Walmart is still trying to make “fetch” happen.
The giant retailer hopes to draw new attention to its Black Friday offerings by getting a jump on advertising around the annual holiday-shopping event. To call attention to new offers and low prices, Walmart will unveil a series of commercials featuring members of the cast of the 2004 movie “Mean Girls” reprising their roles — except now they are adults.
Lindsay Lohan, Lacey Chabert and Amanda Seyfried are among the film’s cast making a return. All are portrayed as adults — some with burgeoning “mean girls” of their own.
“Walmart is really known for Black Friday ,and we don’t intend to lose that positioning,” says Courtney Carlson, Walmart’s senior vice president of marketing, noting that the new commercials will be “unmissable” across both traditional advertising channels and social media. Walmart has in recent years tried to expand the concept of “Black Friday,” the one-day retail rush that takes place on the day after Thanksgiving, to the broader pre-holiday season. Many of its sales and bargains show up online — at the start of the week
The ads launch Wednesday (the day the Plastics from “Mean Girls” wear pink), with new iterations surfacing every subsequent Wednesday during the month. Each week, a different member of the cast will appear in an ad and a social post. Walmart wants to get its customers paying earlier attention to holiday shopping with by offering great deals and prices ahead of the actual Black Friday, slated to take place November 24, and Cyber Monday, scheduled for November 27.
“We think fans are going to be super excited to see us after all these years. I know we are excited for everyone to see what we’ve all been up to,” says Daniel Franzese, the actor who revives his character Damian Leigh for the campaign.
Other actors were excited by the prospect of a cast reunion. “It was so nice being back together after all these years. It was great catching up with everyone,” says Lohan. “It was wonderful to spend the day with Amanda and Lindsay. It was so much fun to reminisce and be together again after all these years,” says Chabert.
The large retail chain employed a similar strategy in 2022. In a series of commercials timed to Black Friday, Walmart revived the 1999 Mike Judge satire “Office Space,” using the talents of actors Gary Cole, who played the infamous corporate manager Bill Lumbergh and Ajay Naidu, who played the rebellious tech worker Samir Nagheenanajar.
The company faced a challenge in recent weeks when a picture of members of the “Mean Girls” cast slipped out onto the web. Many who saw it believed they might have been getting a deliberately revealed picture that might be part of a Super Bowl commercial. But Walmart’s Carlson says the photo “legitimately leaked” — and not by design. “We kept very quiet,” she says, so as not to fan interest ahead of the campaign’s debut.