Department Store Pranks Shoppers With Christmas-Themed Extravaganza

So in Rhode Island there’s a department store chain called Ocean State Job Lot. It’s like Walmart but not. To hype themselves for the holiday shopping season, the store hooked up with Kindling Digital which created the elaborate prank which took shoppers on an adventure which involved Owen Van Winter, an elf, Santa and a guy claiming to be Santa who turns out to be an imposter.

The stunt grabbed a few shoppers at checkout and took them on an adventure to save Santa and, of course, win some free stuff. It’s quite well done actually and, so far, has received a lot of play. For Rhode Island. OK, not to jab a state within which I used to work at an agency I really didn’t like (or, more correctly, didn’t like me) because, all things considered, I like the stunt. And so do 18,000 other people.

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Steve Hall

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