Christmas is all about giving.
Merry Critmas is a campaign encouraging professional creatives in the advertising and marketing fields to give the gift of a festive portfolio review, or "book crit".
For undiscovered talent trying to break into advertising, it’s a foot in the door.
For established creatives, it’s a nice way of giving something back.

Father Critmas was back in December 2020, for the 5th year running, to match young creatives with Creative Directors around the world for Zoom book crits. This time he was in the gym delivering a Joe Wicks inspired 'Creative Workout' to help students/grads get their portfolios in shape!!

We partnered with The Drum, Adland, NABS, Cut The Crap NYC, GAS and had hundreds of senior and junior creatives getting involved. At a time that junior creatives need it most, we’re really pleased to have got this campaign out there despite the difficulties in shooting film etc at the moment. We are really pleased to help create some amazing opportunities that will hopefully lead to a brighter 2021 for young creatives and give the senior creatives that feel-good factor from helping them.

Sign up to give or receive a crit for 2021 at merrycritmas.com!!!

In it’s 4th year, the campaign went from strength to strength as Father Critmas produced and starred in his own music video. This was a parody of Slade’s ‘Merry Christmas Everybody’ and was produced by GAS Music with BBC Radio’s Mike Sweeney on vocals. The film featured band Federal Charm and creative students from local universities.

The campaign was also being supported by NABS, Unity Radio, The Drum and pushed further via our very own @OneMinuteBriefs and @AgencyQuotes channels. Alongside ourselves, David Felton, Lizzie Owen and Louise Chorley were the lead elves on the project and over the past few years we have created close to a thousand book crit matches across the world.

We put together a case study film of the campaign too.

The campaign has always been led by film and the previous year’s film, which was produced by Trunk, was a horror parody of IT movie and in the first year we were a fly on the wall during one of Father Critmas’ infamous book crits. These have helped us get into global creative publications and encourage big names to sign up such as Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy, Victoria Buchanan of Tribal Worldwide, Mike Rigby of RGA New York, Carole Davids of HeyHuman, Shaun McIlrath of Iris Worldwide and many more.

We also filmed ‘Behind The Scenes’ which reveals a bit more about what Father Critmas is like to work with. He likes to write, produce, direct and star in his own films.