This Crash and Compute campaign feat. Emil de Waal transforms every beat into a collectible cover, merging music with visual art— Clapboard's Global Ad Archive.
The Handwritten Christmas Cards - 10 Advertising | Clapboard Ad Archive
The Handwritten Christmas Cards campaign by 10 Advertising in 2013 delivered one of the era’s more quietly radical performances in agency self-promotion, cutting against the grain of a market that had become defined by hashtagged contests, frictionless Facebook integration, and the relentless churn of shareable digital content. Rejecting Belgium’s prevailing end-of-year trend for virality and social currency, the agency instead centered its holiday outreach on a media artifact almost lost to time: handwritten Christmas cards sent to every client and contact within reach, each one personally inked as a tangible demonstration of specificity and care. As a move within the Media / Entertainment category, this campaign set itself apart by leveraging its format as a brand property—affirming 10 Advertising’s unique value not through spectacle, but through sincerity—which sits exactly within what Clapboard’s taxonomy classifies as FORMAT#11—Unique Personality Property. While many agencies that year opted to automate their affections with algorithm-driven e-cards or video shoutouts, 10 Advertising returned to tactile, analog communication, making the act itself the message: an unequivocal show of warmth that stood in marked contrast to the cool remove of digital engagement strategies. No attempt was made to game the system—to summon social engagement through artificial incentives or manufactured virality—underscoring a strategic confidence that the agency’s own personality, authentically enacted, was the rare differentiator in a season saturated with digital noise. In place of treatable metrics, the campaign relied on an experiential moment, reinforcing its point that genuine relationship-building cannot be automated or crowdsourced. This decision subtly positions the agency as both self-aware and forward-thinking, signaling to potential clients in the market category that the true currency of creative partnerships lies in trust, craft, and personal attention. The Handwritten Christmas Cards campaign earns a score of 56/100 from Clapboard. At a time when communications risked losing all sense of the personal, this campaign matters because it reasserts the value of analog experience as an agency’s most enduring creative asset.
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