DAVID SATTERFIELD.
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The Real Smelling Smell of a Real Tree

ClientScentSicles and Balsam Hill
AgencyMade Movement
RoleCopywriter
Year2012

The brief: take these pine-scented ornaments for artificial Christmas trees and make them memorable.

Tell the story of what happens when you take the product at its word.

“I Can Smell You”

“Smells exactly like a real tree.”

Made in the USA, Scentsicles are a register-adjacent fixture at hardware stores during the holiday season. They came to us at Made asking how we could help get folks to buy this little tube of Christmas tree smelling goodness. And so, we decided to turn one family’s lovely afternoon decorating a fake Christmas tree into a big old mess.

We also let the internet decorate a real tree, and sent the lumberjack after it.

In addition to the film, we created a live community event called The Communitree, the first global Christmas tree decorating party. Users logged onto a microsite that featured a live webcast of a Christmas tree that they could decorate, with the help of a tree-trimming robot. For every ornament dropped on the tree, $5 would go to Toys for Tots. And to keep things fun, two comedians served as hosts, as well as defenders when the tree-hungry lumberjack character from the TV periodically attempted to cut down the Communitree.

Credits

Agency
Made Movement, Boulder
My role
Copywriter
Also made
Communitree, a live webcast fundraiser built with Deeplocal
Origin
The lumberjack was mine. It started as a comp of turn-of-the-century loggers standing on a felled redwood, with the redwood swapped for a Scentsicle.
Art Director
Stephanie Sullivan
Creative Directors
Dave Schiff and John Kieselhorst
Director
The Sniper Twins