How Urban Outfitters plans to target Gen Z with its holiday shopping campaign

Just thinking about the holidays—the associated sights, smells, tastes and sounds—can induce feelings of both sweet nostalgia and slight anxiety. Playing on this dichotomy, Urban Outfitters’ holiday campaign, “Gifts That Make Sense,” directly targets Gen Z by bringing its product assortment to life through sensory-based messaging and media that inspires shareable content. With disruptive CGI content and impactful out-of-home (OOH) components, the brand is providing an attention-grabbing take on holiday sensory overload.

Urban Outfitters’ innovative seasonal strategy is about stopping the scroll, creating community and sparking conversation—all of which instills positive brand associations, elevates top products and ultimately encourages consumers along their path to purchase. With Gen Z as the brand’s core customer, Urban Outfitters aims to create a memorable campaign for this age bracket that “makes you look.”

Get visible

Urban Outfitters intends to keep the energy of its holiday marketing campaign fresh and build an even stronger connection with Gen Z through disruptive CGI creative content that highlights its top sellers and gets the brand’s core consumer to look twice. Gen Z is presented with an endless scroll of visual content on social media, so to break through the noise, Urban Outfitters is using CGI to reimagine its products and join the conversations surrounding cultural moments.

To this end, Urban Outfitters tapped Philadelphia-based photographer and digital artist Andre Rucker to create CGI FOOH (fake out-of-home) animations surrounding the marathon. Rucker digitally transformed the facade of the brand’s flagship Herald Square store so it appears to be covered by the Metallic Puffer Throw Blanket, a new hero item for the season. Making the playful association between the metallic blanket and the recognizable Mylar thermal blankets that runners wear after a race, the animation was shared on the company’s official Instagram and TikTok accounts, garnering over 1 million views in under 24 hours.

Continuing through the month, Urban Outfitters will leverage Rucker to supersize some of its smallest items of the season. Referencing the annual holiday window displays in New York City, several Smiski figures, a new addition within the brand’s novelties assortment, will take to social media in exponential scale, animated to interact with and glow in the windows of Urban Outfitters’ Fifth Avenue store. Culminating the series and paying tribute to the classic parade floats of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a giant version of a Sonny Angel figure will be shown on strings floating by the Herald Square store, which sits along the actual parade route.

“Since introducing Sonny Angel in March, we have been chasing the almost instantaneous demand fueled by our Gen Z customer,” said Jena Tracey, managing director of Urban Outfitters Home. “Sonny Angel and similar new novelty items like Smiski have been so popular as a form of collecting, decorating and infusing positivity, so it’s very exciting to see these small figures come to large scale through CGI and be shared to our customers through social media.”

Get iconic

Partnering a campaign with an iconic moment is a smart strategy to drive ROI, build community and celebrate culture, and Urban Outfitters decided the New York City Marathon was the perfect fit. The race, which took place on Nov. 5, had more than 50,000 runners and roughly 2 million spectators, and Urban Outfitters knew this would be a great moment to build connection and reach new customers.

The retailer developed a series of OOH ads that were created in-house and spoke to the senses by featuring its emotive holiday editorial and corresponding sensory phrases, including: “It’s a Feeling,” “Hear to Stay” and “Scent with Love.” Installed on Oct. 30 at more than 120 locations along the marathon route, the OOH creative drove brand association and awareness leading up to and during the race.

Get talking

Translating the “Gifts That Make Sense” campaign to its Q4 influencer strategy, Urban Outfitters plans to cast a wide net for its social media approach, partnering with more than 200 creators across the season through curated gift boxes aligned to each sense.

“We’re inspired by the growing community of creators that bring our brand and products to life in creative and unexpected ways,” said Catherine Clair Williams, head of brand marketing at Urban Outfitters. From CGI content to out-of-home ads to amplifying the voices of the creators in our community, Urban Outfitters brings the sensory extensions of the holiday campaign to life through authentic and relatable content that creates meaningful connections with our customers.”