Situation:

In the US, the Friday after Thanksgiving – “Black Friday” – marks the kickoff of the holiday shopping season with massive retail sales events. But when the pandemic drove shoppers out of stores and to the Internet, the rules changed. Retailers now offer different deals on different days, driving confusion and chaos in an already crowded season.

The brief:

Announce and drive excitement for Walmart’s big deal days – Wednesdays – during the Black Friday season. We needed a new creative idea that was extremely memorable, and could extend all November long, with at least 5 unique media placements launching every week to support new deal reveals.

Objectives:

-Drive excitement and conversation around Walmart’s Wednesday deals in a crowded seasonal moment

-Keep Walmart top of mind for holiday shoppers

For Walmart to own Wednesdays, we reunited pop culture’s favorite clique who first made Wednesdays historic: the cast of Mean Girls.

It was The Plastics who first famously said, “On Wednesdays, we wear pink.” So we turned their mantra into “On Wednesdays, we shop deals,” and brought all the fan-favorite characters back, continuing their 2004 stories into 2023 to earn the Internet’s attention, with Walmart deals naturally integrated into their lives.

Knowing fans practically worshiped the original IP, script, and characters, and would thus go wild for new content in the Mean Girls cinematic universe, we crafted an Internet-breaking series of wildly entertaining character stories to ignite the flames of fandom across social media.

To create excitement for Walmart’s Black Friday event with a millennial audience, our campaign leveraged the influence of characters, actors, and fans of an iconic movie.

Using the original film’s narrative and voice as sacred doctrine, we crafted stories that gave a hungry fanbase even more Mean Girls, showing where their favorite high school characters ended up in the cinematic universe. The campaign used the classic movie lore and catchphrases to satisfy the diehard fandom, and showed how Walmart products fit naturally into the characters’ lives, making our deals as memorable as the iconic film itself.

To ensure our audience felt seen in our modern take, we expanded our cast to include a diverse mix of partners, students, and surprise celebrity cameos, like rapper Missy Elliott. All featured celebrity talent were interviewed by top publications and promoted the campaign on their own social channels.

Starting Wednesday, November 1st, each celebrity partner launched their character’s “episode” in collab posts on Instagram with Walmart social channels, driving brand messaging to their millions of followers. Talent engaged with followers and fellow cast members while staying in character, and reposted fan love, shared additional behind-the-scenes content, and hinted at upcoming spots with teaser trailers.

Four unique spots launched every Wednesday to drive the “On Wednesdays, we shop deals” messaging and announce new deals all month long, with a fifth spot launching on Cyber Monday. Spots also ran on YouTube’s homepage for 24 hours, and in TikTok, Instagram, TV, and cinema placements.

Every week in November, fans tuned in to Walmart and celebrity social channels, engaging with Walmart, celebrity talent and fellow fans, anxiously waiting to see what Cady, Gretchen, Karen, and Damian would do next.

While Walmart sales data is highly confidential and therefore not shared externally, our campaign broke brand records in awareness, earned press, shopping intent, and engagement – all critical objectives to assess how much we broke through during a crowded retail season.

In the campaign’s first two days, we reached 2.13K earned media placements, including coverage from People, Rolling Stone, Variety, ABC, E! News, and USA Today.

By the end of November, Walmart became the #1 Black Friday retailer for ad awareness and brand consideration (via YouGov), achieving both objectives.

The campaign also led to results unprecedented for Walmart, including:

3 billion total impressions & views online

66x more conversations about Walmart Black Friday than 2022

400x higher user engagement than 2022

90% positive social sentiment

Average clickthrough rate 63% above benchmark

@walmart’s highest performing Instagram post (views, interactions) and TikTok post (interaction rate) ever

From user-generated fan edits to thousands of TikTok reaction videos, the movie fandom deemed our campaign “the Mean Girls sequel we deserved” and actor Amanda Seyfried (Karen herself!) commented “This is better than a sequel.” Thousands commented about shopping intent, and thousands more identified as first-time Walmart customers due to the campaign.