ARCHIVEMake Merry Memories
The Make Merry Memories campaign, launched in the United States in November 2023 for PetSmart by...
Walmart Bets on Holiday Nostalgia to Win Christmas 2024
Walmart's 2024 Holiday Campaigns is a United States film campaign published in December 2024 that uses beloved fictional universes — including Gilmore Girls, The Simpsons, and National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation — to reposition the retailer as a destination for thoughtful, personalised gift-giving during the Christmas season.
The campaign, documented on Clapboard.com, encompasses two distinct but complementary initiatives. The first, titled "Gifts That Show You Get Them," deploys a 60-second anthem film alongside shorter executions, each set inside a recognisable pop-culture world. The second, "Are You Ready for the Most Dramatic Black Friday Ever?" — also released under the subtitle "Deals of Desire" — takes a heightened, soap-operatic tone to dramatise Walmart's Black Friday value proposition. Together, the two initiatives present a unified holiday retail argument: that Walmart understands both the emotional texture of Christmas and the practical urgency of seasonal deals.
The campaign's centrepiece is a Gilmore Girls reunion. Scott Patterson and Lauren Graham reprise their roles as Luke and Lorelai for the first time since 2016, according to reporting by Retail Dive, framing Walmart's gift assortment inside the warmth of Stars Hollow. Additional intellectual properties brought into the campaign include Crazy Rich Asians, Love Jones, SpongeBob SquarePants, The Simpsons, and National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, as documented by The Drum and mgniles.com. This breadth signals a deliberate strategy to reach multiple demographic segments simultaneously across the United States market. The campaign was submitted to Clapboard with four listed media assets and earns a Clapboard Score of 73 out of 100.
Walmart operates the largest advertising business among traditional brick-and-mortar retailers in the United States. Walmart's advertising revenue reached approximately 4.4 billion dollars in 2024, according to separate reporting cited by LinkedIn and industry analysts, reflecting a business that now treats creative campaigns as measurable commercial infrastructure rather than seasonal expenditure. That commercial context shapes the ambition of the 2024 holiday push: this is not atmospheric brand-building alone, but a campaign designed to drive measurable consideration and conversion.
The strategic rationale for the nostalgia-led approach is rooted in a clear consumer insight. Holiday gift-giving is emotionally loaded, and shoppers in the United States consistently report anxiety about whether their gifts will feel personal rather than perfunctory. By setting Walmart's product assortment inside fictional worlds that audiences already associate with warmth, family, and belonging — Gilmore Girls above all — the campaign reframes the retailer's breadth as emotional intelligence rather than mere scale. David Hartman, Walmart's Vice President of Creative, described the effort publicly as a "truly omnichannel campaign" spanning social, online video, and in-store inventory, as reported by Marketing Dive.
The competitive context is significant. In the United States retail media landscape, Amazon held approximately 37.3 percent of global retail-media spending in 2024, according to Skai.io, making it the dominant force any challenger must address. Target, Walmart's most direct domestic competitor in the mass-merchandise category, has similarly invested in emotionally resonant holiday storytelling. Walmart's decision to anchor its campaign in recognisable intellectual property — rather than original characters — represents a lower-friction path to emotional connection, particularly given that Walmart Connect reported retail-media platform spending rose 28 percent in Q3 2024, with Walmart's own platform up 31 percent year over year, as documented by Modern Retail.
Alexander Payne directed the flagship film for Walmart's 2024 holiday campaign. Payne, whose feature credits include Sideways and The Descendants, brings an instinct for understated emotional authenticity that aligns precisely with the campaign's ambition: to make a major retail brand feel genuinely warm rather than commercially engineered. His involvement is documented across harborpicturecompany.com and temilawson.com, and represents an unusual degree of directorial pedigree for a retail holiday campaign.
The 60-second anthem film, produced for "Gifts That Show You Get Them," was created by a multi-agency consortium comprising Fallon, Publicis New York, The Community, Contender, and Digitas, as documented by hellomerman.com and mgniles.com. A 30-second version of the film aired during Sunday Night Football, extending the campaign's reach into one of American television's highest-profile live contexts, according to Marketing Dive. The Black Friday executions — "Are You Ready for the Most Dramatic Black Friday Ever?" and "Deals of Desire" — were produced by Walmart Creative Studio, with David Hartman overseeing creative direction as Vice President of Creative at Walmart.
