During the recent INMA Webinar We are all Santa: driving results from a branded content strategy, Miguel Ugaz, director of the ContentLab at Grupo El Comercio in Peru, detailed the process of creating successful journalistic content that delivers significant business value, with profitability reaching up to 60%.

El Comercio, a Peruvian newspaper with 185 years of history, is one of the oldest in the world. This longevity has allowed it to pioneer various initiatives in the region, including the creation of sponsored journalistic content.

The media conglomerate manages six key news outlets: El Comercio, its flagship newspaper; Diario Gestión, focused on economy and business; Trome, the most-read popular Spanish-language newspaper; the sports daily Depor; Correo; and Ojo.

“We are all Santa” was a campaign created for Coca-Cola, and Ugaz explained it was a branded content initiative that proved highly successful, even though client proposals are often not very rich in content.

“Everyone thinks we content creators have a magic wand that instantly generates winning ideas,” Ugaz told Webinar attendees.

He noted the campaign was successful not only in terms of content but also in metrics and business impact.

The meeting with the client took place at the end of 2023 as part of an initiative to be rolled out in December of that year. The initiative was based on a company survey revealing 39% of its audience in Latin America had lost interest in celebrating Christmas.

This figure, Ugaz said, reflected the sense of crisis and hopelessness felt by the region’s population in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the economic, political, and social crises common in the respective countries of the region. That time of year, Ugaz noted, has always been closely associated with the beverage brand.

Given these circumstances, the brand challenged El Comercio to rekindle the Christmas spirit among its audience, aligning with the global campaign theme: “The world needs more Santas.”

The idea was to use an advertising video to reach audiences on social media and other platforms. However, the challenge was that the video didn’t provide depth to the concept that anyone can be Santa Claus — not only from an advertising standpoint but also in terms of valuable content.

Another challenge was the ad wasn’t designed for the Latin American market, much less the Peruvian one — it was a campaign that hadn’t been localised.

People on the street provided the answer

The 21-member ContentLab team — composed of journalists, designers, and creators — watched the material and then drafted a kind of manifesto.

“In a time when hopelessness seems to be gaining ground, Christmas is a perfect moment to remember that our actions, no matter how big or small, can make a significant difference, and the magic to make them happen lives within each of us. It’s just a matter of will and having a generous, selfless, and caring attitude.”

This text, the creative team thought, encapsulates what Santa Claus would do. They also wondered if people truly understood who Santa Claus is. So, they decided to hit the streets and ask people about their concept of the iconic figure.

The respondents not only shared their views on Santa Claus’ generosity, love, kindness, and goodwill but also went further, suggesting these qualities should be emulated by everyone, especially during Christmas.

“When we embrace the magic of Christmas, Santas multiply,” says the presenter in the video where people express their opinions.

The video summary of what people said served as a tool for the creative team to warm up the campaign and as input for the next steps. From there, they concluded the words most frequently mentioned by people were “supportive, loving, humble, happy, patient, family-oriented, kind, and generous.”

These responses validated the concept of Santa, which was later communicated to the brand to show a preliminary task had been done to support the campaign. Hence, they concluded, “If we can all describe Santa, we can all be Santa,” Ugaz said.

Six profiles

From these reflections, the idea emerged to find Santas among the people, so the team decided to look for individuals who, in their daily lives, were making a difference in their communities and embodied these values.

The next question was how these Santas should be characterised, based on three main criteria:

1. Their work was essential and did not stop, not even during Christmas.
2. They were concerned, kind, supportive, generous, and happy with the impact of their work.
3. They were committed to their work, with a strong sense of service.

Thus, the core of the campaign was to associate these individuals’ values with the brand’s Christmas spirit.

This idea was framed by a branded content strategy, creativity, and impactful design to engage audiences and tell a compelling story.

Additionally, a distribution strategy was designed to better share the story and encourage its spread.

From a content perspective, El Comercio decided to tell the stories of these characters, featuring between 15 and 20 distinct profiles that met the criteria.

After several days of research and interviews, they compiled the profiles of 20 individuals and shared them with the client. This number was eventually reduced to only six.

One of the profiles highlighted by Ugaz during his presentation at the INMA Webinar was Vanessa Vásquez, founder of Juguete Pendiente, an NGO that provides gifts to abandoned minors.

Other profiles included lawyer Jane Cosar, who is visually impaired and spearheaded the legislation for guide dogs in the Peruvian Congress; Pipo Reiser and Andrea Rivera, a couple who founded SINBA, a business promoting a circular economy based on waste; Diego Villarán, who created a surf school for underprivileged children on the Peruvian coast; and Carlo de Águila, a firefighter captain who has volunteered in the community for 20 years.

Ugaz emphasised that the result was a journalistic product, as the reports and stories were real, always aligned with the advertising campaign, which ultimately is the added value of a ContentLab such as El Comercio’s.

This type of content engages audiences and creates a connection with them, in addition to the creative team’s ability to understand the client and the market. “It’s about having a marketing vision, which journalists, myself included, usually lack,” said the ContentLab director.

The other two pillars are design and usability, along with the ability to craft a distribution strategy. These four pillars help structure a campaign and a ContentLab, Ugaz noted.

And there was a fifth element, Ugaz said: It was an editorial product born from a commercial one, signaling a pause in the “divorce” between the company’s commercial and editorial areas.

To reinforce the campaign, a video was created featuring actor Gonzalo Torres, who recounts how Coca-Cola advertising has been present in Peru’s Christmases and documented in El Comercio’s pages for nearly a century.

Creativity with results

This content was distributed through an El Comercio microsite, where design and user experience were prioritised to highlight the stories and the brand’s activities during the holiday season, such as the decorated truck caravans touring the city and the lighting of a large Christmas tree.

They also focused on social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook.

The campaign yielded positive results in terms of metrics. For example, the videos garnered 2.2 million views, 113% above the target; the Web site achieved 100,000 unique users, 25% above the target; 126,000 pageviews, 40% above targets; and reached 3 million people on social media — all within six weeks.

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