The ask
Create a holiday ad that shows the impact cards can have on our lives.


Creative insight
The overwhelming majority of cards are thrown away after they’re read. People do, however, hold on to “the good ones.”


Campaign idea
The good ones


Activating the idea
Show the profound power a small paper card can have on a person’s life.


Manifesto
We humans are a nostalgic species. Probably because memories are all that we have. They’re all our lives are really made of. But they’re hard to hold onto, especially when they take the form of “stuff.”

We minimize our lives and KonMarie our closets. “They’re just things,” we tell ourselves. “Things don’t matter.” But try as we might, there will always be those sacred items we treasure because of how they make us feel, what they help us remember, or what they say.

Cards are one of those things.

We’re given cards for all manner of occasions: Happy. Celebratory. Life-changing and earth-shattering. Sure, they get hidden away in boxes, and tucked away in drawers. But they’re there for us when we need to be reminded of the way we felt when we received them.

Imagine if you kept all of your cards over the course of a lifetime. And imagine if you had an opportunity to sit down and read them… as a way to go back. Not to change things, per-se. Just to feel a few things twice.

It’s true: many things are just things. But the good things… are everything.

Hallmark


Creative approach
Using a Hallmark poem from the late-80s as our script, we’ll tell the story of a sentimental mother and her three children, and the memories she helped hold on to for them throughout the years in the form of birthday cards, Christmas cards, Easter cards, graduation cards… a lifetime’s worth of cards, saved, to stand in for when the day comes that she can no longer serve as the keeper of their memories.


60-sec Broadcast/OLV: “The Good Ones”
[Open on a young girl’s birthday party: she’s tearing into gifts without even opening the cards, let alone reading them, until her mom corrects her faux-pas. Cut to the end of the party; as mom helps pick up and toss out the wrapping paper, she grabs each card, reads it, and sets it aside. VO quietly, and slowly, reads the following Hallmark poem from the late 80s.]

Let me sit with my baby
and play for a while
and forget all my unfinished work
with a smile.

[Time passes in a frenzy of birthdays, holidays and other important milestones… all worthy of card-giving, but, in the eyes of her children, none worthy of card-saving. So, mom saves them. All of them. In sweet little boxes she’s created and hidden for each of her kids.]

For every tomorrow
holds work to be done,
but lullaby moments
and peek-a-boo fun
are life’s tender treasures
meant just for today,
for babies grow up
and the years slip away.

[We see quick cuts of graduations, showers, weddings… to baby births, pet deaths, all of it — both joy-filled and heart-wrenching. And the boxes fill with a lifetimes’ worth of cards. Occasionally, mom even slips her own cards into their boxes, to remain unopened.]

The memories we keep
of the moments most dear,
are all we will take,
when we’re far, far from here.

[The children, now grown, enter their childhood home; the same ones where the parties and holidays from earlier in the piece have taken place all these years. It’s noticeably different. Quiet, still, staged, and a little dark. Dust specs dance their way through the suns rays peeking in through the windows. They walk around, touching items, photos of their recently-deceased mom, remembering, welling up, smiling, laughing. Until they find the boxes hidden up high in a closet. They pull them out and start reading, when they realize she’s saved every single card. Plus, a few extras of her own.]

Which is why I‘ve saved yours
the only way I knew how
and hope you will, too,
for the ones you love most, now.

[GFX]
Most things are just things.
But some things are everything.

Hallmark logo


Art Direction
Produced footage is intercut with the family’s own recordings from birthday parties, graduations, weddings… all of the important milestones. Styling, wardrobe and color shifts as we move through time: it’s faded and more monochromatic as we start, and gets progressively more modern as we end in present-day.

Only a selection of the photography shown is original; it’s used as mood board imagery, only.