How Trigger Turned 2020 Into a Holiday Dumpster Fire Campaign
Trigger's 2020 Holiday Dumpster Fire is a 10-hour looping digital video produced in December 2020 in Canada as an agency self-promotional campaign, replacing the traditional holiday Yule Log format with a crackling blaze consuming the defining symbols of a pandemic year — sourdough loaves, investment papers, and travel plans — as a collective comedic send-off to 2020.
The campaign originated entirely within Trigger, the Calgary-based creative agency, which conceived, produced, and distributed the work for its own brand, according to Advent Aedileworks. The premise is disarmingly simple: a long-form, loopable video asset designed to sit on a screen like a fireplace channel, but framing the year's accumulated frustrations as literal fuel. The title — "10 HOURS of Relaxing 2020 Holiday Dumpster Fire" — performs the joke in a single breath, deploying the language of ambient wellness content to describe something categorically the opposite.
In Canada, where the advertising and media landscape was absorbing the economic shocks of the pandemic year, the campaign landed as a piece of humour rooted in shared cultural experience. Rather than promoting a client or a service, Trigger turned the agency itself into the subject — a self-aware gesture that acknowledged the strange position creative businesses occupied at the end of 2020. The campaign was published as a single digital media asset and distributed through online channels, accumulating 44,511 views, 530 likes, and 40 comments as archived on Clapboard. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 74 out of 100, reflecting its creative distinctiveness within the agency self-promotion category.
Trigger built the 2020 Holiday Dumpster Fire on a precise cultural insight. The year 2020 had generated a recognisable shared vocabulary across Canada and beyond — sourdough baking as lockdown coping mechanism, collapsed travel plans, and investment uncertainty had become shorthand for collective disruption — and the campaign weaponised that vocabulary as creative material.
The strategic choice to produce an agency self-promotional piece rather than client work is significant. In the Canadian advertising industry, agency self-promotion functions as both a talent-attraction signal and a public demonstration of creative thinking under no commercial brief. According to IBISWorld, the Canadian advertising agencies industry was estimated at approximately C$3.8 billion in 2020, with revenues forecast to decline around 2.5% that year, reflecting pandemic-era budget contractions across the market. In that environment, agencies capable of producing resonant, low-cost cultural commentary demonstrated a form of creative resilience that client-facing work often could not.
The digital channel was the only viable distribution context for this campaign. According to Media in Canada, digital media spending in Canada rose to C$5.9 billion in 2020, up from C$5.8 billion in 2019, and represented approximately 58.1% of total Canadian advertising expenditure — a share that had stood at 49.2% just one year earlier. The pandemic accelerated a structural shift toward screens that Trigger's campaign was designed to inhabit. Competitors in the Canadian independent agency space, including Zulu Alpha Kilo and Cossette, have each built strong reputations through self-promotional and culture-adjacent work; Trigger's dumpster fire positioned the Calgary shop within that conversation by prioritising wit over production scale, according to Commonreader Wustl Edu. The campaign's long-form format — ten uninterrupted hours — also inverted the assumptions of short-attention-span digital content, treating endurance as the punchline.
Director Locke Vincent helmed the production of the 2020 Holiday Dumpster Fire, working under the creative direction of Todd Blevins, according to TechCrunch. The visual concept required the discipline of restraint: a static or near-static frame presenting a burning dumpster, sustained across ten hours, demanded that every element within that frame carry comedic and cultural weight. The objects chosen for incineration — sourdough loaves, investment papers, travel plans — were not random props but curated artefacts of the pandemic year, each legible to a Canadian audience that had lived through the same disruptions.
Art director Brad Connell shaped the visual language of the piece, while copywriter Tim Anderson handled the textual framing that completed the joke — most critically, the title itself, which adopted the cadence of ambient relaxation content to maximum ironic effect. The campaign was coordinated by project coordinator Matt Cowie, with account director Kelsey MacDonald overseeing its delivery.
The structural parody at the heart of the execution deserves attention. The Yule Log — a looping fireplace video broadcast on television and later streaming platforms during the holiday season — is among the most passive, low-stakes formats in media history. Trigger's decision to appropriate that format and replace its comforting imagery with a dumpster fire transforms a symbol of domesticity into a symbol of civic exhaustion, without abandoning the formal grammar of the original. The ten-hour duration was itself a creative statement: it matched the scale of long-form ambient content on platforms such as YouTube, where multi-hour relaxation and ambience videos constitute a recognisable genre. By operating within that genre's conventions while detonating its emotional register, the campaign achieved its humorous effect through form as much as content.
Trigger's 2020 Holiday Dumpster Fire generated 44,511 views, 530 likes, and 40 comments, as archived by Clapboard. For an agency self-promotional piece distributed without paid media support in Canada — a market where independent agencies rarely direct significant media budgets toward their own brand — these figures represent a measurable organic footprint, according to Wendybrandes. The comment count, while modest in absolute terms, is notable for a ten-hour video in a niche format; comments on long-form ambient content tend to skew heavily toward the cultural joke rather than algorithmic discovery, suggesting the audience arrived with awareness of Trigger or the broader 2020-fatigue cultural moment.
No verified trade-press reviews, award recognitions, or third-party performance analyses for this campaign are publicly available. The campaign was not entered in, or did not receive recognition from, Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or WARC Awards as of available records.
Structurally, the campaign demonstrates effectiveness in several dimensions that metrics alone do not capture. It required minimal production infrastructure relative to its cultural ambition, it produced a shareable asset with an inherently viral premise, and it communicated Trigger's creative sensibility — specifically its capacity for self-aware humour and formal intelligence — to precisely the audience most likely to hire or recommend a Canadian independent creative agency. The Clapboard Score of 74 out of 100 reflects this balance of creative confidence and measured execution within the agency self-promotion category.
Trigger's 2020 Holiday Dumpster Fire is a 10-hour looping digital video published in Canada in December 2020 as an agency self-promotion, according to Vice. It parodies the holiday Yule Log format by showing a dumpster burning objects associated with the pandemic year, including sourdough loaves, investment papers, and travel plans, as a comedic farewell to 2020.
Trigger created the campaign entirely in-house. Creative director Todd Blevins and director Locke Vincent led the production. Art director Brad Connell and copywriter Tim Anderson shaped the visual and verbal execution, with account director Kelsey MacDonald and project coordinator Matt Cowie completing the core team, all based at the Calgary agency.
The campaign accumulated 44,511 views, 530 likes, and 40 comments, as archived by Clapboard. These figures represent organic reach for a self-promotional digital asset distributed without confirmed paid media support in Canada, making the engagement a meaningful signal of cultural resonance within the agency's target audience.
Trigger used the campaign to demonstrate creative wit during a year of widespread pandemic fatigue. By framing 2020's cultural symbols — sourdough, cancelled travel, investment losses — as literal fuel, the Calgary agency produced a shareable asset that communicated its comedic intelligence and strategic sensibility to prospective clients and industry peers across Canada without a formal client brief.
No verified award recognition for the 2020 Holiday Dumpster Fire has been publicly documented. Available records show no entries or wins at Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or WARC Awards. The campaign earned a Clapboard Score of 74 out of 100 for creative distinctiveness within the agency self-promotion category.
The campaign reflects the rapid growth of digital as Canada's dominant advertising channel. According to Media in Canada, digital media spending reached C$5.9 billion in 2020, representing approximately 58.1% of total Canadian advertising expenditure. Trigger's choice of a YouTube-style long-form format positioned the campaign precisely within the platform behaviours accelerated by pandemic-era screen consumption across the Canadian market.
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