Projects
Delivered a record-breaking holiday season campaign for America's biggest underdog, the USPS.
US Postal Service
The Strategy: Show how true champions thrive under pressure. Demonstrate how the USPS is embracing the pressures that come with the holiday shipping surge. Utilize an advertising campaign to actually galvanize the organization to own the season where they truly deliver more than any other carrier.
The Creative: ‘This is Our Season’: Football has a season. Baseball has a season. This is our season.
We leveraged the sports season to make an analogy to how the holidays are USPS’ season.
We also concentrated the majority of USPS’ yearly media investment into the late November-December timeframe, and it was all worth it.
The Insight: America ships more during the holidays than any other time of the year. But during holiday “crunch time”—when it matters most, people were more likely to turn to competitors (UPS & FedEx) instead of the USPS.
However, during the last holiday season (2013), UPS and FedEx had failed immensely—delaying holiday deliveries. On the other hand, USPS’ massive infrastructure and scale + its dedicated 600,000+ postal workers (from plant leaders to postal carriers many of whom worked 7 days a week in the weeks leading up to Christmas)—had allowed USPS to weather through the storms and surges in deliveries. And USPS continued to provide 'last mile' deliveries for FedEx and UPS.
TLDR: USPS = the true champions during the holidays.
Metrics:
USPS shipped double its competitors in December 2014
18% increase over number of packages shipped in December 2013
Delivered record number of holiday deliveries: 19 billion pieces, a 27% increase year-over-year (4 billion more than prior year)
Public perception of Reliability dramatically improved (increased 6% during the campaign)
Led to revenue growth (10.4% package revenue growth) & higher market share
The campaign won the Silver Effie for marketing effectiveness. But most of all, we pumped up the team. Individual post offices took ownership of the campaign, and postal workers even made homemade "This is Our Season" posters!