• by Barbara Lippert , Columnist, October 28, 2024

“Gifts That Show You Get Them,” Walmart’s new 60-second holiday anthem, is a sweet and nostalgic spot that never becomes too cloying.

That’s because it sidesteps many of the usual Yuletide tropes to embrace moments of gift-giving shown in fizzy pop cultural clips.

Thus, the range of picks shows that the world’s largest retailer gets YOU.

In the quick cuts department, there’s something for everyone, especially if you’re fond of recognizable comic flashes in such TV series and films as “Gilmore Girls,” “The Simpsons,” “SpongeBob Squarepants” and “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation,” among others.

My fave clip is from “Gilmore Girls,” a now-classic series that lit up the early aughts. It’s a telling scene between the on-again/off-again couple Lorelei and Luke, whose love language seems to be sarcasm.

Lorelei hands Luke a hat (a backwards baseball cap is part of his identity) But fearful of overdoing it or seeming too sincere or emotional, she qualifies it by saying,  “I just thought, G-d forbid, if something happens to that one….” pointing to the cap he never takes off his head.

Whereas SpongeBob is beside himself with joy at the prospect of a gift, and even Bart Simpson manages to hug Mamma Marge to thank her for a gift, albeit with an eyeroll.

These scenes are matched with exchanges between current day gift-givers (and okay, those include scenes with big blue boxes, Christmas trees, and snow.)

They seem straightforward enough, but watching closely, the team snuck in a few sugar-resistant nuggets.

A bunch of bowlers give their buddy a hideous Christmas sweater and he (lies?)  “You nailed it!” And in the last scene, a maybe 8-year-old boy in flannel pajamas hugs his mom tightly as she ponders the gift he just gave her and tries to love it: a plastic water cup with a straw.

These are recognizable, and even poignant, human moments.

“We’re always looking… to build emotional connection between our brand and the customer,”  Walmart Vice President of Creative David Hartman explained in a release.

The big box retailer has focused for a while on “putting the brand in culture, and culture in the brand,” according to Hartman.

That certainly was true for last year’s black Friday campaign, a clever update of the movie “Mean Girls” using the original featured actresses Lindsay Lohan, Lacey Chabert and Amanda Seyfried, who are now mean-ish millennials and mothers. “On Wednesdays, we still wear pink” Lohan says in a voiceover, referring to the most quoted line and showing the silliness of those sacrosanct rules in the 2004 film.

“Gifts That Show You Get Them” was developed by several Publicis Groupe agencies, including Fallon, Publicis New York, The Community, Contender and Digitas.

The video anthem, in 60- and 30-second form, is directed by Alexander Payne. 

Payne has helmed some of my favorite movies (“The Holdovers,” “Sideways” and “Citizen Ruth.”) I would have enjoyed seeing more of his idiosyncratic lens and style emerge, especially if it involved any eye-rolling by Paul Giamatti.

Still, it gets to the heart of holiday gifting, for all its beautiful, thoughtful intentions and resulting hits and misses.

And “if something happens to that one,” as Lorelei delicately put it, the spot certainly reminds a gift giver where to go so that everyone gets seen and, um, as the voiceover puts it, loved.