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How Migros Made Mimi the Owl the Heart of Swiss Christmas 2019
"Mimi the owl is learning to fly" is Migros's 2019 Swiss Christmas campaign, created by Wirz and released in November 2019, using a family-centred film narrative to support the retailer's annual donation drive against loneliness and poverty in Switzerland.
Migros released the campaign under its French-language title "Noël 2019: la chouette Mimi apprend à voler" in November 2019, positioning it squarely within the Swiss retail calendar's most competitive charitable gifting window. The film follows a father and daughter purchasing a Christmas tree at Migros, returning home, and decorating it together as a family — until an unexpected rustle in the branches introduces Mimi, the owl at the campaign's centre. The moment is quiet, warm, and deliberately unhurried, reflecting Migros's core proposition of togetherness and compassion rather than product promotion. In the Swiss market, where community identity and cooperative values are deeply embedded in consumer culture, this tonal choice carries particular resonance. The campaign's call to action directed audiences to Migros's annual charitable donation platform at migros.ch/faireundon, linking festive sentiment directly to collective social action. Clapboard scores the campaign 63 out of 100, recognising its emotional clarity and strategic coherence while noting the limited scale of its media footprint. The campaign comprised two media assets classified under the Retail Services category, as documented by Clapboard. Hashtags #NoelMigros and #NoeldeMimi accompanied the film's digital distribution, reinforcing brand ownership of the seasonal moment across French-speaking Switzerland.
Migros anchors its festive advertising in social purpose rather than promotional mechanics. In Switzerland, where cooperative retail culture shapes consumer expectations of corporate behaviour, a Christmas campaign centred on charitable giving is not merely sentimental — it is strategically coherent. Migros reported Swiss retail sales of CHF 22.030 billion in 2019, up 0.6% year over year, according to Report Migros Ch, reflecting a business operating at scale but under meaningful competitive pressure. Its Cooperative Retailing segment recorded sales of CHF 16.756 billion, down 0.6%, with supermarket and hypermarket revenues of CHF 11.596 billion, down 1.4%, also per report.migros.ch. Domestic market share for the Cooperative Retailing business stood at 15.2% in 2019, down from 15.4% in 2018, according to report.migros.ch, signalling a market in which every percentage point of consumer loyalty requires active cultivation.
That pressure comes most directly from Coop, Migros's principal Swiss rival. Coop reported retail sales of approximately CHF 18.0 billion in 2019, up 1.4%, with supermarket revenues exceeding CHF 10.4 billion and customer footfall growth of 2.5%, according to report.migros.ch. Discounter Denner, itself a Migros subsidiary, recorded sales of CHF 3.252 billion, up 2.2%, per report.migros.ch, illustrating the degree to which Migros competes across multiple price tiers within the Swiss grocery landscape. Against this backdrop, the decision by Wirz to build the 2019 Christmas campaign around narrative and social responsibility rather than price or range is a deliberate brand-equity play. Christmas represents the single highest-stakes emotional moment in Swiss retail, and Migros's history of memorable advertising characters — a tradition traceable to graphic artist Karl Schlegel's work from the 1930s through 1954, as documented by Corporate Migros Ch — gives the brand both permission and precedent to lead with character-driven storytelling. Mimi the owl serves that tradition for a streaming-native audience.
Martin Werner directed "Mimi the owl is learning to fly" for Migros. Werner brought a restrained, observational quality to the film, allowing the family's domestic ritual — the tree selection, the journey home, the shared act of decoration — to establish emotional stakes before Mimi's appearance reframes the scene. The visual language is warm and naturalistic, avoiding the over-saturated sentiment common to festive retail advertising across Europe. Sebastian Blenkov served as director of photography, with his cinematographic approach lending the interior scenes a textured, candlelit intimacy that suits both the Swiss domestic setting and the campaign's charitable tone.
