Every year Klick Health creates an annual holiday video message for pharma clients and potential employees. Past videos have been funny and lighthearted or groovy and chic. However, this year’s video takes a more somber approach to promote its message about simple acts of kindness.
The video opens with dark and bleak city scenes and seemingly shady characters with ominous voiceover intones: “It’s out there” and “It’s speading.” However, the music changes as the scenes become clearer—the man in the alley approaches a woman with a cart and helps her unload donations for a food pantry. In another scene, the banging on the door of a simple family apartment turns out to be friends with gifts and food and holiday cheer. The voiceover defines the previously menacing “it” as “one single act can change everything.”
RELATED: Klick Health taps former Razorfish exec for new chief brand strategy officer role
Each of the scenes in the video was inspired by real-life events, which are shown in snippets at the end. (Klick got permission from the real people involved to be included.) Klicksters, as agency employees call themselves, star in the video, including Chief Creative Officer Rich Levy taking a turn as a surgeon-turned-Santa and CEO and co-founder Leerom Segal leading the way with gifts into the family’s apartment.
The past holiday videos from Klick “have always been light and fun and joyful and cheerful—and also hopeful for the future. This one leans into that emotion of hope and that if we all just act a little kinder toward each other, the world would be a better place,” Levy said.
He and Glenn Zujew, Klick’s executive vice president of creative and medical, settled on the theme after reading a column in the Washington Post last year about the “kindness connection” and the proven ability of kindness to improve health and influence others to be more empathetic and generous.
RELATED: Klick goes on creative director hiring spree thanks to new business
Klick will donate $1 every time the video is viewed up to $10,000, and the charity it chose this year for the proceeds goes hand-in-hand with the theme of kindness: the Fred Rogers Center in Latrobe, PA, named for the thoughtful children’s show host.
Klick uses the annual video in a thank-you sent to clients each year, but also as a recruiting tool to attract like-minded creatives and others to the growing Toronto-based agency, Levy and Zujew said. The agency began creating the videos 11 years ago, with last year’s holiday spoof “Klickmas” notching 2.6 million views on YouTube.