Treasure hunt Christmas campaign for M&S 'The Two Fairies'

M&S Christmas Campaign: a gigapixel treasure hunt

This year, M&S have created a storm on social media with their festive ‘Follow the Fairies’ treasure hunt campaign.

The campaign idea

The fairies, ‘Magic’ & ‘Sparkle’, perform random acts of kindness, such as the Cornish primary children getting into school and finding it magically covered in snow! Initially, the two fairies were anonymous, and there was much press speculation about who was behind the Twitter account; who was delivering cupcakes to people in need of cheer and bedding to animal shelters.

The treasure hunt

We created a hi-res panorama looking out over the London cityscape. Viewers are invited to ‘find the fairies’. The interactive gigapixel image allows users to zoom very close in to see the detail. Hidden in the image are 13 fairies, when the users find them, they tweet about it and could end up as a recipient of a random act of kindness! Often, items in a treasure hunt like this are added in post-production. In this case, there were actual models positioned in various spots around London, in touch with the producer so they knew when to be ready for the capture.

The shoot was great fun (though rather chilly for the 13 fairies) and we’re delighted to have been a part of one of the sweetest festive campaigns ever run.

The M&S gigapixel treasure hunt was fairly easy and participants should have found all the fairies fairly easily. We have worked on other gigapixel treasure hunts where participants have lost the whole weekend searching for codes. You can discover more gigapixel projects here.