Arthur Christmas Yahoo! Home Page Take Over

An online advertising first for Yahoo!, Sony Pictures Releasing and Aardman Films, this piece not only took over and synchronised all the multimedia ad spaces on the Home Page, but it also allowed for user-interaction within the context of the page. The result was a more playful and visually stunning experience of Aardman’s movie characters as they ‘weaved in and out’ of the promotional spaces and page gutter.

The key objective was to encourage as many cinemagoers as possible, and especially parents with 8-12 year olds, to see Arthur Christmas during the very first weekend of release. The best way to do this was to conjure up that special brand of charm and magic so skilfully created by Aardman’s animation studio.

Our strategy was to appeal to the child inside, by simply marrying the potential of online technology with the audio-visual craftsmanship Aardman is so famous for. As part of a larger online and social media campaign that already relied heavily on rich multimedia, Yahoo offered us the opportunity to take over their entire homepage for one day and use it as a canvas for Aardman’s CGI wizardry.

Naturally, Aardman fans have high expectations and expect nothing less than slick, high end animation from the Bristol-based studio. So the digital activity needed to be boldly innovative and visually stunning too.

Launched two days ahead of the film opening, we recreated many of animated sequences to fit within Yahoo’s Homepage Takeover space. The movie characters were able to ‘weave in and out’ of the promotional spaces on the homepage and into the gutter, thus appearing as one synchronised piece of animation.

But we didn’t stop there! When the animation came to a natural pause, the user was given the opportunity to actually interact with the characters via simple mouse-overs. This in itself was innovative and quite boundary-breaking as far as programming is concerned. But what really made this creative piece stand out for us, was the way in which it combined beautifully animated imagery with the layout of Yahoo’s homepage to create a contextual and highly cinematic piece of advertising for the Christmas movie of the year.