This holiday season, JCPenney’s overarching brand campaign was focused on helping the consumer get the most out of their holiday season – We Got Your Holiday. From unexpected savings, to finding all your gifts in one place, to providing seasonal tips and tricks, JCPenney was your one-stop-shop to find the most value for the holidays
To extend the campaign into the digital space and offer unexpected value to our fans, the social media team executed a free holiday spectacular livestream bringing fans closer than ever to the Backstreet Boys. The livestream included multiple surprise and delight moments to help viewers get a head start on their holiday shopping, including gift cards and top gifts as prizes. Additionally, JCPenney provided viewers with an hour of family-friendly content featuring exclusive performances of holiday songs, surprising games, and ways to engage with the Backstreet Boys from home.
With a goal of one million Facebook Live viewers to fill our holiday funnel and knowing how crowded the live shopping space has become, we wanted to find a new way to bring value to viewers beyond the typical live shopping experience other retailers execute during the holidays. We took the existing concept of JCP Live (a shopping network-style livestream launched in 2020) and leveled it up with a commitment to create a broadcast-quality entertainment special designed to engage social audiences: the JCP Live Holiday Spectacular!
To execute this new goal, we scripted an hour-long game show-style stream built to entertain and keep viewers engaged with a constant flow of surprise and delight giveaways, games played on behalf of viewers, and Q&As for our celebrity talent. The game show format kept things interesting with new segments every 3-5 minutes, but also let us align with business priorities by highlighting the depth and breadth of our holiday gifting assortment.
We knew we needed a household name to bring legitimacy and entertainment value to the stream. When we learned the Backstreet Boys were back with their first-ever holiday album, A Very Backstreet Christmas, it was a no-brainer to partner for the spectacular. Two legacy household names with an overlapping target audience (millennial moms, 25-54) made the partnership a perfect fit to drive engagement, tune-in and earned media buzz with national outlets including Extra (who embedded for an interview on set), People, Adweek and Yahoo! Entertainment. Additionally, we partnered with TV host, producer, and podcaster, Naz Perez, who kept the show moving and the Backstreet Boys engaged.
The stream featured five games played by our talent, five audience gifting moments from an on-screen advent calendar, five donations totaling $75,000 to our non-profit partner, Feeding America, which the Backstreet Boys later matched, two separate minute-long gift card giveaway blitzes, and two exclusive acapella performances by the band. We streamed in L.A. with a full production crew and set design team to give the show the grandiose feel of a broadcasted holiday special, while maintaining the audience engagement functionality of a social-first livestream.
We moved forward with Facebook as our social channel of choice for the stream thanks to the robust production capabilities, ability to leverage the as many of our consumers follow us there (5.5M followers) and full funnel retargeting options to convert viewers to holiday shoppers. To drive excitement pre-live, we created a Facebook Event page where viewers could RSVP and receive a notification day of to tune in. We used the link to our Facebook Event page as our main CTA across all channels, driving followers to RSVP. To reach viewers outside our network, we partnered with our top performing influencers to share on their channels and gave Backstreet Boy fan accounts the inside scoop to share with their followers. We gained additional traction from both earned and paid media support.
The JCP Live Holiday Spectacular drew more than 41,000 LIVE viewers and earned more than 1M total views during the promotion period. The stream held viewers for an average of 7 minutes and 37 seconds, 99x more than Meta’s average for brand videos.
Engagement with the stream was off the charts with more than 251,000 LIVE comments during the broadcast, crushing our previous engagement records.
Paid amplification of the livestream helped drive more than $660,000 in revenue.
