Spooky season begone! As consumers are packing up their pumpkins, retail brands have already begun to deck their halls with holiday goods as the fight for seasonal shoppers creeps continually earlier each year. But more than just unleashing yuletide stock into stores, some retailers are taking an active role in spreading holiday cheer through shoppable content on connected TV.

The Home Depot may not fuel its Halloween marketing with paid media, but the retailer is doing quite the opposite for the holidays—and making its campaign a must-stream. “Merry & Bright” is a festive home reno show starring “American Idol” winner Jordin Sparks. The singer guides families through revamping their homes to be worthy of a visit from Kris Kringle. The series includes three 10-minute episodes as well as short-form additions featuring tips from Sparks. “Merry & Bright” was produced by Vizio, and is now streaming on its CTV platform.

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The Nov. 1 launch for the series was a particularly important selling point for Home Depot because “our customers are starting to shop earlier and earlier, and decorating, celebrating and prepping for all the holidays earlier,” said Christine Reed, director of media at Home Depot. “We wanted to make sure that we were in market with this type of content series and our media weight in November, shifting that up from December.”

Periodically throughout the series, QR codes for each episode’s home makeover will direct users to curated pages on the Home Depot website that will feature products consumers can use to achieve the same look. 

Reed said “Merry & Bright” will serve as a test for investing further in branded content as Home Depot evaluates “how customers are going to interact with this content and how they’re going to drive results as a part of interacting with this content.” Shoppability is crucial to this aspect of the partnership with Vizio not just for proving direct sales. The partners will also track the overall rate of interaction and behaviors such as the point in each episode that consumers felt most inclined to scan, and be able to retarget those consumers across Home Depot’s marketing.

“Merry & Bright” will stream through Dec. 31, and will be featured on the Vizio home screen’s hero carousel throughout its run. The series will also be promoted through targeted ad breaks in other Vizio content and will stream on YouTube and social media as well. The partnership was negotiated by Home Depot’s media agency OMD and executed with the agency’s content marketing division, The Content Collective.

For its part, Vizio has been looking to boost its branded content production capabilities as well. In May, the CTV company announced the launch of the Vizio Branded Content Studio aligned with its NewFronts presentation. 

“We’ve done a great job over the last four years of leveraging sponsorship opportunities on the home screen … [ad products] that are turnkey ‘sponsor presents,’ but the new content studio is a chance for brands to really be inside the content to become the entertainment,” said Katlyn Wilson, director of branded content sales and strategy at Vizio. Counter to what some marketers may think, Wilson said creating the series was not a “slow, long, arduous, long-lead-time difficult process.” Although Vizio had been in conversation with Home Depot since early 2023, “the actual go date to the time that it’s live is around 90 days,” said Wilson.

Branded content has become a popular way for marketers to reach audiences as TV viewership has increasingly shifted from live linear TV to on-demand streaming, where many consumers opt to watch ad-free. Last year, Coca-Cola produced a holiday miniseries for Amazon Prime Video, and advertisers including Constellation Brands, Mars Wrigley and Johnnie Walker have grown investments in branded content as well.

Home Depot chose to go the route of partnering with a CTV platform rather than an individual streamer because viewership has fractured across numerous streaming platforms, many of which suffer from consumers hopping between them month to month. Platforms such as Vizio help ensure scale: Vizio users are guaranteed to see the home screen when they turn on their devices and may stop on the way to their intended app or show.

Another consideration for Home Depot was Vizio’s ability to integrate the retailer’s first-party data for campaign targeting, which not all streamers offer yet.

“For this initial pass for going to market with [branded content], it is more for mass reach and … ensuring it’s showcased at scale,” said Reed, who added that Home Depot is in conversation with “others in the streaming space” about ways to innovate its media strategy.

While the retailer still invests in linear TV advertising, particularly around sports, Home Depot is very conscious of “how so many eyeballs are still going into the streaming space,” said Reed. “That has evolved how we’re going to market as we think about our upfront deals in terms of the mix between network versus cable versus the streaming platforms, and how we want to ensure that no matter where our customers are, we’re there with them.”