Make Christmas What You Want it to Be - Packing Up Early​

Dutch online store Bol proudly calls itself "The store that belongs to all of us". The brand wants to embrace and show the diversity of its customers in the Netherlands and Belgium and tell their stories. 

For their holiday campaign, they chose to represent those who experience and celebrate the holidays differently with a campaign that created a nation wide conversation with its message: Make Christmas what you want it to be. 

Christmas is celebrated all over the world as a feast of abundance, and the celebration is getting bigger each year in both Belgium and the Netherlands. But latest numbers show that one in five people in the Netherlands and Belgium are overwhelmed and overstimulated by the abundance of lights, hundreds of christmas-songs, overflowing shopping streets and immense social pressure that comes with the holidays.

We as a society are learning more every day about neurodiversity and its effects, and statistics like this deserve more awareness to make the holiday season more inclusive. So we developed a narrative that was all about compassion for those who choose to celebrate the holidays different from the norm.

For the campaign, we collaborated with as many people as we could who share a first hand experience with neurodiversity. The research team, the director, the casting and even the song was recorded with an artist who proudly represents the neurodivergent community and talks about how her ADHD influences her art and her life.

The execution of the idea made the campaign stand out in the tropes of Christmas ads that were all about celebrating Christmas as big as possible. Where in our film we made it almost seem like the holidays are over. Capturing the attention of viewers with an unexpected twist.