What's got more than one million views and its own original retro modern song? The Klick Health annual digital holiday greeting, of course.
Each year for the past seven years, the Canadian healthcare and pharma agency has created clever and humorous push-the-creative-envelope digital greetings for its family, friends and clients.
Part recruiting tool and part creative showcase, the videos attract viral-level attention and pass-arounds. But this year’s original song “You Make Winter Warm,” created with social media star musician and video producer Andrew Huang, is its best showing yet with more than 1 million views and thousands of downloaded songs.
The song has a double meaning in that every download of it will result in $1 donated to Operation Warm, which helps local organizations buy new winter coats for kids. So far, they’ve had more than 3,000 downloads and their goal is to get to 10,000. And they’re getting some help from the media. After launch, for instance, the Weather Channel talked about the effort and played the song, encouraging people to download to help out.
While Klick has been creating the holiday greeting videos since 2010, the staff takes the creative part quite seriously and tries to outdo itself year after year, said Glenn Zujew, executive creative director and co-producer of the holiday video and song. The first video—a riff on the best memes of 2010 portrayed by staffers—landed on the CNN homepage for a month under a headline of something like “Viral Video About Viral Videos Goes Viral,” Zujew said. And that’s how Klick got hooked on getting ever more innovative year after year.
Zujew has been at Klick for almost 20 years and has worked on the holiday project every year; before they started making videos, the agency's creative department crafted different illustration and photo mashup holiday cards each year.
However, it’s not just an exercise in cultural relevance and special effects. Zujew, who does many job interviews on behalf of Klick, said that in almost every one, candidates will bring up the holiday videos as one of the reasons they want to work at the agency.
“It really works for us in showcasing our culture and personality. If you read the comments from that first video, everyone was asking ‘how do I get a job there?’ ” Zujew said. “In healthcare, it’s a challenge for us sometimes with creatives. They all want to watch the Nike websites, but we really wanted to bring the A team and the best of the best people into Klick so that we could try to change the face of healthcare marketing.”