Magic is Made in Vancouver

Our Solution

Reach Far & Wide

Public Relations, Earned Media & Influencers – Oh my!

How do you make an annual event… newsworthy? Kipling’s multi-pronged public relations strategy framed the Vancouver Christmas Market as a mainstay of the region’s festive season – a magical tradition with surprising new delights.  

We amped up our media kit, including bright new photos, a series of seasonal releases and a 2024 Market Guide spotlighting new vendors. Our targeted pitches went out to digital and traditional media, as well as bloggers and influencers. We also orchestrated two remarkable events, Media Day and Media Family Night – both so invite-only due to popular demand. Our Media Night welcomed more than 200 media and influencers, including notable outlets like The CBC, The Daily Hive, Shaw TV, and Fairchild TV. 

Over the season, our always-on approach set the stage for over 250 media mentions – in the pages of The Vancouver Sun, The Province, Georgia Straight, Tourism Vancouver, and other prominent outlets. It also echoed through multicultural media globally, and earned the Market a coveted spot in international publication Women’s Wear Daily: “15 of the Best Christmas Markets Around the World for Holiday Shopping”. Media interviews, strategically timed until the final day, ensured widespread coverage.

Our extensive reach into different communities on social media platforms–through macro and micro influencers–further pushed us into the spotlight pre, mid, and postseason.

How we did it:

• Revamping our PR strategy to reach deep into untapped communities
• Preparing media kits, backgrounders, ticketing previews, and press releases
• Generating creative story ideas (while including sponsors, stakeholders and vendors) throughout the season
• Facilitating interviews, sponsor news releases, and ongoing media requests
• Optimizing our media events, for the largest and most dynamic turnout yet
• Always having a crisis PR and Reputation Management plan at the ready (and then celebrating not having to deploy it!)

Sponsorship

In the lead-up to the Market, Kipling went all in on securing a new presenting sponsor in Canada’s premier travel loyalty program. We found a perfect partner in Aeroplan, whose community values aligned with ours. 

Merry Metrics

Digital Advertising, Social Media, Paid Media Buy

We used the success of previous campaigns as a launch pad, identifying new and growing avenues to reach untapped audiences and entice returning visitors with newly added activities. In our research and evaluation of last year’s campaigns, we decided to prioritize our best-performing creative: video content. Kipling further diversified ad spend across more platforms to gain the widest available reach. The results speak for themselves: exceptional ROAs and cost-per-result. 

Working in cohesion inter-departmentally, the social media team created dozens of pieces of campaign-driven original content, weighing playfulness and professionalism to suite the social platform. We heavily leveraged brand new Market offerings, such as Karaoke Night, Trivia Night, and Photos with St. Nikolaus, while promoting refreshed creative for Market mainstays like Date Nights, Lantern Parade, Pride Night, Live Music, and more.

We fiercely capitalized on a tool experiencing exponential growth: influencer collaborations. In producing high-quality content in coordination with huge local influencers, we were able to more than double last year’s reach on Instagram, increase Reel plays by 46%, and considerably grow our following. 

Deck the Halls with Design

Graphic Design, Photography, and Content Creation

Sip, savour & celebrate the season at Vancouver Christmas Market. Employing this angle in 2023, we created brand new eye-catching creative powered by vibrant colours, informative icons, and real moments of magic. 

Through graphic design, photography, videography, and content creation, the Kipling team was able to create significant buzz through outdoor billboards, transit placements, posters, and fence wraps. We coordinated several photo shoots, to add a series of refined shots to our huge quantity of organically captured photo and video. 

Content creation was a behemoth, requiring multiple posts per day every day across channels for the duration of the season. We balanced personalized Reels promoting individual vendors with lighthearted Holly & Jolly skits, high-quality UGC/influencer collaborations, special event/discount promotion, sponsor/partner deliverables and more.

In reviving the Market’s brand identity (while staying true to our roots), the Kipling design team created a brand new whimsical tapestry of illustrations that highlighted the unique Vancouver lifestyle: tales of maple leaves and Canadian iconography, bears and wildlife, Indigenous art, bicycle adventures, and ferry rides. These illustrations permeated our creative output across venue maps, posters, web, the Market colouring book, and multiple campaigns.