Gift recommendations for Bank of Georgia's Secret Santa
Bank of Georgia's nationwide Secret Santa matched strangers across the country for a New Year gift exchange. Supernova built the recommendation system inside it, helping every santa answer the campaign's one hard question: what do you gift a person you have never met?
Bank of Georgia is one of Georgia's largest banks. Together with Georgian Post, it ran one of the country's best-known New Year campaigns: a nationwide Secret Santa, open to anyone in Georgia, client or not.
Register on the campaign site and you were matched with a stranger somewhere in the country. You saw their age, their city, and the wish they wrote, but not their name, and a different stranger drew you. The format captured the country's imagination, drawing close to 300,000 registrations across its runs. It also concentrated all the difficulty into a single moment: choosing a present for a person you have never met, from a few written lines, in time to hand it to the post office before the New Year deadline. At that scale the campaign lives or dies on follow-through. Matching strangers is the easy half; it only works if each santa actually picks a gift and sends it.
A recommendation system built into the exchange, suggesting what to gift the person you were matched with. When a santa got their match, the system offered concrete gift ideas for that person, a starting shortlist instead of a blank page and a stranger's few-line wish.
For the bank, Secret Santa was a marketing campaign, and the recommender supported it at the step where gift exchanges usually stall. The campaign returned season after season and became a New Year tradition well beyond the bank's own customers.