For The Home Depot, the holiday season represents one of the most important periods of the year, as the brand looks to help customers through every touchpoint of their holidays- from prepping and decorating, to gifting and celebrating, and everything in between.
However, moving into the second half of 2023, shifting consumer shopping trends driven by economic uncertainty and heightened spending sensitivity presented challenges across the retail category. As a result, shoppers were re-evaluating where and how they shop, looking for both value and convenience. With holiday spending forecasted to surpass pandemic levels for the first time, we needed to position The Home Depot as the premiere destination for holiday products, motivating audiences to shop at The Home Depot this holiday season.
Our objectives were to create a custom content campaign that showcased the value The Home Depot brings to holiday projects while driving lifts in awareness and consideration and showing sales impact through both in-store and site traffic during this key sales period. To measure campaign success, we utilized a custom brand lift study, along with a foursquare study, to measure in-store visits.
We first needed to answer the question - how do shoppers define value during the holiday season?
Interestingly, we found that value definition shifts dramatically during the holidays, with shoppers emphasizing emotional impact over price. In fact, 77% of people reported they plan to spend equal or more than last year, ready to splurge if the emotional payoff is high. Based on these insights, we needed to demonstrate the emotional benefits of creating meaningful holiday experiences.
Consumers were also kicking off holiday shopping earlier than ever- with 56% beginning their 2022 shopping in October, up 11% year over year. That trend continued with holiday décor, with 51% of shoppers buying most of their products from mid-October to mid-November. So, an early launch would be key to reaching shoppers and impacting purchase decisions.
Finally, the campaign needed to include a frictionless experience to purchase, with shoppable tactics to bridge the gap between inspiration and action.
These insights led The Home Depot to create “Merry and Bright”, a custom shoppable series showcasing incredible holiday décor makeovers for families looking for some holiday help, starring Grammy-nominated artist Jordin Sparks.
Consisting of three 10-minute episodes, plus bonus holiday tips and tricks, Merry and Bright gave audiences a front-row seat to amazing holiday décor transformations - all made possible with products from The Home Depot. As viewers were inspired by each design and reveal, integrated messaging from The Home Depot, along with shoppable tactics, helped turn that inspiration to action. By scanning in-episode QR codes, audiences were directed to custom "shop the look" pages on HomeDepot.com where they could add products seen on screen directly into their cart, making the jump from inspiration to action frictionless and easy.
This custom series would expand the role of brand storytelling, driving not only upper funnel KPIs like awareness and consideration but also providing full-funnel impact across sales and commerce.
To execute Merry and Bright, we partnered with VIZIO, bringing together audience scale and targetability, a collaborative production team, and the ability to promote both the content and shoppable tactics across the entire VIZIO ecosystem.
In preparation for launch, The Home Depot and VIZIO worked together to drive awareness for the series across both trade and consumer outlets via a robust PR campaign, including a trailer premiere and panel during NYC Advertising Week. Once launched, Merry and Bright was promoted across every piece of the VIZIO platform, including trailers and hero units running across the VIZIO CTV homepage. These trailers were complimented by additional discover and spotlight ad units, along with a custom series hub on VIZIO WatchFree+, all with shoppable QR codes integrated throughout promotion.
The campaign was supported across social platforms, with full episodes posted across VIZIO’s YouTube, along with trailer cutdowns, social scene lifts, and holiday tips posted across THD and VIZIO social platforms throughout the month of November. Promotion also came from host Jordin Sparks, who drove awareness for the series across her own social platforms and in media interviews.
Merry and Bright campaign media delivered 251MM+ impressions, exceeding the 46MM impressions planned by 546%, amounting to over 93,000 hours of content watched. The campaign generated an additional 52MM+ earned press impressions.
Brand study results showed awareness lifts of +2.8pts, despite an incredibly high baseline of 95%, along with consideration lifts of +6.8pts. VIZIO media performed well, with hero units outperforming advertising CTR benchmarks by +82%, and even outperforming CTR benchmarks for major mainstream entertainment titles!
Proving full-funnel impact, in-episode QR codes outperformed similar holiday shoppable units by 3x, with campaign landing pages receiving 233k+ pageviews, along with our location attribution study estimating campaign content driving over 13MM store visits.
