When the Covid19 lockdown started, Lowe’s stayed open as an essential retailer, helping people stay safely at home. In the midst of a global pandemic, no one had a playbook for what was to come, but Lowe’s knew it needed to pivot and reach customers in new and more meaningful ways than ever before.

With shelter-in-place orders in effect, our marketing had to be sensitive to the mood of the nation. We shifted our messages quickly, taking on a new perspective for Lowe’s geared to their audience of female DIYers (do-it-yourself), to remind people what they could love about home.

Our challenge was to carefully let people know Lowe’s Home Improvement was still open. We needed to embody the new “Home Unites Us” campaign, help Lowe’s return to its décor roots, and drive sales.

In normal times, home is important to us, but it usually takes back stage to the life we are living. With Covid19 lockdown and people spending an extraordinary amount of time in their homes, that totally changed.

All of those home improvement jobs that seemed to remain on the bottom of the to-do list, suddenly rose to the top. People wanted to make their home a place they could enjoy and serve multiple functions – home offices, gyms, schools and even recreation and entertainment centers.

This led us to our insight: Home now had the starring role in people’s lives.

Our idea was to showcase how Lowe’s can make home the center stage you’ll truly love through content integration into popular programming.

At a time when many of us were feeling isolated, Lowe’s new platform “Home Unites Us” shed light on how the situation could also be uniting. We took that platform to American Idol (a DIYer favorite program) through a partnership that put home at center stage.

Production had to halt and American Idol needed to pivot to showing contestants performing their songs from home. They needed help to keep up with the theatrics of a stage. Enter Lowe’s, stage left!

Showing the contestants confined to their own homes, helped communicate the shared emotion behind the “Home Unites Us” campaign. And, the DIY experiences of the contestants reinforced how home improvement was attainable in many different ways.

In just one week, we mobilized Caroline Harmon, Lowe's internal trend & style expert, to virtually work with each contestant to personally design their individual space and within two days, we coordinated hundreds of products to be delivered to the final contestant’s real homes.

Then, from their phones, each contestant let viewers into their spaces to experience their major life moments unfolding in the program in an extraordinarily intimate way. We made these Idol contestant-curated rooms shoppable on Lowes.com and via email.

Host Ryan Seacrest and Caroline also appeared in five special features created for social media, showcasing the design journey of the rooms and tips on the right products people could purchase to achieve similar looks.

Through our content, Lowe’s showed how home could be a place to truly love.

• Double digital increase in sales for the items featured in our contestant curated rooms vs. week prior to our content airing and an 8.8% increase in average total order value

• Overnight, sentiment towards Lowe’s turned overwhelmingly positive

• 46% increase in immediate chatter and buzz

• Impression of brand increased 11%

• Ad awareness increased 17%

• The brand spot we ran in the show following our content drove 425% more searches than baseline