For over 122 years, JCPenney has been many shoppers’ go-to department store, especially during the holiday season. However, in recent years the brand has faced challenges connecting with customers and many don't even realize they’re still in business.

JCPenney realized it was time for a refresh and launched the Make It Count campaign as an opportunity to spark new and lapsed customers’ passion especially in the lead up to the all-important holiday shopping season.

Since the beginning, JCPenney has gone all out to make the most of every day and every dollar. The way James Cash Penney envisioned. And the way their consumers do too. As one of the most trusted department stores in America, they’ve put in the effort to match their shoppers’ effort because each day is a new opportunity to “make it count”. The campaign messaging was comprised of a series of lifestyle vignettes telling customer stories of personal, emotional and transformational moments in their daily lives. The products from JCPenney featured in ads were a catalyst for sparking relatable memories of these moments. Media connected customers to the spirit of the campaign through a carefully crafted strategic approach.

The audience approach focused on winning back lapsed customers and attracting net new, “next best” shoppers to go online and into store locations. To win back customers, JCP aimed to reinvigorate their relationship with inactive, at-risk, and mostly female-skewing shoppers who might be one-and-done visitors. To entice customers shopping at competitors, the focus was on finding value-minded consumers that are actively looking for designer deals at off-price retailers like TJ Maxx, Marshall's and Home Goods. The campaign also presented an opportunity to establish a test-and-learn framework with two growth audiences (Males and the Hispanic community) to establish benchmarks for future campaigns.

Based on proprietary audience research, the media approach relied on five strategic pillars:

1. Passion points

2. Relevancy

3. Authenticity

4. Moments that matter

5. Proven traffic drivers

The campaign aimed at making a statement and standing out amongst a sea of retail sameness.

Tapping into the audience’s passions, JCPenney utilized high profile sponsorships of Amazon Prime’s NFL Thursday Night Football and Apple TVs MLS Season Pass featuring custom content integrations such as the JCPenney Player of the Game tying back to the spirit of making it count.

Hyper-contextual relevancy was on full display with out of home placements, CTV, digital and social media. Editorial adjacency provided a high level of authenticity via partnerships with Essence, People, and Us Weekly magazines.

The team effectively used high profile, mass reach ad placements to create moments that matter at launch and key promotional periods (such as Black Friday) via strategic flighting of the Pinterest Spotlight + Premiere, Meta Moment Maker and YouTube Masthead driving instant reach and impact. Finally, a mix of proven traffic drivers across social, display, online video and mobile placements utilized new campaign messaging and directed the audience to the website and stores.

The campaign was an overwhelming success with gains in awareness from 2MM incremental brand searches, an 81% positive sentiment to social media units (2x benchmarks), and a 70%+ lift in message association for DOOH. Increasing customers’ understanding of why to shop at JCPenney was critical. The audience leaned in with significant lifts in purchase intent measuring 2.8%, 4.7%, and even 13%+ for some tactics. The campaign successfully drove people online & in-store. A 4% lift in e-commerce traffic and sizable gains in foot traffic led to an estimated $22MM in revenue gained from September to December contributing to MMM results attributing $100MM in incremental revenue to paid media activity in 2023. And finally, the campaign caused buzz scores (YouGov) to spike 200% amongst Gen Z and Millennial women leading to JCPenney being the 5th most popular dept store in Q1 2024 beating out competitors such as Macy’s, Nordstrom, and Wayfair.