GRANT WEBER
CREATIVE | STRATEGY | PERFORMANCE
Histor-eCards
History Factory combined its client’s mutual love for history and the anxiety many have around the holidays into a humorous email campaign. Histor-eCards took a closer look at some of the holiday traditions that seem to endure through gritted teeth and forced smiles.
Results:
32% open-rate among senior-level marketers
200 social shares
5 original hand-drawn Histor-eCards
Responsibilities:
Strategy
Copy
Design
Histor-eCards mirror Someecards in look and attitude, but add a unique storytelling element. Each card tells a snappy history behind those holiday traditions that make us scratch our heads and yet never seem to disappear, like lighting the yule log, hanging tinsel decorations and Secret Santa.
Before Netflix and chill, there was the yule log.
In 1966, WPIX-NY televised a burning yule log for three hours on Christmas Eve. The station’s “15 minutes of flame” went on to become a mainstay in many homes without fireplaces of their own. In 1989, WPIX cancelled its yule log, but the faux fire found new life in the internet age. After 9/11, WPIX rekindled the annual tradition—the “comfort food” of television. Today, the famous tinder has its own three-episode series on Netflix.
The reason the holidays can feel like one big GoFundMe campaign.
Holiday charitable giving is common in cultures around the world. In U.S. offices, it's called Secret Santa. The holiday fad peaked in popularity when TV guru Larry Dean Stewart revealed himself as the "Secret Santa" in 2006 after years of anonymously giving $100 bills to those in need—making everyone else look bad. Thanks, Larry.
Lead Decorations? Surviving the holidays is hard enough as it is.
Monarch and holiday influencer Queen Victoria popularized the use of tinsel after a drawing of her Christmas tree went 19th-century viral. By 1904, mass-produced tinsel was available—usually as tin-plated lead. #yikes
A toast to the holidays.
Everybody’s favorite Parliamentary lush, Winston Churchill, famously said, “The gin and tonic has saved more Englishmen’s lives, and minds, than all the doctors in the Empire,” and history tends to agree with him. In colonial India, British soldiers added tonic water containing quinine, an antimalarial medicine, to their daily ration of gin. A scurvy-preventing lime garnish paired nicely with the piney taste. The G&T later became a holiday favorite. God save the queen!
We have the Great Depression to thank for the “voluntary” attendance at the office holiday party each year.
Companies hosted holiday parties for employees because many families couldn’t afford to host their own. After World War II, embarrassing dance moves and awkward fraternization peaked in popularity. By the mid-1950s and ‘60s, many companies opted for family-friendly picnics instead. Today, the event rests somewhere in the middle—probably for the best.