Congratulations to Clarion Communications, which has just won the PR Week Campaign of the Year Award for its Christmas 2010 stunt, Lakeside’s Living Christmas Fairy. Designed to promote Lakeside shopping centre in Essex, the campaign saw ex-Big Brother star and Essex Girl Chantelle Houghton hoisted 60-ft in the air onto Lakeside’s Christmas tree (while dressed as a Christmas fairy) – thus marking the start of the festive season.

A simple idea, maybe, but one that captured the attention of both national and regional media. According to Clarion, the campaign appeared in 48 different titles, ranging from The Sun and Daily Mail newspapers to Heat and OK! Magazines. ITV’s Daybreak and Heart FM also covered the story while tweets from celebrity writers on national newspapers and consumer magazines ensured thousands of people saw it on Twitter.  Across all media, the campaign reached 49m people – generating coverage with a value of £532,446, which represented an exceptional return on investment of 32:1.

So this got us thinking… with just six weeks to go until Christmas, why not look at a few other examples of well-executed festive PR campaigns?

Warwick Castle & Willoughby PR

There’s a nice little video on YouTube showing Warwick Castle’s 2007 attempt to get into the Guinness Book Of World Records with 2,000 conga dancing Santas. More recently, Willoughby PR came up with the idea of auctioning Christmas Day at Warwick Castle on eBay – starting price £25,000. The campaign began with a tweet but soon developed a significant amount of media attention (with brands such as the BBC, Sky News, The Scotsman and Classic FM all picking up on the story). According to Willoughby, 2.4million read about it online, 172million read about it offline and social media traffic related to the Castle rose by 22%. As a result of all this, traffic to the Warwick Castle website rose by around 30%. Best of all, perhaps, Willoughby pegged the price of the campaign at just 12p. As for the Castle, 2,000 people watched as the eBay auction ended at £28,000.

THINK! & Red

Christmas has a serious side too. In 2008, Red created a very effective don’t drink drive campaign for THINK!, the government road safety campaign. Red tracked down a willing volunteer who had lost his licence the previous Christmas after being caught over the limit behind the wheel. He agreed to climb into a seven-foot tall pint glass for a national media launch at London Paddington to help spread the word that drink driving is really not worth the risk. Afterwards, Red took the man-in-giant-pint-glass concept on tour to some of the busiest places in the UK. Coverage of the launch included live broadcast on Channel Five’s lunchtime bulletin, C4 News, articles in the national and London press, as well as online and radio news bites. The roadshow achieved coverage in regional newspapers, TV, radio and online.

Aladdin Chocolates & Prime PR

Prime PR in Stockholm handled an interesting campaign for Aladdin, a chocolate box brand that has been hanging around Swedish homes for 70 years. The issue for the brand was that it had lost some of its traditional values and magic. For Christmas 2009, a new chocolate was about to enter the box, but instead of talking about the imminent arrival, Prime focused on the one that would have to leave to make room for it.

“We converted the communication into a question of democracy by letting people’s votes decide which praline would have to go,” explained Prime.

Over a four week period, the campaign caught nationwide interest resulting in “400,000 votes (5% of the Swedish population), media coverage of 33million, the fourth fastest growing Facebook application in the world, 15,000 fans of the campaign, 300 blog posts etc.” Even better, “sales went up by 26.5%, Aladdin’s market share increased by 2.8% and revenue increased 44%. Aladdin was the biggest topic around Christmas 2009 in Sweden.”

Germany Christmas Markets & Frankfurt/Kurt Stroscher

This one isn’t an easy idea to replicate – but it’s a superb case study all the same. 14 years ago, Kurt Stroscher was given the job of marketing the city of Frankfurt abroad. He came up with the idea of a German Christmas market in Birmingham and has, in effect, reinvented the British Christmas. Today, there are German Christmas markets everywhere and Frankfurt sponsors four of them in Birmingham, Edinburgh, Manchester and Leeds. Birmingham alone attracts 3 million visitors. Frankfurt covers the costs in return for sponsorship rights. As a result, the city claims to have seen a 30% increase in British visitors from 2000-2010. Other cities have also got in on the act, with Cologne sponsoring a market at London’s South Bank.

A final thought on Christmas… www.publicityheaven.com (a business which provides companies with tools to improve their PR) has a few good ideas about how to maximise your PR over the festive season…

Community work: Supporting your local community is a great way to generate publicity for your business. Almost every town in the country will have Christmas lights, and these don’t come cheap etc, etc.

Make a prediction for the year ahead: At this time of the year prediction stories are always likely to generate media interest.

Or a year-on-year sales comparison: Comparison stories generate interest as people like to know how businesses are performing.

Create non time-critical releases: When journalists are struggling for ideas, stories without a deadline are often their saviour. A good non time-critical press release could offer expert tips and advice to people.

Make yourself available for interviews: Radio stations find it difficult to source stories and people over Christmas, so why not make it easy for them? If you’re easier to contact than anyone else you will get more PR.