Discover ideas for shopper activations, including prize promotions to capitalise on the festive season. Learn ways to leverage in-store and out-of-home channels to your brand’s advantage.
With Christmas on the horizon, planned promotions for the festive season are finally going live. Although many brands have started the roll-out of their Christmas promotions, it’s not too late to bring your ideas to life this season. Whilst creating and building a promotion can take a few months before it’s ready to go live to the public, tight deadlines are not unusual in the industry. It’s still feasible to build a promotion that’s fully compliant with CAP codes when you work with an agency that has the right team, skillset, and tools.
Christmas promotions are a great way to get shoppers’ attention, get them engaged with your brand, and stand out amongst competitors both on-pack and on-shelves or off-pack and online. This last quarter can be stressful, with ideas often running dry as the year approaches a close. Whether it’s a last-minute digital promotion or a new promotion for 2026, we’ve compiled some ideas here for you to get inspired for your brand’s next digital promotion.
Prize draws are a classic promotional mechanic that works great with various activation types. A winner is chosen at random from all valid entries, and it’s a great mechanic to round off a promotion and guarantees that all prizes are fairly distributed.
Instant win promotions, or ‘winning moment’ promotions, provide instant gratification as the prize is revealed immediately. This promotional mechanic is often used by brands, either in combination with another type – usually a prize draw – or as a standalone mechanic.
Brands can get creative with these formats and enhance the points of engagement a participant may experience. For example, by including gamifications or animations in the promotion.
Once a shopper enters a promotion, most tend not to think about it after successfully entering, but the advent calendar format incentivises continual engagement. Each day, a level of anticipation builds as the final day approaches – and as participants spend more time with the brand, the more likely it becomes to be front-of-mind for entrants.
This kind of promotion may be difficult to execute on short notice, but brands can offer a shorter promotional period to make successfully running an advent calendar promotion more manageable. For example, instead of offering 25 days of instant win opportunities, brands can instead offer 12 or 7 days of instant win chances in the lead-up to Christmas.
Advent calendar promotions are a staple of the promotional space during this time of year – one of our favourite iterations of this format here at Promotions Interactive is O2 Priority’s advent calendar.
If your brand wants to set up a quick promotion that can be delivered in days – a text-to-win promotion may be the way to go. We know how unmovable and how tight deadlines can be – especially in a season as busy as Christmas.
The main things to consider when setting up a TTW promotion are setting up auto-responses, putting in place fraud prevention systems, and, if it’s a purchase-necessary promotion, a way to reliably check for proof of purchase of entrants.
We’re highly experienced in building and running text-to-win promotions and have helped successfully deliver countless promotions with short turnarounds to a high standard. If you’re interested in running a TTW, contact us for our industry expertise and experience.
One way to stand out on the shelf is through on-pack transformations. Promotional packaging with a festive flair can attract audience attention by adding some visual variation to what customers usually expect to see. It helps a brand stand out among competing brands on the same shelf. In order to keep audiences engaged beyond the purchasing stage, consider turning the new packaging into an opportunity to integrate connected packaging.
Bring your brand to life with experiential activations. You can immerse consumers into your brand with exciting activations both out-of-home and in-store.
For example, one of our favourite promotions is by Bacardi’s gin brand, Bombay Sapphire. For their promotion, they had an in-store experiential promotion at John Lewis Oxford Street, linking up the digital screens with a national online promotional microsite in real time to give consumers the chance to win real sapphires and much more. The experiential was key in supporting sales in-store and exposed the prize pool to a significant audience.
Let your brand take up space. Taking over a space, especially high-traffic areas, is a great way to reach potential consumers outside of your brand’s usual demographic. Takeovers make people stop-and-stare and are frequently employed in campaigns to manufacture virality and generate online conversation.
Locational takeovers are a great activation to employ at any time of the year. Whether it’s at an event, in public, at a pop-up event, or in-store, locational takeovers are a loud and bold way to garner attention for your brand.
Sampling is also a great way to inspire consumers this festive season. Since food is such a big part of the holidays, brands can showcase how their product can be cooked or shared in a way that makes the Christmas festivities even more special.
For brands in FMCG and CPG, giving consumers the chance to try the product before buying is a highly valuable interaction. First-hand sampling and testing builds rapport and consumer trust. Especially since the FMCG market is saturated and dense, differentiating between similar-feeling competitors and goods can be difficult, so providing a physical and memorable experience, such as sampling, is a great point-of-connection for a consumer to have with a brand.
To find out how your brand can engage and interact with consumers this Christmas and New Year's with a promotion on our end-to-end platform, speak to one of our experts at no cost at +44 (0) 203 80 555 36 or email hello@promotionsinteractive.com to learn more about promotional technologies.
We’re happy to answer any of your questions or to tell you more about what we do and how we could support your next promotional campaign.
