Holiday AI Assistant

DDM Studios developed a new kind of holiday helper for Walmart: a large language model (LLM) trained on DDM insights and content, Walmart merchandise and messaging, and campaign goals to reach holiday gifting and hosting intenders across our audiences. This all-seeing holiday AI assistant acted as a predictive, dependable resource that guided us behind the scenes as we created benchmark-busting social content across five of DDM’s powerhouse brands: Better Homes & Gardens, InStyle, PEOPLE, Real Simple, and The Spruce.

From there, DDM Studios’s team of content editors and video producers curated AI outputs to produce the “12 Trends of the Season” social video package and a co-branded Pinterest board: “Thoughtful Gifting Inspiration,” housing six Pins custom-shot for Walmart. 

All social content drove to curated shopping carts with featured items on Walmart.com for seamless holiday shoppability.

Walmart’s primary KPI was to encourage awareness and consideration among their target audience, with a special eye toward engagement rate and video completion rate benchmarks, and our campaign delivered in spades.

Our social video package delivered an astounding 23M+ impressions, 4.5M+ over what was contracted. TikTok videos were particularly high performing in engagement rate (ER), with a lift in ER benchmark +22%. For video completion rate (VCR), Instagram was our top-performing platform, with a VCR 4x higher than our typical benchmarks.

Our native approach to Pinterest was both first-to-category and a huge success with an Engagement Rate +450% above benchmark. And it wasn’t one outlier that caused this spike: All Pinterest creatives outperformed the ER benchmark. Three of the six native Pins within the co-branded Pinterest Board saw ERs at least +435% over benchmark.

This campaign was a true social-first program with content running across TikTok, Instagram, and Pinterest. By using the AI Assistant, we achieved multiple efficiencies and streamlined processes in the pre-production phase, which allowed us more resources to invest in creating more of the right content while maintaining our rigorous storytelling and quality standards. 

With this in mind, we would say that the AI Assistant allowed us to create more quality and quantity of videos (12 total!) than we have in previous campaigns. The Holiday AI Assistant campaign showed that our audiences were drawn to Walmart’s merchandise when seeking out gifting and hosting ideas during the holiday season.