Shackleton's Christmas Stunt Rewards Phones at the Dinner Table

For many parents, Christmas will be spent trying to get their offspring off their phones at the dinner table. Forget family time and the art of conversation, when teenagers are glued to their glowing screens...

However, Madrid agency Shackleton has come up with a bit of festive mobile tech that asks people to do exactly that, in the name of spreading the Christmas spirit. And they've even sent it to the Pope.

Xmas Mode, which combines digital and physical, technological and traditional elements, is a modern take on the Nativity story, which allows family and friends to transform their mobile devices into characters from the stable scene.

By connecting several mobile devices (between two to eleven) to the app and placing them together, the screens form a 'live' Nativity scene, peopled by 14 key characters including Saint Joseph, the Virgin Mary, the Three Kings, a donkey and the shepherd, who interact with each other by moving across the devices. The star rises above the stable; a sheep wanders over to join the donkey, and the Three Kings kneel by the manger. 

And if you receive a call while admiring the festive tableau, don't panic - simply answer it and on hanging up, the character will reappear.

“With Xmas Mode we not only wanted to showcase our technological innovation, but also wanted to do something that was really useful and easy to use," explains Juan Silva, executive creative director at Shackleton.

“With Xmas Mode, as well as with all the other Xmas campaigns such as SantApp, On Hold Music Band LIVE or iJam, traditional meets modern in a paradoxical way," adds CEO Pablo Alzugaray. "In all of these creative ideas, innovation and technology combine to search for new ways of preserving, precisely, something that has been going on for a very long time, with hardly any changes. We sent Xmas mode to Pope Francis yesterday… let’s see if he likes it”.

To try it for yourself this Christmas, download the app at xmasmode.com.