Walmart enlists 'Office Space' cast to make case for the Mondays in holiday ads

Walmart is encouraging people to ignore those TPS reports and instead head to the store or Walmart.com on Mondays as it enlists much of the cast of the 1999 movie “Office Space” as part of a multi-faceted 2022 holiday campaign. Jennifer Aniston will not bring her flair to the campaign. But Kinna McInroe as Nina, known for her line “someone has a case of the Mondays,” gets the point across about the retailer focusing holiday sales this year on Mondays rather than Black Friday. Gary Cole returns in a starring role as Bill Lumbergh, including a demand in one ad that “we’re going to need you to come in seven hours early,” a nod to early deals for Walmart+ members. Diedrich Bader as Lawrence, Ajay Naidu as Samir and the real singer Michael Bolton, not the Office Space character, all will figure prominently too. The latter even sings a snippet of a custom Walmart Mondays jingle. Background music for the spots is the Geto Boys’ “Damn It Feels Good to Be a Gangsta,” also used in the movie. “Monday is I think everybody’s least favorite day of the week,” said Casey Schlaybaugh, VP brand strategy and marketing, Walmart. “So we decided there’s no better way to flip the script and make Mondays actually the most loved day.” “This content will be episodic with big masthead takeovers on YouTube every Monday through November,” Schlaybaugh said. Placements will also include cinema and broadcast advertising, she said. Walmart isn’t giving up on Black Friday, she said. But it’s important strategically to have multiple events, so Walmart will continue and expand a strategy it started two years ago to have multiple events starting before Thanksgiving. “Black Friday is still incredibly important,” Schlaybaugh said. “But one of the things we know is that customers do want to shop early. They want to have control. They want to shop more frequently.” Walmart's holiday work comes from Publicis and Lopez Negrete Communications. The retailer's broader holiday effort includes an anthem multicultural spot that broke late last month highlighting how a wide range of families celebrate the holidays. That campaign was built from the efforts of Walmart marketers fanning out around the country to talk with customers about their holiday traditions, and the words in the ads all came from customers' mouths, said William White, chief marketing officer of Walmart U.S., in a panel last week at the Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing conference. Spots that focus on the families within the anthem spot will follow later in the holidays, Schlaybaugh said. The holiday push also includes a creator house in Walmart's hometown of Bentonville, Arkansas, where creators will produce content that the retailer will share on its social channels throughout the holidays, including some shoppable livestreams, she said.

Walmart enlists 'Office Space' cast to make case for the Mondays in holiday ads

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