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Calm?s Virtual Advent Calendar Takes Teesside To Texas

Mon, 19 Nov 2007

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Middlesbrough-based strategic marketing communications agency Calm Asylum has started a trend on Teesside with an environmentally friendly advent calendar which was originally designed to help the company reduce its carbon footprint.

The novel virtual advent calendar – which through viral marketing has reached people as far as Texas - is now in its third year and creators at Calm have taken a steady stream of orders from firms wanting their own version.

The calendar – which allows companies to have fun and engage with clients and their workforce in the run up to the festive season - has been a huge hit for both its commercial and environmental benefits saving on postage and paper.

Mark Easby, Operations Director of Calm, said: “We’re a creative company so it comes as no surprise to me that the team, when faced with the challenge of reducing our environmental impact, came up with a better solution that actually generates income for the company.
 
“We love Christmas and we wanted to give our clients something fun to do every day in the run up to the break. We also wanted an alternative to paper corporate Christmas cards which we feel are boring, do very little to build your brand and take up huge paper resources and valuable time.”

The calendar is accessible via a weblink where you can open the different days to play games, watch a video or answer quiz questions and like a traditional advent calendar you cannot open all the windows at once, but a new one is available every morning.

Calm Asylum’s own advent calendar went global. 1,500 people were sent the launch e-mail on December 1 in 2005. Better tracking enabled Calm to monitor viral activity through a ‘send to a friend’ function, and the response was off the scale.  400,000 unique visitors and 50 million hits later the firm was getting responses from clients all over the country to say they had been sent the link by some unusual routes.

One client from Stockton got in touch after receiving the link via a friend in local government in Birmingham, who in turn had been sent it by a friend in local government in Glasgow, who’d been sent it by a friend in a commercial company based in Houston, Texas.

It gives businesses 24 days of brand placement over the Christmas period instead of the single hit paper and e-cards offer and has helped clients increase their customer database by placing their brands in front of a whole new audience.
Calm - which prides itself on delivering something different since it was founded eight years ago – believes more innovative opportunities like this will increase its ability to reduce the carbon footprint and create similar opportunities for its customers.
 
Calm, which is proudly based in Middlesbrough, offer a full range of services and skills, including strategic marketing, branding, creative, digital, web design and PR, and employs 11 staff.
 
The company has clients from a variety of industries from professional services and business to tourism and community, both in the public and private sector, from start-up businesses to PLC’s, right across the UK.

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