Production was handled by Pumpkin Film, with Artbox providing production services, as documented by Clapboard. Visual effects were executed by BaconX, a credit that points to the technical demands of integrating a convincingly rendered owl into a live-action domestic environment without disrupting the film's grounded realism. The decision to use an animal character is consistent with Migros's broader advertising lineage — corporate.migros.ch documents Chocolate the chicken as a named animal character in Migros's 2009 Christmas campaign — though no available sources establish Mimi as a recurring figure before or after 2019. The creative team at Wirz structured the film in French, reflecting the campaign's primary deployment in French-speaking Switzerland, and paired it with a direct charitable call to action that transforms passive viewing into an invitation to donate. The two-asset campaign format, noted by Clapboard, kept execution focused and production resources concentrated on a single high-quality film rather than a dispersed multi-format rollout. Production credits for the full agency team beyond named individuals are not publicly documented in available sources.
"Mimi the owl is learning to fly" accumulated 277,878 views, 269 likes, and 22 comments on YouTube, as recorded by Clapboard. Those figures represent verified platform engagement for a single-market Swiss Christmas film released in November 2019 — a context in which audience scale is naturally constrained relative to pan-European campaigns. The more structurally significant performance indicator is the film's competitive ranking. The campaign placed fourth among Switzerland's top ten YouTube commercials of the full year 2019 and first among Switzerland's top five YouTube commercials of Q4 2019, according to markt-kom.com. YouTube's ranking methodology for these positions considered audience engagement, local video views, and audience retention, per markt-kom.com, meaning Mimi's placement reflects genuine viewer behaviour rather than paid amplification alone.
Ranking first in Switzerland's Q4 YouTube commercial standings is a meaningful result for a retail film competing against the concentrated advertising spend of the festive season across all categories. It indicates that the Wirz-crafted narrative structure — slow build, domestic warmth, animal reveal — held viewer attention through to completion at a rate that outperformed category rivals in the Swiss market. No additional verified performance data, including conversion figures for the charitable donation drive, is publicly available for this campaign. Structurally, the film's effectiveness derives from its tonal discipline: it resists the promotional register that characterises most retail advertising and instead operates closer to the short-film format, which rewards the kind of audience retention YouTube's algorithm rewards in turn. The Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 reflects this balance — a campaign of clear emotional craft and strategic alignment, operating within a contained geographic and media scope.
"Mimi the owl is learning to fly" is Migros's 2019 Swiss Christmas campaign, created by agency Wirz and released in November 2019. The film follows a family decorating a Christmas tree purchased at Migros, building to a warm encounter with an owl named Mimi, and supports Migros's annual charitable donation drive against loneliness and poverty in Switzerland.
Martin Werner directed the Migros Christmas film "Mimi the owl is learning to fly" in 2019. Sebastian Blenkov served as director of photography. Production was handled by Pumpkin Film with services from Artbox, and visual effects were executed by BaconX, as documented by Clapboard.
The campaign ranked first among Switzerland's top five YouTube commercials of Q4 2019 and fourth among Switzerland's top ten YouTube commercials of the full year, according to markt-kom.com. The film recorded 277,878 views, 269 likes, and 22 comments on YouTube, based on data documented by Clapboard.
The Migros 2019 Christmas campaign supported the retailer's annual donation drive addressing loneliness and poverty in Switzerland. Viewers were directed to migros.ch/faireundon to contribute. The campaign's French-language tagline "Présent l'un pour l'autre" — present for one another — framed collective giving as the film's central emotional proposition.
Wirz, a Swiss advertising agency, created the Migros Noël 2019 campaign "Mimi the owl is learning to fly." Wirz structured the film around a naturalistic family narrative in French, targeting French-speaking Switzerland. The agency's creative approach prioritised emotional storytelling over product promotion, consistent with Migros's broader festive advertising tradition.
Migros has used memorable characters in advertising since the 1930s, when graphic artist Karl Schlegel developed the brand's visual identity, according to corporate.migros.ch. Animal characters appeared in earlier Christmas campaigns, including Chocolate the chicken in 2009. Mimi the owl continues this tradition for a streaming-native audience, though no sources establish her as a recurring character beyond 2019.
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