Lame

For some reason all sorts of companies seem to believe that it is very original indeed to give their advertising campaigns the functionality of advent calendars in the weeks before Christmas. Not good. I love advent calendars like the next person, but only real ones, i.e. either time-consuming DIY projects where parents put small gifts into little drawers or felt bags or just plain old chocolate-filled ones or even old-fashioned calendars with pretty pictures. It is very anticlimactic to get a calendar which either contains pictures of poor deprived children in need of your donation - if I want to donate money to charity, this definitely won't add to my motivation - or coupons for 10% off something. Yawn. Once you know the coupons work along the lines of different-discouts-on-different-products-each-day you're inevitably going to open up the whole thing right away in order to know which is the most worthwhile offer of them all. Which sort of defeats the purpose, right? I bought ground coffee beans at the Tchibo near the office yesterday and was given a huge coupon-filled paper advent calendar, which I immediately "gutted" in order to throw the rest into the paper recycling bin.

So, dear CMOs or MOAS (Masters of Advent Strategy): either give customers decent advent calendars with your company logo, filled with quality chocolate and just regard it as a branding campaign or DON'T BOTHER.