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Canadian Tire is ringing in the holiday season with a 30-foot tree situated in Toronto’s Union Station. It is, however, no ordinary Christmas tree. It’s a Spirit Tree. It features 3,000 LED lights that are powered by messages of positive Christmas spirit on social media channels including Facebook, Twitter and posts to the Spirit Tree website, where video of the tree is live-streamed. Developed by Tribal DDB, the tree captures online content containing specific Christmas keywords, transforming them into data that’s then visualized via the lights on the tree. The brightness and colour of the lights vary depending on the source of the message. For example, posts from Twitter and other social media are represented as white lights, whereas messages from the website appear as a spiral of blue lights moving up the tree along with flashing strobe lights all over. The brightness of the lights represents the total number of messages per minute, so the more messages the brighter the tree. It looks like Tribal DDB’s digital elves have been working hard this year.

Credits:

advertiser: Canadian Tire
agency: Tribal DDB
business unit director: Kaezad Nallaseth
technology director: Joe Dee
CD: LP Tremblay
strategist: Jason Chaney