The official start of the holiday shopping season is right around the corner.
While it typically conjures up images of consumers clamoring for deals on big ticket items, American retailer Walgreens is hoping that this year it can be the first place consumers turn for inexpensive gifts like wine, candles and small toys.
“We want to inspire small gifting,” Walgreens’ senior director of mobile, social, content and performance marketing, Adam Kmiec, explained to Internet Retailer.
“Throughout the holiday season we want to remind our customers that we offer convenient options in stores and online so that they can quickly find a gift and get back to the fun of the holiday season.”
To that end, the retailer, which operates some 8,000 stores across the United States, as well as an ecommerce site at walgreens.com, is launching its first-ever video campaign on Pinterest, which Kmiec says has been a source of significantly increased social engagement during the holiday shopping season.
In recent years, Pinterest has unveiled a number of ad products, like Promoted Pins, and the Walgreens video campaign will utilize Pinterest’s ad product, Promoted Videos, which was launched in August and that Pinterest says have produced significantly higher brand lift metrics than non-video ads.
For example, one of the first users of Promoted Videos, General Mills, found that the video ads were four times as memorable than their non-video ads on Pinterest.
Promoted Videos can be combined with Promoted Pins, and use Pinterest’s native video player, which the company says provides for a “seamless experience.”
A focused effort
Like many social platforms, video has become an increasingly important part of Pinterest’s content mix. In fact, video on Pinterest has grown by 60% in the past year.
Pinterest is also widely recognized as one of the most commerce-centric social platforms. According to one report, over half of (Read more...) users use the platform to discover and/or shop for products, compared to just 12% for other social platforms, and Pinterest says that 75% of the content that users interact with on its platform comes from businesses.
That makes it a logical option for a brand like Walgreens. But Walgreens’ effort to promote itself as a solution for consumers’ small gifting needs isn’t just relying on Pinterest’s reputation for reaching shopping-minded users.
Not only will the retailer will be using Pinterest’s demographic targeting options, it will be targeting its Promoted Video ads to Pinterest users who have pinned content from or previously visited Walgreens.com.
And it plans to measure just how well this targeting works, by tracking Walgreens.com sales that originate from Pinterest, as well as store sales and brand lift metrics.
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