Spreading Joy This Festive Season Shows the Value of Creativity and Collaboration

Last year, as the festive season approached, we all felt the need for hope. A year later, we have hope but we also need laughter, levity and joy. 

To deliver this, Pigeon’s Montreal and Toronto offices have done some inspired work around sharing laughter and joy this holiday season. Instead of a typical holiday card, our team asked, what if the card could be something more? What if it was a fun experience that could be felt and shared with our clients (which include Corby Spirit and Wine Limited, Hershey, Ikea, Danone, Metro, Sandoz, Grupo Bimbo and Irving Partners) and the community around us?

The result is the Pigeon Joke Generator, a dynamic virtual platform, that serves jokes on demand to liven up parties and evenings with family or friends. Optimized for mobile, the platform has a simple interface and a look reminiscent of the classic Comedy Club.

Available both in French and English, side-splittingly funny one-liners emanating from the Joke Generator include “Eating seafood is quite healthy…It’s great for your mussels!” and “What do cannibals and lawyers have in common? They both cost you an arm and a leg.” That’s not all, Pigeon has provided our friends with some festive cocktail recipes and a holiday Spotify playlist to reinforce that now’s the time to laugh, celebrate, and take it a little easy. 

There’s a serious point to the fun, though. The Joke Generator embraces Pigeon’s own expertise of the consumer trends that we’re noticing in the run-up to end-of-year festivities – the prevalence of enhanced shopping experience and interactions, including the re-emergence of QR codes, the further growth in the circular economy, and the rise of specialty, curated stores.

The Joke Generator is also a further expression of the spirit we’ve injected into recent work for our clients, including a new festive design for St Hubert’s to make the experience of eating its food more fun for the family. Also encouraging families to participate with a personalized interactive game – the Holiday Challenge, which is accessed through a QR code placed in food boxes. Or just take a look at the new identity Pigeon created for DUX, which depicts a playful and dynamic persona for the healthy food movement.

As Josianne Pelletier, PIGEON’s design director, points out, the Joke Generator project has also been a great way to collaborate too. Both with Minimal, a long-time creative and digital partner, and with emerging comedians to write the original jokes to be shared with those we work with, know and love. That fits firmly with the Pigeon culture to nurture and encourage design talent throughout the year.

This holiday, it felt right to continue in this direction, extending our encouragement to support the next generation of comedic entertainers in Quebec and the rest of Canada. For our small office parties we hired some budding new comedians. In Montreal from the École Nationale De L’Humour and, in Toronto, Courtney Gilmour, who is a trail-blazing, female, disabled comedian who broke records when she was the first female to win the Just For Laughs Homegrown Comics Competition in the 19-year history of the organization. Both evenings (after we had confirmed our double vaccinations and pre-party negative tests) were a roaring success. 

Ania Russocki, Pigeon’s Toronto-based general manager, adds: “The fun, party spirit won’t end with the festive period. Pigeon’s regular virtual ‘flock o’clock’ Thursdays afternoons will continue in 2022. These themed get togethers have involved us playing games, sharing jokes, enjoying drinks or just hanging out with each other casually, and are not related to any ongoing work.”

Taking time to have some fun, spread some joy, and be with other people is great for breeding a strong, collaborative, creative culture. Let’s keep that spirit alive next year too.