By Will Novosedlik

Imagine your typical Hallmark holiday rom com but everything you see is for sale, from the main character’s lipstick to the throw pillows in the B&B she’s renting while visiting her family for Christmas.

Shoppable content is not a new idea. It’s a concept that’s been kicking around since the dot-com days. The difference is, back then it was just an idea. Now, it’s big in China and just starting to catch on in North America. Walmart introduced it’s own shoppable content this past holiday season in the form of a 23-episode romantic comedy called Add to Heart, where viewers can buy anything they see directly from Walmart while watching the series on TikTok, Roku and YouTube.

“As much as this is not something I could ever bring myself to watch… I love it for Walmart,” says Bob Froese, founder and CCO of Toronto-based creative shop Bob’s Your Uncle. “Everything about it – from the cheesy mashup ‘RomCommerce’ title to the less-than-academy-award-winning films seems like a perfect fit for Walmart.”

The user experience varies slightly from one channel to the next. On TikTok, each three-minute episode runs as a paid in-feed ad featuring 10 shoppable product tiles. On Roku, users see an ad on their home screen, which takes them to the series’ playlist while watching. They can shop for products by pressing OK on the Roku remote, which allows users to text themselves a link to shop on their phone on YouTube. Users can find a link to all the products in the description box.

Walmart SVP and CMO William White said in a recent WSJ video that to measure consumer engagement around Add to Heart, the retailer looks at three things: One, are people adding items to their cart while watching the content? Two, are they buying it? And three, if they’re not buying it, are they coming back to it later? If the answer is three, and they bought the item later in store, the digital version that prompted the purchase is considered an “inspiration moment.”

Cam Wykes, executive experience director North America for the Oliver Agency says, “I love the concept. It reminds me of those Nescafé ads from when I was young but with an intuitive ecommerce element.” Wykes is referring to when Nescafe aired a series of twelve 45s TV spots for Taster’s Choice which, taken together in sequence, were meant to resemble scenes from a slow-burn romantic novel. While the narrative content was not that much different than Add to Heart, back then (between 1987 and 1993), there was of course no way to purchase the product without getting off your couch and going to the supermarket.

“Where [Add to Heart] falls short for me is the number of episodes (23),” says Wykes. “Too much of a good thing. It’s a fine line between keeping the audience engaged in the story and trying to feature as many Walmart products as possible.” Wykes managed to get through 9 episodes before losing interest.

Shoppable content is where media companies seeking new sources of revenue meet the need for brands to be on both social media and streaming platforms, where all the eyeballs are these days, explains Christopher Vollmer, managing director at media and marketing consulting firm MediaLink, in the same WSJ video. “What they’re trying to do now is build up much more of a first party data relationship with consumers and actually push them more and more to their own environments where they can enact a transaction and build more of a long-term relationship,” he says.

But like Wykes, Vollmer is wary of the risks of pushing consumers away before the story’s over. “The content has to be great. It can be a fantastic user experience, but if it’s not embedded in a story that users find as very compelling, very interesting, it’s not going to be something that they come back to.”

For Peter Rodriguez, chartered marketer and founder of The Brand Igniter, a marketing consultancy, Add to Heart is “a strategic consumer-centric initiative. It makes Walmart stand out in the consideration set and separates it from the rest. It’s transparent and well-executed. And Roku is a fast-rising star on the media landscape — a great delivery channel.” Rodriguez speculates that it would also be great if this content could expand beyond the confines of streaming platforms to include mass media.

“This is a big risk for us,” shares Walmart’s White. Much of the shooting and on-screen action was governed by the need to make the products stand out, not the actors. The female lead in the series talks about having to position herself in precisely the same spot for several takes so that her gold high heels get maximum visibility. When the product is the main character, the actors are little more than live props — leaving even less room for compelling storytelling.