Check Out Some Of This Year's Best Ad Agency Holiday Cards

Last Monday, space150 shared the above image via social media and a bus stop ad. They asked people if they would rather have $10 given in their name "to fight cyber bullying" or have $10 mailed to them. All it took was a tweet to them with either #GIVE or #RECEIVE.

By the end of Monday afternoon, they reached their limit of 150 tweets — 139 had donations made in their name to Pacer's National Bullying Prevention Center, and just 11 got 10 bucks. The Grinches also got a nice piece of coal.

All the VIA Agency wants for Christmas is David Bowie. They turned their weird obsession with the singer into a fun project using the Twitter trending topic #GetItToBowie as an attempt to get him to cover one of the VIA House Band's songs. They're offering a free six-song album of original holiday tunes, and they're clearly having a great time.

Their "card" was a link to getittobowie.com, which features some pretty great (and pretty awful) Bowie impressions.

In October, branded content producer and director Tim Piper took a photo of his model wife and created a video demonstration of how Photoshop has made consumers expect unnatural bodies in advertisements.

For their holiday card this year, Victors & Spoils parodied the viral video, giving Piper's beautiful wife a very disturbing (but Christmas appropriate) makeover:

Some agencies also send more traditional "cards," like this one from Ogilvy, with a reindeer modeled after the agency's late founder, David Ogilvy:

Traction has created a Mr. Hankie-like character for this holiday season, encouraging you to buy the absolute worst presents for family and friends. How about a portable infrared sauna, "Microwave Cooking for One," or a "hipster potato" poster?

And for every few pulls of the machine's arm, you'll get a special message from a claymation poop-man. Finish up your shopping list here.

"Prankvertisements," ads in which a scary hidden camera prank is used to market something, were incredibly popular throughout the globe this year. To send out the year of the prankvertisement, Planit turned on their own employees.

They were told to record a Christmas carol video message for their families, while their co-worker dressed as an elf with a Leatherface mask waited to scare them. A few of the best reactions come at 0:54, 1:26, and 1:42. And props to the man impervious to fear at 1:07:

In 2011, Saatchi & Saatchi LA were given the task to come up with an alternative to a holiday card, and they collaborated with Deeplocal to create "Nog Pong." It's a variation on the classic college game beer pong, where the heavy holiday drink egg nog replaces beer.

This year, people who visited nogpog.com could click a button and have a robot shoot a ball at the cups full of nog. For every shot, the agency donated money to the Amanda Foundation, a charity for rescued dogs.

This year's game is over, but here's a video of the original Nog Pong game to get an idea of how it worked:

Draftfcb created an online doodle wall set up like a chalkboard. When the "DoodleHeart" page is filled, the agency will make a "significant donation" to UNICEF to provide typhoon relief in the Philippines. It's hard to tell what "filled" means, though, since the page is on infinite scroll.

You can leave a doodle here.

If you've got an Apple device, you can use AKQA's mobile messaging site "Written In The Stars" to send a loved one a message written in the stars.

On your iPhone or iPad, go to stars.akqa.com and click on the "Create" icon. Then you can draw a holiday greeting into a 3D star map. The message's recipient will then search for the North Star to uncover the message.

Here's a video showing how it works. The video, as well as the messaging service, features a soundtrack from 3D of the popular trip hop duo Massive Attack:

Click here to see this year's big winners in brand redesign>>