfilment stunt. Coca-Cola and Ogilvy Brazil selected 75 old letters to Santa from Santa Claus, Indiana, tracked down the writers, and delivered the gifts they once asked for.
The letters were kept in Santa Claus, Indiana, where a local Santa-related museum had reportedly received letters for decades.
Locate an archive of unanswered letters. Select a small set. Identify the original writers years later. Recreate the exact requested gifts. Deliver them, and film the search and the moment of fulfilment.
Because it carries built-in specificity and credibility. A handwritten childhood request feels personal and time-stamped, so the fulfilment reads as earned rather than manufactured.
The film documents effort as proof. Viewers do not just hear a promise about “magic”. They watch the logistics that make the promise real.
If you want belief, let the action do the persuading. Make the work visible. Keep the claim simple. Let real reactions carry the credibility.
If the fulfilment feels staged, scaled too broadly, or too polished, it can lose authenticity. Limiting scope and showing real effort helps protect trust.
Coming to a Buenos Aires pub near you is the newly minted sport of Poolball, created by Ogilvy Argentina for Budweiser.
Two teams meet on a giant 7×3 meter pool table. Fifteen soccer balls are reskinned to look like pool balls. The competitors use their feet instead of cues to score.
Poolball takes two things that already belong in the same evening. Football and beer. Then it adds a third. The “I could play that” simplicity of pool. The result feels less like a stunt and more like a playable product.
Standalone takeaway: Poolball is a brand activation that fuses two familiar games into one instantly understandable format, so people stop watching and start participating without needing instructions.
The mechanic is the entire idea. A pool table scaled up to human size. Pool-ball visuals on footballs. Pool rules translated into foot play. When the mechanic is this legible, the content is self-explaining and the crowd becomes the amplification layer.
BTL is often used as shorthand for below-the-line activity. In practice, it means a brand experience designed to be felt in the real world, then shared because it is worth retelling.
Bar-friendly activations win when they create quick status moments. You either played it, you watched someone nail a shot, or you filmed the chaos. Poolball naturally creates all three, because every “pocket” attempt is a mini highlight.
It also lowers the risk of participation. You are not learning a new sport. You are remixing two you already know, with rules you can copy by watching one play.
Budweiser is not selling a feature here. It is selling association. Big-game energy. Competitive banter. Social proof that the brand belongs in the centre of group nights out.
When the game is branded but not fragile, the brand becomes the host of the experience rather than the interruption inside it.
Poolball is a branded game format that combines football and pool. Players kick footballs designed like pool balls on a giant pool table and score using pool-style goals.
Because it is easy to understand, easy to spectate, and it produces repeatable highlight moments. Venues like it because it creates crowd energy. Brands like it because the crowd documents it.
The visual contrast does the work. A human-scale pool table and “pool ball” footballs create an immediate “what is that” reaction, so filming feels natural rather than incentivised.
Make it genuinely playable. Simple rules. Clear scoring. Quick rounds. If the experience is fun without the brand name, the brand credit comes for free.
A single hybrid rule, one striking physical cue, and one repeatable scoring moment. If people can explain it in one sentence, you have the right foundation.
