Santa helps deliver trend-bucking Christmas footfall boost for Preston

About the Project

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With town and city centre visitor numbers trending downwards across the UK thanks to changing habits coupled with cost-of-living challenges, high street businesses are locked in a constant battle for survival.

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The run up to Christmas is a key trading period for retailers, hospitality businesses, and entertainment venues, but success depends on footfall.

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Preston BID (the Client) in collaboration with Preston City Council, wanted to promote the city of Preston as a festive destination with a wraparound campaign, and approached Fifty2M with a loose concept called ‘Capital of Christmas’.

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The aim was to elevate the city and set it apart from its local and regional rivals, giving it a specific Christmas ‘identity’ and promoting its many reasons to visit.

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Recognising that high-profile seasonal attractions can act as a catalyst for boosting visitor numbers, triggering a chain reaction across the local economy, the Client arranged for a pop-up ice rink to be installed, with its opening timed to coincide with the city’s annual Christmas lights switch on celebrations.

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What We Did‍

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We took the idea from the initial concept and developed it into a fully fledged campaign, with phased implementation from early November all the way up to Christmas week.

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Themes and messaging

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Focusing on the city’s core strengths over the festive season - which included the recently opened food and entertainment complex, Animate, and newly refurbished Harris Museum - our campaign centred on presenting Preston as a place to enjoy:

• Shopping
• Dining
• Cinema
• Bowling
• Culture
• Ice skating
• Hotel stays

Each of these had its own themed messaging. When it came to shopping, for instance, our narrative was all about encouraging people to shop in person for a more festive experience instead of solely online, and to do it locally rather than travel to popular regional shopping centres like Manchester’s Trafford Centre or Liverpool One.

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We also reminded audiences that it's easy to get to, and promoted the offer of free car parking at various locations, made available by Preston City Council, Lancashire County Council, and the University of Lancashire.

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However, acknowledging that people typically engage in multiple activities during a single visit - something known as a linked trip - we made sure to tie our themes together at every opportunity: “Shopping for Christmas gifts? Enjoy a meal and a drink while you’re here.”

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Creating the necessary back story

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Everything was framed around the city’s designation as ‘Lancashire’s Christmas Capital’, but it felt like it needed a back story to justify the claim.

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It was obvious right away that the only person who could credibly bestow this status on Preston was The Big Man himself.

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So, we hired a professional Santa (a part time actor who you can see in Game of Thrones) who has his own very realistic Father Christmas beard and really gets into character, then constructed our entire campaign and it's key themes around a simple story arc:

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Santa came, checked out everything Preston had to offer over the festive period, and liked it so much that he declared it to be the county’s Christmas Capital - a stamp of approval that neighbouring towns and cities didn’t have.

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We took Santa on a tour of the city, capturing a mix of photo and video content in relevant locations - raising quite a few eyebrows among locals who were not expecting to encounter Father Christmas in the first week of October!

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Communicating the story and festive offer

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With the story and our themed messaging in place, the next job was to communicate them as widely as possible.

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However, the campaign had only a modest paid media budget. After careful consideration, we decided that our best chance of success lay in using low cost Facebook and Instagram ads to reach our audiences, especially given the demographic, behavioural, and interest-based targeting options available.

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As well as ads for awareness and saturation, we also created a dedicated website as a hub for all things Christmas related, and used Facebook and Instagram ads to drive traffic to this destination, with the website again built around our core themes.

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Our primary audience consisted of Preston residents, who were shown our ads in which Santa promoted the city’s retail, leisure, and hospitality highlights. In addition to our themed messaging, ads shown to this audience also included ‘shop local’, and ‘all on your doorstep’ messaging too, along with references to ‘your city’ designed to invoke pride and belonging.

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A secondary audience of people living within easy reach by bus, train or car enabled us to target residents in neighbouring towns and cities in a bid to encourage them to also visit, using ads in which we directly referenced the time it would take and, for bus and train journeys, the approximate cost too - “look how easy, quick, and cheap it is to visit Lancashire’s Christmas Capital”.

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Campaign phasing

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Mindful that there was a risk of being seen to move too early, our first push contained a graphic featuring a heavily blurred image with a ‘content warning’ emblazoned across it, with a clickable link taking people to a ‘splash page’ on the campaign website where the same image and content warning were presented along with a choice: “Happy to see Christmas content this early in the year? Click here”, directing visitors to the main content. This worked well, and created plenty of engagement thanks to its tongue-in-cheek style.

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We began in earnest by promoting the city’s annual Christmas lights switch on first. Research highlights that high-profile, localised events like this generate a 'spatial externality' - essentially a commercial halo effect - where the footfall captured by a primary anchor attraction is directly transmitted to the surrounding retail and service ecosystem, which would make for a great start to the festive season, but it’s also an established event that we knew we could piggyback on in order to get attention. We used ads to promote this as a Facebook event, allowing people to indicate they were ‘Interested’ or ‘Going’, using this as a form of social proof and to build excitement, particularly around the opening of the pop-up ice rink - set to be the largest, outdoor undercover real ice rink anywhere in the North West of England.

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Once our Christmas lights switch on ads were in circulation, we launched our themed awareness ads, featuring a mix of static photos and graphics, swipeable carousels, and videos of Santa ‘endorsing’ the various components of the city’s Christmas offer. The primary aim was to establish Preston’s identity as Christmas Capital at this early stage and so the ads had more of a ‘brand’ focus.

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With the Christmas lights switch on out of the way, from week three of November our ads shifted focus to showcasing Preston as a retail, leisure, and hospitality destination, with brand taking a back seat.

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Then, as we entered the final two weeks of the pre-Christmas period, we changed the emphasis again to introduce greater urgency, for instance by promoting last-minute shopping opportunities.

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Key Outcomes

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In total during the campaign, we reached and engaged an audience of more than 350,000 people in our target locations across paid social and website, with ads seen over a million times.

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Monitoring conducted for the Client reported that footfall around the city on the day of the Christmas lights switch on was up 7% year-on-year, with the organiser noting at the time that “the crowd at the Flag Market was one of the biggest we have seen in years”.

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More impressively, whilst footfall across the UK was down 2.7% year-on-year over the Christmas period, Preston bucked the trend with an 0.2% increase, essentially outperforming the national picture by 3%.

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Client Testimonial

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"I would definitely recommend Fifty2M to any local authority or Business Improvement District seeking help with place marketing and cultural event promotion."

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Mark Whittle, who heads up Preston BID, said: "Having worked with them on other projects, we went to Fifty2M with what we felt was a winning concept for boosting Christmas 2025 visitor numbers to Preston, but which we needed expert help to execute.

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"They really 'got' what we were trying to do, and proved to be an ideas factory from the outset, making strategic and tactical suggestions to build-on and improve the concept before turning it into a campaign.

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"Getting Santa to front it was a brilliant move, and they handled everything from start to finish.

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"The Christmas Capital campaign successfully contributed to higher footfall recorded over the festive period, versus the region.

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"I would definitely recommend Fifty2M to any local authority or Business Improvement District seeking help with place marketing and cultural event promotion."

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