Bring back the joy of Christmas
Fantanele is a village in Romania that was once full of people, passing on traditions from one generation to another. Sadly, this thing started to fade away more and more, every year. All the young people started to move to the city, leaving all the older generations back home. Now, the village has only a few families left and no one to pass the Christmas traditions to.
By documenting the lives of the existing old generations we managed to promote the village and bring young tourists here. They could book a place with one of the families, during the holidays and they would get in touch with all of the lost traditions that this place and these people have to offer.
The campaign was a success and Fanatanele became a huge holiday hit, and most importantly it brought joy to the old people, getting once again the chance to teach kids how to enjoy Christmas.
The launch
We started off by creating a special TVC announcing people of our initiative and inviting them to visit the campaign website. Lidl was bringing back the joy of Christmas and if you wanted to be part of this, you just had to book your place at one of the families.
The village families
We documented the lives of 5 families from the village, each with their own special story. They told us why they are alone, where are their kids and how they enjoy Christmas now that they are alone.
Each video was promoted on all LIDL assets to make Fantanele village a place where good and kind people awaits you for the holidays. It also served us to make people aware on how much traditions are fading in our country.
The following video belongs to one of the families we documented.
Booking page on LIDL’s campaign page
The Bookings
Once the campaign was launched, people started to book their stay.
On Lidl’s campaign page they could reserve their stay for a maximum of 3 days, during the entire December.
The village families meet the city ones
Once the booking started to be made, the young generations started to visit the families. That is why, in order to promote our initiative more, we created new videos with the city families visiting the village ones. In each tvc we captured one of this kind of pair, encouraging people to book their last traditional exchange. We also brought the stars of the brand chef Florin Dumitrescu and actor Andrei Aradits who participated with all the LIDL goodies to place on the family table.
The joy was brought and traditions were saved.
Young people visited Fantanele the entire Christmas season and more - they learned the traditions that were about to fade away. From my personal experience with this project, I got to value more what I learned from my parents, grandparents and great grandparents. And that is priceless.