The craft decision to use practical, recognisable sets — most notably a faithful recreation of Luke's Diner from Gilmore Girls — rather than abstracted retail environments is deliberate. It asks the audience to enter a world they already trust before introducing Walmart's product message. The broader execution extended this logic across six distinct intellectual properties, each matched to a different demographic and emotional register: the romance of Love Jones, the family chaos of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, the generational familiarity of The Simpsons, and the cross-cultural warmth of Crazy Rich Asians. Production credits for the individual IP executions beyond the Payne-directed anthem are not fully publicly documented.
No comprehensive verified performance data for Walmart's full 2024 Holiday Campaigns suite is publicly available across all executions. However, meaningful third-party measurement exists for the holiday advertising period. According to EDO, Walmart's holiday advertisements were 59 percent more effective than the average department-store brand during the 2024 holiday sales period — a finding that connects directly to the campaign's stated objective of driving gift-consideration among United States shoppers.
The campaign also earned industry recognition. Walmart's holiday work received a Clio Entertainment 2025 Silver award in the Branded Entertainment and Content: Film category, as reported by Clapboard.com. This award is a verifiable external signal of creative quality and positions the campaign favourably against competitors including Target and Amazon, neither of which received equivalent Clio recognition for their 2024 holiday retail-film work.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness argument is strong. The decision to deploy a 30-second cut during Sunday Night Football — one of the highest-rated weekly broadcasts in the United States, according to Nielsen's regular ratings reporting — maximises reach among a broad, cross-demographic adult audience at the precise moment holiday purchase intent is highest. The multi-IP architecture also distributes risk: if any single pop-culture property underperforms with a given audience segment, others carry the emotional load. The Clapboard Score of 73 out of 100 reflects a campaign that executes its nostalgia strategy with considerable craft and strategic coherence, while leaving some measurable performance evidence still to be independently verified at the time of publication.
Walmart's 2024 holiday campaign centres on the idea that great gifts show genuine understanding of the recipient. Published in December 2024 across the United States, it uses pop-culture reunions — most notably Gilmore Girls — and multiple fictional universes to connect Walmart's product range to emotionally resonant Christmas moments, as documented on Clapboard.com.
Alexander Payne directed the flagship 60-second anthem film for Walmart's "Gifts That Show You Get Them" campaign. Payne's involvement, documented by harborpicturecompany.com and hellomerman.com, brought feature-film directorial craft to the retail Christmas spot, which also aired in a 30-second version during Sunday Night Football, according to Marketing Dive.
Walmart's 2024 holiday campaign featured six intellectual properties: Gilmore Girls, The Simpsons, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, Crazy Rich Asians, SpongeBob SquarePants, and Love Jones. The Drum and mgniles.com document this multi-IP strategy, which was designed to reach distinct demographic segments simultaneously across the United States market during the Christmas season.
Walmart's 2024 holiday campaign won a Clio Entertainment 2025 Silver award in the Branded Entertainment and Content: Film category, as reported by Clapboard.com. The campaign also earns a Clapboard Score of 73 out of 100, reflecting strong creative execution within the United States retail holiday advertising category for that year.
According to EDO, Walmart's 2024 holiday advertisements were 59 percent more effective than the average department-store brand during the holiday sales period. This outperformance positions Walmart ahead of direct retail competitors such as Target in seasonal advertising effectiveness, though comprehensive campaign-level metrics across all executions are not yet fully publicly available.
The "Gifts That Show You Get Them" campaign was created by a multi-agency group including Fallon, Publicis New York, The Community, Contender, and Digitas, as documented by hellomerman.com and mgniles.com. The Black Friday executions were produced by Walmart Creative Studio, with David Hartman, Walmart's Vice President of Creative, overseeing the broader omnichannel effort.
.webp)
Creative Collaboration Platform: The Backbone of Modern Creative WorkWhat is a creative collaboration platform?Clapboard defines a creative collaboration platform as the operational core for today’s distributed creative teams. This is not a collection of digital collaboration tools stitched together; Clapboard’s system
Understanding the Creative Production MarketplaceWhat is a Creative Production Marketplace?Clapboard defines a creative production marketplace as a structured ecosystem where brands, agencies, and production talent converge to execute video, advertising, and branded content at scale. Unlike the legacy agency or freelanREAD FULL ARTICLE
The Urgent Need for a Creative Production Operating SystemWhy Traditional Creative Production Models Break DownClapboard sees the creative production landscape shifting under pressure. Content velocity is no longer a buzzword—it’s a mandate. Modern advertising demands relentless output across dozens of channels, each wREAD FULL ARTICLE
.jpg&w=256&q=75)
