Forgotten Birthday Exchange

The festive-gifting market is cluttered with seasonal sales, Christmas cliches and smh puns that seem to have fallen straight out of the nearest cracker. Not On The High Street wanted us to cut through the clutter and grab the attention of their Gen-Z & Y target audience. With a limited budget, and a lot of noise to shout over, we needed to find a new way to engage with our fun, sociable audience.

Social listening showed that just 4% of Gen Z & Gen Y social conversation is dominated by the Christmas build up. In fact, in this crucial festive trading period, December birthdays drive significantly more positive sentiment amongst our young audience. This is the conversation we wanted to join, sidestepping the Christmas chatter entirely and grabbing attention with an unexpected crusade to save December birthdays.

We swapped NOTHS’ usual Xmas content with 12 Days of Forgotten Birthdays – comedically highlighting the plight of the December baby. A Forgotten Birthday Exchange awarded December-borns who shared their birthday sob story on Instagram, with a NOTHS’ gift. Five influencers joined the exchange and encouraged their forgotten followers to take part and shop the Forgotten Birthday Edit on the NOTHS website.

We created a social-led Christmas campaign that drove Gen Z & Gen Y engagement— by not talking about Christmas. The Forgotten Birthday Exchange generated NOTHS’ highest social engagement spike of 2022 and drove an additional 4.5k website sessions during the crucial festive sales period and 200 once forgotten December birthdays were saved along the way.