Door to door salesman

The retail countdown

Jamie Cullum launched ‘The Advent Cullumdar’ on 1st December which houses £20,000 worth of Christmas gifts behind its virtual windows, including AC/DC tickets, John Legend concert tickets, 10 CDs from Universal and a Nokia Comes With Music phone. Each window features a short video of Cullum introducing that day’s gift alongside details of how to win the item.Visitors to the site simply open the particular days window to reveal a new prize and then enter their own details – and refer a friend – for that day’s prize draw.

The musical calendar theme is also been utilised by Warner Music who are offering up a ’25 Bands of Christmas’ website which will offer exclusive gifts, free MP3s and messages from Warner artists. The contents of each window can be gifted to friends via email. Opening each window also reveals links to purchase via iTunes and Amazon.

So what?: Jamie Cullum, Universal’s jazz prodigy, could actually fit inside an advent calendar window. A bit like Mike Teavee did in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. However this is a chocolate free calendar stacked full instead with some genuinely great prizes. All credit to Cullum for recording 25 separate messages and creating a genuine artist to fan relationship here. Warner’s effort is similar, with the added benefit of free MP3s and a sharing option. It’s a great use of a daily touch point. One that could easily be adapted to a yearly calendar once all those email addresses are gathered in.

“I really like this, some proper prizes and a nice little site from everyone’s favourite jazz maestro. Most of all it’s a clever way to gather a lot of email addresses and get traffic to his site”
Dom Hodge, Associate Director, FRUKT

www.jamiecullum.com