For The Home Depot, the Holiday season represents one of the most important periods of the year, as the brand looks to help people through every touchpoint of their holidays- from prepping and decorating, to gifting and celebrating, and everything in between.
However, recent shifting consumer shopping trends driven by economic uncertainty and heightened spending sensitivity presented challenges across retail. As a result, shoppers were re-evaluating where and how they shop, looking for both value and convenience.
Despite these shifting trends, holidays remained a top priority for consumers, with spending forecasted for growth in 2024.
Given this, our objectives were to create a campaign that showcased the value The Home Depot brings to holiday projects, while driving lifts in awareness, consideration, and purchase intent.
To be successful, we needed to answer the question - how do shoppers define value during the holiday season? Interestingly, value definition shifts dramatically during the holidays, as shoppers rebalance emotional impact over price. In fact, 70% of consumers are influenced by emotional connections to brands specifically during the holiday season. We needed to seize the opportunity to demonstrate the emotional benefits of creating meaningful holiday experiences.
Additionally, we needed the campaign to include a frictionless path-to-purchase, integrating shoppable tactics to capture the ‘excitement opportunity’ and bridge the gap between inspiration and action.
Based on these insights, we set out to pivot away from creative that highlighted specific products or holiday discounts/sales and instead tell a real story about real people taking on holiday projects and the genuine human value those projects can bring. This docu-style storytelling would showcase authentic emotions, resonating with our audience during the holidays.
Alongside our custom storytelling, we paired THD standard ad creative, complementing our emotion driven storytelling with a more traditional call-to-action for maximum efficacy.
Finally, knowing consumers have come to expect both convenience and a frictionless purchase experience, we looked to ensure all custom content was seamlessly shoppable for anyone inspired by our story.
To execute this campaign, The Home Depot partnered with television network and premier storytelling destination, AMC, to create a custom shoppable docu-style film that shined a light on the joy that holiday projects can bring. To do this, The Home Depot and AMC showcased the Mata family, as they sought to use seasonal décor to create new holiday traditions and memories with their two children. Using a wide range of incredible holiday décor products from The Home Depot, the Matas were able to transform their home into a holiday wonderland, culminating with a heartwarming reveal and surprise for their two girls.
As viewers were inspired by the magical reveal, integrated and shoppable brand messaging 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 onscreen directly into their cart, making the jump from inspiration to action frictionless and easy- cool right?
Campaign creative included hero :60 creative, along with :30 cutdowns, all running across AMC linear, digital, and social platforms. The campaign also included custom social holiday how-to’s, including snackable project tips featuring the Mata family themselves.
Creative across all platforms was paired with The Home Depot ad creative, combining custom storytelling with traditional media messaging.
So, our priority objectives were to drive lifts in Awareness, Consideration, and Purchase Intent. How did we do?
Brand study results indicated the campaign was an absolute success, with custom storytelling paired with THD standard ads showing double-digit lifts across all KPIs. Lifts were also strong when comparing these combined effects to The Home Depot’s standalone Ads, showing the synergy of our combined creative.
Custom Content + THD Standard Ads Combined
In addition to these incredible lifts, campaign media performance was strong, overdelivering by 533% across digital placements and 14% across linear.