For the 2025 holiday season, the creative brief was to reimagine what holiday shopping means at Target through a holistic story to attract new guests and engage with current guests. Not another sale or promotion, but an honest-to-gingerbread holiday world that brought joy, connected emotionally, and made gift-hunting feel magical and shareable.
Strategy
Holiday campaigns are everywhere, and most compete for the same emotional territory. Our Step Into the Holidays needed to be an invitation to rediscover the wonder of the season — where curated collections of festive décor, cozy-chic apparel, toys, beauty and hosting must-haves await.
Execution
To stand out, Target needed to create a world with its own characters, rules, and magic—a place guests could instantly recognize and want to revisit, hosted by our “Holiday Squad” of charming, cheerful animated characters:
Target Creative built the Yeti-verse start to finish: character design, storytelling framework, tone, and cross-channel expression. Leading a global team of design partners, and engaging with award-winning animation partners, we created a cast of characters ready to rival anything on the big-screen.
And screen-time was only the beginning. After developing our animated characters, we worked with Target’s product and experience teams to bring them to guests IRL, including Yeti ‘mascot’ appearances in stores, social storytelling, bold Out of Home placements, in a ‘Wonder Drop’ public holiday experience in New York City’s Domino Park, plush-toy extensions, and character-based merchandising.
This case study video shows how our in-house team worked together to bring this entire campaign to life.
Selective campaign elements were developed with Mythology, with Target Creative overseeing all integrated storytelling.
The Yeti-verse drove significantly heightened guest engagement and brand visibility, supported by strong press coverage and cultural resonance. Media described the launch as Target’s “biggest holiday splash yet” across Black Friday, Cyber Week and throughout the season. Early behavioral indicators showed lifts in store footfall, extended time-in-store during weekend events, and increased online traffic to holiday categories. The creative — built end-to-end in-house — reinforced the strength of Target’s integrated studio model, reducing external reliance while maintaining high production value, brand consistency, and scale. The Yeti-verse established a long-term holiday property Target can continue to build season after season.
Social Specific Results
Target had a strong social presence, and guests truly loved our Yeti & Mice characters. Our Yeti-verse animated social spots drove the highest engagement (even outperforming other holiday content) at over 17M views and over 93k engagements. Target’s top Yeti social post, on Instagram, was Starbucks exclusive drink announcement which had over 500k views and over 24k engagements - see visual below.
TikTok Livestream
As part of this campaign, Target also had its first Tiktok livestream featuring entertainment-driven social content that brought in successful results (see the two visuals below of our Tiktok Livestream, or here is the full Yeti Livestream). The one-hour long livestream kept the audience watching new content every 2-3 minutes. Findings also showed that the Q&A section brought the most comments.
Livestream Results
