For retailers, Black Friday is one of the most competitive days of the year. It’s also a fleeting holiday for consumers, creating urgency and stress around one single day of the year to get holiday shopping done at the best possible price. We wanted to stand out among retailers, not just on Black Friday, but for the entire month of November. To differentiate from other brands, we wanted to create a bespoke social-first campaign that would leverage the true power of TikTok, and get our consumers excited, engaged, and inspired to shop with us.
Our strategy was rooted in a deep insight that Black Friday/holiday shopping is practically a professional sport, it is the Super Bowl of savings – with 14MM views on the TikTok discover tag “Training for Black Friday Be Like”. With that trending organically on the platform, we wanted to set a TikTok challenge in a lighthearted way, asking the community to show how they’re getting ready for the exciting Walmart deals that would be dropping on Mondays in November.
We implemented this strategy in a three pronged approach:
Power of Sound: To spark excitement, we partnered with TikTok creator @MusicByBlanks to create a custom ‘80s-style training montage track, “Is It Monday Yet?” to inspire our shoppers to share their Black Friday training montages and anchor campaign content.
Power of Creators: We then partnered with four diverse TikTok creators (@KyleExum, @AlexandraMadison_, @JayMendoza and @EzeexNatalie) to show us how they were training for Mondays in November - from box squats to chair sprints and speed typing. Each creator video used our custom anthem track, highlighted Walmart+ early access shopping, and reinforced our Monday deal drops in entertaining, scroll-stopping, TikTok-first content.
Power of Community: We then launched our #IsItMondayYet TikTok Branded Mission, a new product that effectively engages creators to develop on-message content for brands, with a TikTok TopView ad unit on the launch day to engage the platform’s creator community to share how they were getting ready for Monday. The TikTok community showed up, pumping themselves up and training to snag the hottest deals in their own homes, the Alaskan wilderness and everywhere in between. Over the three-day branded Mission, our “Is It Monday Yet?” anthem track flooded the TikTok For You Page, reinforcing Walmart as the retailer for Black Friday Deals, priming audiences for the drops, and sparking brand love along the way.
Through the #IsItMondayYet TikTok Branded Mission, we effectively drove awareness for Walmart’s month-long Black Friday deal drops, reinforcing key date and time messaging in a social-first way that engaged creators to join the campaign. Over 72 hours, #IsItMondayYet engaged 343 creators to share 469 videos, driving over 110MM video views on the hashtag. The use of TikTok’s TopView ad unit was successful in reaching users with key messaging, driving a 4.01% CTR – 7.5% above benchmark.
Walmart also saw significant brand lift following the completion of the Branded Mission, with a 10.4% increase in ad recall and a 3.1% increase in brand association with the hottest Black Friday deals. And most importantly, the #IsItMondayYet creator campaign and Branded Mission helped contribute to Walmart’s rise to the #1 most searched retailer for Black Friday deals in 2022, closing the holiday season with overwhelming success.
