Party City

The objective

Sparking interest and engagement for Halloween season

Party City, owned and operated by Canadian Tire in Canada, is widely known for their selection of costumes, décor, animatronics, accessories and party supplies. For Halloween, the brand aimed to establish itself as the go-to destination for young Canadian shoppers looking for spook-tacular costumes. They set out to reach, entertain and inspire new and existing customers, who lived near a Party City location and were likely to visit. The brand looked to TikTok for its dynamic and engaged audience, to promote their products in a creative way, and ultimately drive online and in-store traffic. In addition to achieving media efficiency, Party City wanted to drive incrementally positive brand sentiment.

The solution

A potion of creativity and strategy

Over a period of six weeks, Party City leveraged a mix of TikTok's innovative ad solutions, strategically planned to peak during the Halloween season, ensuring maximum engagement and impact. The campaign was driven by a first-to-market Pulse Seasonal Lineup for Halloween, ensuring highly relevant ad delivery to engaged customers on the platform. With Pulse Seasonal Lineups, advertisers can feature their ads next to the top trending TikTok content during key seasonal moments, allowing for maximized brand awareness, relevance and affinity. Additionally, Spark Ads and Video Shopping Ads were also leveraged to create an entertaining and recurring presence for Party City on TikTok, with the aim to boost ad recall and drive website visits.

These solutions were bundled with proper measurement to assess the effectiveness of strategic ad placements and creative executions. A Brand Lift Study (BLS) was implemented to study any shifts in recall or perception and a Foursquare study was leveraged to help measure any direct impact on store visits and foot traffic.

For the creative, the campaign was supported with both branded and creator-driven content, specifically designed for TikTok to ensure relevance and relatability. The ads creatively showcased Party City products with an entertaining hook, inviting audiences to visit the store and find everything they needed for their perfect Halloween moment.

The results

Spellbinding full-funnel success

Party City’s campaign not only achieved high engagement with 27.5M video views but also significantly boosted store visits during a critical sales period. In particular, the Halloween Pulse Seasonal Lineup significantly surpassed regional BLS norms - reporting an increase of 14% across ad recall. As a result, Party City successfully penetrated the market, making a memorable impact on its target demographic.

Through Brand Lift Study campaign cuts, it was identified that the strategic use of Halloween Pulse was the most efficient in driving awareness and translated into tangible results, with over 2400 incremental store visits attributed to the campaign. Simultaneously, through the FourSquare Foot Traffic Study, Video Shopping Ads were also proven impactful with an 8% lift in store visitation.

Party City's innovative approach to Halloween marketing on TikTok set a new standard for moment based retail campaigns, effectively driving both online engagement and in-store traffic. Now that’s some enchanting success!