How Hallmark Wins At Holiday Marketing Campaigns: Exclusive Look
The Science Behind Hallmark’s Winning Holiday Marketing Campaigns
High-Stakes Seasonality: Why Holiday Marketing Campaigns Are Make or Break
In the high-stakes arena of holiday marketing, occasions like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and Christmas present pivotal opportunities for brands to connect with consumers and drive excess sales. Hallmark, a master of monetizing meaningful moments, understands the intense pressure of orchestrating brilliant holiday ad campaigns. For CMOs, CFOs, brand managers, sales teams, and creative professionals, the challenge is both intense and exacting.
As a result, many brands retreat to the psychological comfort of the standard Awareness, Consideration, Conversion (ACC) funnel. But after five years of spearheading high-profile holiday marketing campaigns, we’ve uncovered surprising truths that challenge the efficacy of the traditional media planning convention. Our exclusive case study, derived from extensive longitudinal data gathered through Hallmark’s top-tier holiday paid media campaigns, exposes the fundamental shortcomings of this conventional model.
The evidence makes clear that time-sensitive holiday campaigns demand a strategic rethink rather than reliance on outdated formulas. The bottom line? Familiar but ineffective methods can secure short-term results but often undermine sustainable, long-term growth.
'Hallmark Holiday' Marketing
In more than 100 countries and 30 languages, Hallmark is a global behemoth in holiday. It owns approximately half of the $7.5 billion U.S. market for greeting cards, and a sizable share in holiday gifting and gift wrap products. As a brand, Hallmark’s holiday marketing campaigns have huge cultural significance. Hallmark is so closely associated with special occasions and celebrations that it’s been accused of “inventing” holidays. (It’s stance? “While we’re honored that people so closely link the Hallmark name with celebrations and special occasions, [but] we can’t take credit for creating holidays.”)
In particular, Mother’s Day, Valentine’s and the Christmas holiday season represent a substantial portion of sales. Hallmark Keepsake Ornaments ornaments, for instance, can be found in 38,000 retailers worldwide, and, Hallmark is the only brand with a notable marketshare – roughly 35% – of the $700 million U.S. retail market for Christmas ornaments, a category that is rather obviously highly seasonal.
Holidays often represent outsized value for otherwise hard-to-motivate retail shoppers. Hence, holiday ad strategy aims to maximize the value of these spending sprints for brands. Amid changing consumer habits, outsized competition, radical shifts in the performance media landscape, and perennial challenges with how marketing organizations budget for media investment, brands like Hallmark can’t rest on their holiday ad strategy.
For 5 years Criterion Global has helped Hallmark break free from traditional formula in its holiday ad campaigns. This approach focused on balancing short term sales with long-term brand building by using awareness media that drove offline foot traffic in stores while also running conversion-focused holiday marketing campaigns to maintain relevance and engagement digitally.
How the Holiday Marketing ‘Formula’ is Flawed
The traditional “Awareness, Consideration, Conversion” (ACC) model reveals significant shortcomings in the context of today’s complex and omnichannel digital environment. Chief among these is the model’s flawed depiction of the “consideration” phase, which has become increasingly nebulous. Contrary to the linear progression suggested by the ACC formula, consumer decision-making is rarely a straightforward path.
Additionally, the process of retargeting further complicates this ACC model by blurring the lines between consideration and conversion. Ads that are meant to re-engage users through retargeting make it impossible for advertisers to pinpoint exactly where a consumer is on their journey. For example, someone exposed to a consideration campaign might convert immediately, or an awareness effort could unexpectedly lead to a purchase. For advertisers like Hallmark which invest <$10M annually, there is often a tendency to over-invest in lower-funnel tactics like retargeting and its many variants. But the bottom line is that campaigns no longer fit so neatly into these solid, three categories.
The Perils of Holiday Ad Intertia
As shown above, common media planning conceptions of how shoppers shop are flawed, or rather, mis-aligned with consumer experiences. But what’s worse are organizations that become stuck in holiday planning interia – re-purposing the same flawed planning year over year.
As shown, consumer journeys are more nuanced than typical funnels represent. This is most commonly demonstrated when consumers bypass the consideration stage altogether, moving directly from awareness to conversion. They buy because of brand recognition. But in digital media channels, they may remain entrenched in outdated consideration phases long after their research is complete. This inherent unpredictability in consumer behavior renders the middle stage of the ACC funnel challenging to define and target effectively.
In addition, consumers don’t only shop online. 75% of retail revenue is still tied to non-digital environments, and the rise of omnichannel purchasing, cross-channel strategies, and AI-informed performance media buying tactics like Advantage+ and PMax add to even more murkiness in the “Awareness, Consideration, Conversion” model, since consumers now engage with brands across a variety of platforms – social media, websites, apps, and in-store interactions – further blurring the lines between these stages. Different types of media exposure can trigger completely different actions, and measurement is not created equally, particularly for omnichannel retailers like Hallmark.
Overall, these imperfect variables make the consumer journey much less straightforward than it used to be, resulting in a fragmented path where touchpoints across channels influence outcomes in ways the traditional ACC funnel can’t adequately capture.
Do Holiday Marketing Campaigns Undermine Long-Term Growth?
