Campaign Trail is our analysis of some of the best new creative efforts from the marketing world. View past columns in the archives here.
Unwrapping presents during the holidays is a timeless source of joy and connection. For the last 180 years, some consumers have been happiest when tearing away wrapping paper to reveal a box in a specific shade of robin’s egg blue. With that in mind, Tiffany & Co. and creative agency partner Anomaly this year put the jeweler’s iconic blue boxes at the center of its holiday campaign, titled “Love is a Gift.”
“Those boxes are actually keepers of these love stories. They’re a symbol of the holiday magic made real,” said Caitlin Slack, group creative director at Anomaly, of the campaign. “What if you take this blue box to new heights and have it be this enduring symbol of love that can actually be explored even further and used to heighten emotion, as well?”
In a 90-second hero spot, actor Anya Taylor-Joy explores a cityscape made up of blue boxes which double as portals that allow her to view love stories across the world: of familial love in Tokyo, self-love in New York and romantic love in London.
“We wanted to have a bit of that nostalgic glamor, but then modernized in the current day,” Slack said.
Launched on Oct. 28, the campaign spans online video, paid digital, retail and social channels. Along with the hero spot, three 30-second cutdowns focus on individual city sequences, while a fourth weaves all three together. The effort is soundtracked by The Pied Pipers’ “Dream,” a song from 1945 that features the apropos lyrics “dream when you’re feeling blue.”
“There’s romance, there’s a bit of nostalgia that the track has,” Slack said. “We definitely wanted to infuse that feeling of warmth into this dream state that she’s in through the music.”
The next chapter
“Love is a Gift” builds on Tiffany’s holiday campaign from last year, “With Love, Since 1837,” which also starred Taylor-Joy, who Slack describes as a figure of effortless, carefree glamour. The 2024 effort generated 57 million organic views and grew the brand’s social following by 135,000. Both efforts were developed by Anomaly.
Each vignette in the campaign connects a type of love to a specific Tiffany design: HardWear, based on a design from 1962, as a symbol of self-love; Lock, a symbol of familial love from 1883; and T, based on a motif from 1975 that represents love and possibility.
In the same way that the designs are inspired by pieces in the Tiffany archive, “Love is a Gift” looks to update the brand’s timeless iconography for a modern lens. To do so, the agency enlisted Lol Crawley, the cinematographer for epic drama “The Brutalist,” and production designer Nathan Parker, who crafted practical sets.
“This year was all about creating the next chapter of the Tiffany holiday stories… and building on that magic of last year with a new kind of beautifully evolved approach, where we get to dig deeper into different narratives and then push the craft of the campaign even further,” Slack said.
