The holiday season for a retail client like Walmart is their most important time of year. In 2023, we were tasked with solving business goals across the funnel but doing so in a new and innovative way, while shortening that path from inspiration-to-purchase and maximize sales. We created a first-to-market program incorporating inspirational holiday creator video content living within a custom Walmart hub on The Roku Channel in which all videos were fully shoppable. The results were impressive and helped Walmart establish a baseline for future shoppable activations of this kind.
While the Holiday campaign is Walmart’s highest priority, with aggressive business goals and expectations to drive a significant portion of yearly GMV, it’s also the most cluttered window for the category, with consumers inundated with brand messaging, offers, and easy ways to shop.
Our primary task was to drive consideration of Walmart’s priority holiday categories around gifting and gathering moments but do so in a new way, tapping new channels, new partners, and ultimately identifying efficient paths-to-purchase to achieve Walmart’s goal of using innovation to deliver a new customer experience that enhances the customer journey.
Our secondary challenge was connecting with consumers in ways that would help evolve customer perceptions of Walmart as an omnichannel retailer and drive digital sales. Our target audience are busy and budget-conscious millennial families. Knowing the holidays can be one of the most stressful times of the year, Walmart’s goal was to help them ‘beat the holiday hustle’ by making shopping for gifting and gathering occasions fun, easy, and accessible.
Our strategy for the campaign included:
Create:
With an increasing number of our millennial customers consuming streaming content, CTV has become a high priority channel within our media mix. Walmart struck a commerce partnership with Roku, gaining exclusive access to their new interactive native-checkout ad units with shoppable functionality via QR code and Text to Shop.
As nearly 50% of millennials are influenced by creators when making purchase decisions and likely to watch a scripted TV show or movie featuring their favorite creators (eMarketer), we needed to go where creators go.
PubW explored potential media partners to collaborate on a never-been-done-before execution for Holiday. We identified mega-influencer platform, Jellysmack, who recently announced the launch of ‘Hello Inspo’, a CTV FAST channel featuring their top creators living exclusively on Roku with longer form narrative-style content. By connecting Jellysmack’s compelling content with Roku’s massive scale, distribution reach and hosting capabilities, we believed this was a recipe for success.
Utilizing powerfully insightful data, we contracted three Jellysmack creators – Emmy Made, Natalie’s Outlet, and Liz Fenwick who aligned with existing Walmart customers, personas, and categories.
Integrate:
This campaign successfully fused creator-centric content with CTV streaming and first-to-market shoppability components. We identified a strategic selection of high priority holiday products within tech, toys, fashion and home decor to be integrated into each creator’s content and fuel their concepts.
Within each ~6 min. custom episode, 2 hero products and 3 – 4 supplemental products were featured; all shoppable via overlays. We tested engagement and efficacy of these overlays by using a QR code that users could scan and purchase items on the spot, and a text-to-shop format allowing viewers the option to save all products in their online basket to perhaps purchase later.
Optimize:
Our primary campaign KPIs were impression delivery and CPC. We built a multi-pronged approach across Roku and Paid Social to achieve these. The program was rooted in the 6 custom Jellysmack videos, with shoppable overlays throughout, which were housed within a custom Walmart-owned Holiday Hub on The Roku Channel. A traffic-driving effort was deployed using Roku ROS banners including the notable homepage banner and placements within Roku City.
We worked with Jellysmack to continually optimize CTR/CPC placements towards the best performing audiences, which proved to be successful with a final paid social CTR ~3x the Jellysmack benchmark.
To boost Roku performance mid-campaign, we secured a placement which pinned our custom tile to the Roku home screen for 24 hours, boosting clicks which accounted for 27% of total tile clicks throughout the flight and bumped impressions by +13%.
We optimized towards HHs that engaged with banner inventory regularly and fell within Walmart’s target campaign audience (A18-24). Engagement was determined by how many qualified viewers opted to watch the custom content for a minimum of :30s.
‘Hello Holidays’ exceeded key campaign KPIs across the funnel. We over-delivered on impressions at +105%. The social campaign over-delivered on CTR at +173% compared to BM, indicating consumers were highly engaged across touchpoints, with an average 70% VCR across all ~6-minute episodes.
We proved that Walmart streamers were not only comfortable with social on the big screen, but shopping as well given that 26% of users that clicked on overlays indicated purchase intent and drove 1.5x GMV vs other branded executions within the same timeframe.
Key Results, Insights & Learnings:
Outperformed Walmart T-Comm BMs for CTR by 1.5x and CVR by 2.0x
Reached 34% of total Roku HHs throughout Holiday timing (24M impressions / 6.1M Roku HHs)
Average VCR of 70% given that each custom episode was ~6 min in length
Jellysmack videos on Meta overdelivered on CTR (173% to BM) & VCR (124% to BM)
Gleaned invaluable internal learnings to inform future T-comm activations & Holiday planning
10:1 preference for Text-to-Shop vs. QR Code Scans
In comparison to other Walmart x Roku campaigns that ran during the same timeframe, “Hello Holidays” drove 2X site visits and 1.5x higher GMV
Based on Roku’s Creative Evaluation Study, 4 out of 5 viewers thought that the Roku partnership was a great way for Walmart to grab their attention and nearly just as many felt that the content made them think the brand is innovative and for people like them, and 85% of viewers agree Roku is a great destination to promote Walmart.
