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This holiday season, Walmart is taking a page from The Hallmark Channel—sort of.
While the cable network remains the undisputed champion of the holiday film genre, the mega-retailer is throwing its own hat into the romcom ring. Its new 23-episode series, Add to Heart, aims to connect with shoppers who watch the sweet guilty pleasures alongside holiday traditions such as decorating, shopping and baking cookies.
With its name and opening title graphics giving a subtle wink to the online shopping experience, Add to Heart follows a young woman named Jessica working as an interior design assistant in New York as she navigates the usual romcom tropes. Those include an unexpected proposal from a man she’s dated briefly, a glamorous yet icy boss, a gay roommate-slash-bestie who provides the comedic one-liners and revelatory truth bombs, and a chance encounter with a former flame named Javi—who may or may not be the love of her life—when she returns to her small hometown for the holidays.
In the Walmart version, audiences can shop the outfits worn by the cast, the makeup the boss applies, and almost all the furnishings, ornaments and other holiday fare conspicuously placed around the generously spaced homes—with more than 330 products available to purchase through the retailer.
That the former couple’s “re-meet cute” and courtship happens while she is shopping in her local Walmart store is also by design.
Each episode of Add to Heart runs under three minutes, and the conclusions prompt audiences to visit a dedicated homepage on the retailer’s site to shop items featured in the series.
Produced in partnership with Publicis Groupe agencies including Fallon, Publicis NY, The Community, Contender and Digitas, the series launches on TikTok, Roku and YouTube with its first six episodes Dec. 2, the following eight episodes Dec. 5 and the remaining nine Dec. 8.
The ‘RomCommerce’ era is here
William White, chief marketing officer at Walmart U.S., told Adweek that the series continues a strategy that the retailer has implemented “for quite some time,” using innovation to create omnichannel experiences that “shorten the distance between inspiration and purchase.”
The brand has previously created content series featuring Kansas City Chiefs quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, Latin music star Becky G and Barbie. It also recently announced a partnership with NBCUniversal to run shoppable episodes of Bravo’s Below Deck on Peacock using KERV Interactive’s artificial intelligence technology, which identifies items in the scenes or and locates them through the retailer.
But with Add to Heart, White said Walmart is taking these experiences to the next level.
