Google on Monday (Nov. 25) launched a game show content series for its Shopping platform that is hosted by Jimmy Kimmel and features five celebrity duos as contestants. The effort builds on previously released holiday ads that include other famous pairings and a similar theme around the competitive spirit that takes hold during the season.
“We discovered around 60% of people like to treat the holiday gifting period as a little bit of friendly competition, like, ‘Who’s going to give the best gift?’ So we centered an entire campaign all around this [idea],” said Stephanie Horton, senior director of global commerce marketing for Google.
A new episode of the game show, “Can You Gift It?,” will drop on YouTube every day this week, culminating on Black Friday, with cutdowns running across digital and social. Each episode features Kimmel and a pair of celebrities who compete in tasks reminiscent of “The Price Is Right” and “The Dating Game” from a retro-styled game show set. The activities rely on Google’s holiday shopping insights and search data.
The first episode of “Can You Gift It?” stars comedian Eric André and music producer Benny Blanco, while future pairings include WNBA stars Kelsey Plum and Kahleah Copper and comedic talent Ronny Chieng, Atsuko Okatsuka, Robin Thede, Roy Wood Jr., Matt Rogers and Joel Kim Booster.
“We wanted people who had that really good friendly competition vibe with each other, because if you think about gift giving, it’s usually for your close friends or people in your family. When we were thinking about it, we really wanted to choose people who had that same relationship,” Horton said.
Google leveraged similar relationships in earlier ads that are part of its holiday campaign. NBA legend Dwayne Wayne and actor Gabrielle Union, who are married, first appeared last month in ads that saw Wade doing his holiday shopping while running across town as Union used Google Shopping by the pool. This month, musicians Charli XCX and Troye Sivan appeared in 15- and 30-second spots that played up the relationship between the “Brat” superstar and her “Sweat” tour mate.
The campaign will run through Dec. 5 across connected TV and social channels including TikTok, Reddit, Meta and Snap, with additional content from Google and partners like Anomaly.
Questions for the game were pulled from Google Shopping’s Holiday 100 list of the most-searched items, giving the platform a chance to turn an element of its shopper data into marketing content. Similar tactics have been utilized by both Amazon and Walmart this holiday season. Google’s campaign additionally highlights some of the platform’s new commerce features, like dynamic filters and AI-powered personalization, that began rolling out to Shopping last month.
“There are so many ways to help you shop on Google, from reviews to filters to some of our AI technology, so we wanted to bring it to life in a way that was palatable and would humanize some of the technology… in a fun way,” Horton said.
