Here’s a video that’s gone viral on the interwebs in the last few days: it’s one creative family’s Christmas video postcard and it’s got over 12 million views at the time of writing. That way surpasses their video from last year that has a little over 100k views. So what happened? The Holderness family did kick it up a notch this year with some nice asides and b-roll footage but it just has the right amount of amateur haminess and enough production value to be watchable without being too slick. To some it up in one word, it’s ‘cute’.

You can get away with things at the holidays that just wouldn’t fly the rest of the year: the Hallmark channel has already been showing saccharine-sweet movies that wouldn’t find an audience the rest of the year but it seems to work for them. And while the Holdernesses were working all that cute they just promoted their business. I can’t decide if this is the most astute piece of self-promotion ever, or the luckiest. Whichever it is, I hope the family make the best use of all the eyeballs. If I had one criticism it would be to have held back on the monetization of the videos at least a little. It’s hard to resist when all those views come your way but they currently have ads overlaying and preceding even their company’s sizzle reel – that’s a little much. Still, we can learn a lot from this video: as we’ve mentioned before every video you produce is marketing. It doesn’t matter if it’s your pre-flight video or your video Christmas card, everything has the potential to promote you and your company so, take a leaf out of the Holderness family’s book, and do nothing by half.

•  Christmas jammies family: “We are richer, funnier and more talented than you”