Our yearslong holiday marketing work proved that the “Awareness, Consideration, Conversion” (ACC) model often oversimplifies the customer journey, leading brands to fixate on conversion metrics at the expense of crucial earlier stages. This skewed focus typically impacts long-term growth data – although it may not be as apparent in short-term returns on investment (ROI).
In the high-stakes realm of holiday marketing, where time pressures are acute and the competition fierce, this myopia can prompt even established brands to sacrifice sustainable growth for immediate gains.
For instance, during the third year of our collaboration with Hallmark, internal budget cuts necessitated a 20% reduction in media spending year-over-year. Concurrently, there was a heightened emphasis on generating immediate, measurable digital revenue.
The Quantifiability Bias, In Action
The results of prioritizing performance, and sacrificing brand were, to put it mildly, mixed:
- Digital Success: Despite the -20% budget cut, year 3 digital performance media metrics soared. Digital revenue exceeded projections by 40%, grew by 18.8% YOY, and saw a staggering 2270% increase vs the trailing 24 months. Additionally, our work saw digitally-verified Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) improved by 48.7% YOY.
- In-Store Decline: However, these digital wins came at a cost. Using our online to offline measurement, ad-attributable in-store revenue experienced a sharp 61% decline. attributed to the reduced allocation of resources to traditional retail channels.
- Mixed Outcomes: While the digital strategy boosted online revenue, the overall effect on brand awareness and other key metrics was negative, despite an otherwise successful +8.14% lift in visitation. The macro shift in focus led to a dip in total revenue when combining digital and in-store figures.
Our yearslong work with Hallmark underscores the complex balancing act in optimizing holiday marketing campaigns and growing brands long term. Aggressive digital growth and performance media does not always yield total revenue increases, especially when brand awareness and physical store performance are impacted. Brands that overlook brand awareness and consideration tend to experience reduced brand recall, a phenomenon that’s well-documented in neuroscience.
In the end “Awareness, Consideration, Conversion” formulas for holiday marketing campaigns can plateau growth, causing brands struggle to grow and keep a competitive edge in the long term.
How Hallmark Overcame Holiday Marketing Inertia
| Brand Media | Performance
(Conversion) |
Impact Comparison
on Total Revenue |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Y3 | 15.61% lift | 10.82% lift | +44% better for brand |
| Y4 | 19.35% lift | 7.37% lift | +163% better for brand |
| Y5 | 79.38% lift | 21.02% lift | +277% better for brand |
Branding media has proven to deliver lower costs per visit, and greater incremental store visitation lift vs performance. The data underscores the pitfalls of the “Awareness Consideration Conversion” model. Though performance media delivered short-term online gains, the overall macro revenue suffered due to the amount of Hallmark’s sales that took place in-store. Criterion Global’s analysis uncovered the difficulty of measuring brand media impact in real-time—an issue explained by “availability bias”, where decisions are skewed by the most immediately accessible datasets (in this case, digital ROI data).
Holiday Marketing Impact: the Real Results
Nevertheless, brand media ultimately proved to be the unsung hero of Hallmark’s holiday marketing campaigns, delivering significant +15.61% lift in in-store visits (+44% greater than performance media at 10.82%), lower costs per visit, and substantially higher in-store ROAS (3.21x, using a client formula which factored incremental visits x in-store purchase rate x average in store transactional value).
Criterion Global’s strategic focus on finding the sweet spot between brand and performance media led to greater incremental store visitation and sustained value over the long term.
The central lesson from Hallmark holiday paid media campaigns- gleaned from over 20 quarters and approximately 15 mainstream holiday ad campaigns – is that, despite the allure of immediate online wins through conversion-focused tactics, it is crucial not to underfund or undervalue upper funnel marketing strategies. Even in time sensitive holiday marketing periods. These stages are vital for driving offline revenue as well as total max campaign impact. Criterion Global’s refined approach to the “Awareness, Consideration, Conversion” (ACC) model demonstrates that a more sophisticated paid media strategy can deliver superior results across both online and offline channels. For many brands, this evolved methodology ultimately fosters greater overall success.
Redefining Holiday Campaigns: Key Lessons from Hallmark’s Success
By moving beyond the rigid funnel framework, Hallmark and Criterion Global redefined holiday campaign marketing for this beloved global brand. Instead of concentrating exclusively on conversion, we balanced strategies that nurtured brand awareness and deep motional engagement. This balanced approach has proven to be essential for enhancing overall brand success.
Quoting the client lead: “While Hallmark helps people express their caring 24/7 and year round, many promotional marketing campaigns focus on short term, seasonal celebrations, such as Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day. Pacing our media spend and messaging strategies to align with customer needs is mission-critical for these seasonal initiatives. Criterion Global works to map patterns of demand, using strategic choices in media allocation based on seasonality and shopping patterns to improve marketing outcomes, then reporting back on jointly determined success metrics outlined in our scorecards. Most importantly, their ability to rapidly shift spends and quickly pivot based on real time customer sales metrics helped us deliver expertly-executed and perfectly-paced paid media campaigns.”
For more on the importance of holiday ads on your annual media planning, or for consultation on recalibrating your media investment, Contact Us.