SHI

The Techy Santa

Santa’s servers can’t keep up with a five-year-old.

Watch the full campaign

The Strategy

SHI helps companies buy, set up and manage their technology, from a fleet of laptops to a data center. The people it sells to sign off on that technology at big organizations: IT leaders who need it to work, buyers who need a fair price, and the executives who sign the order. SHI doesn't want to win on a spec sheet. It wants to be the partner that takes things off your list. Tell SHI the problem, and SHI handles it.

SHI came to us for a holiday campaign it could bring back every December, and it came with an idea already in hand. Its marketing team had written a script that cast Santa as the ultimate reseller, the one who makes the impossible look easy. The script was finished, and on its own it would have run about 70 seconds. We walked SHI through how we build a campaign: one 30-second spot and two 15-second follow-ups. They let us take a swing at a rewrite. In ours, even Santa needs somewhere to take his own wish list.

The 30-second spot opens at the mall. Santa is on his throne, checking his watch while a five-year-old recites a list that will not end. He's wired for it, with a mic up his sleeve. Every wish goes straight to two elves in a dim server room decked out for Christmas, and the list is longer than their servers can handle. Then Santa spots someone across the mall.

The follow-ups pick up after the fix. Back in the server room, the elves have new machines and a stack of old laptops headed somewhere they shouldn't go. At the throne, Santa is off the clock with a frozen drink and his phone, while a woman with a tablet waits for his attention.

The Process

We worked through the scripts with SHI to make sure the message would land. An early draft of the elves' spot had server racks and equipment breaking down, and SHI worried it would look like its own equipment was failing. So in the rewrite, the elves recycle the old gear, which never came from SHI, and replace it with quality equipment from SHI. That gave us a way to show off SHI's tech recycling service, too. And SHI's team loved one line from its own first draft so much that Santa gets to say it in the second follow-up.

We shot it all on one Sunday in a studio, on three sets we built: the Meet Santa village you'd find at any mall, a food court, and the elves' server room. The ceiling tiles really fell on set. The sparks and fire were added afterward, in editing.

SHI didn't need the 6-second reminders we usually make. So instead, every spot got a longer version for social feeds with an animated holiday card at the end. HP, Intel and Windows 11 helped pay for the campaign, so their devices roll past along the bottom of it. "Wishing you a Happy Holidays" twinkles away until only the "shi" in "wishing" is left. It becomes the SHI logo, and the partner logos line up underneath. That wordplay came out of working sessions with SHI's team on the final tagline. SHI ran the ads itself, then brought them back for the 2025 holidays.

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