Target Hopes to Sell Christmas With a Life-Size Legos Pirate ShipIn the movie Big, Tom Hanks personified New York City’s status as the land of perpetual childhood when he played Chopsticks by dancing on an oversized piano at FAO Schwarz. This year’s Christmas display from Target is sure to give that iconic scene a run for its money. At a 16,000-square-foot “retail spectacle”—located next to the Chelsea Market in New York, free and open to the public for two weeks starting Wednesday, December 9—Target will lure adult shoppers and the children within us all with interactive experiences tied to toys the retailer is selling this season. Visitors will be able to test-fly drones, drive remote-control cars around a peppermint track through a smartphone app, play with their own picture on an enormous Etch A Sketch, and use what Target describes tantalizingly as “a Rube Goldberg-like contraption to personalize an ornament.” The display will include a grownup-sized ball pit and a life-sized Lego pirate ship, as seen on TV, dubbed the S.S. Free Shipping.
A Target promotion includes free standard shipping for all online orders throughout the holidays.) Of course the purpose of the whole display for the Minneapolis-based retailer isn’t all ball pits and Legos. Upon entering, visitors will get an RFID tag they can scan at displays to put items in a digital cart, which they can pay for and pick up at the end of of their journey (from Santa’s arm sticking out of a chimney).“The idea is to make the shopping experience feel weightless and less encumbered and to make the transaction more seamless and effortless,” retail analyst Amy Koo told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “But the most significant part of [Wonderland] is to bring this interactive and physical experience to a segment of the population that Target very much cares about.” All products and services featured are based solely on editorial selection. MONEY may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website.Quotes delayed at least 15 minutes.
Market data provided by Interactive Data. S&P Index data is the property of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. and its licensors. Powered and implemented by Interactive Data Managed SolutionsTarget TV Commercial, 'Chapter Two: Pirate Shipping' Disney Prep & Landing on ABC - past 2 weeks About Target TV Commercial, 'Chapter Two: Pirate Shipping' Three children and Bullseye the Target dog set sail aboard the SS Free Shipping with a clan of LEGO pirates. The ship is sailing through a whipped cream sea when, all of a sudden, a Twizzler octopus surrounds the vessel. The crew is terrified until they realize that all he wants is his package. The young girl hands him his present and waves him off, and the captain wishes him happy holidays. Olivia Trujillo ... \"Nina\" girl in pink coat and glasses, Robert Daniel Sloan ... Boy, Shiloh Nelson ... Bullseye, Kids, Octopus, Pirate Target Back to School Target Phillip Lim Collection We’ll give you a glimpse of more of our powerful real-time ad analytics.
Ready for the big time? Request a trial of the iSpot TV Ad Analytics platform. You've hit your data view limit. Time to upgrade to the full iSpot TV Ad Analytics platform. At least one social/website link containing a recent photo of the actor. Submissions without photos may not be accepted. Voice over actors: provide a link to your professional website containing your reel. Submit ONCE per commercial, and allow 48 to 72 hours for your request to be processed. Your Email (used for confirmation)Over the years, Target Corp. has pulled many stunts to generate buzz in New York City — from building a life-size dollhouse in Grand Central Station a couple of years ago to perhaps, most memorably, setting up a temporary holiday store on a boat docked on the Hudson River more than a decade ago. The Minneapolis-based retailer is back at it this holiday season, angling to make a big splash in the Big Apple this time with something it’s calling Wonderland. The 16,000-square foot “retail spectacle,” as the company calls it, will be free and open to the public for two weeks starting on Wednesday.
Located next to the Chelsea Market, it is filled with 10 holiday-themed displays that incorporate a digital element on top of an interactive physical experience. Each one is tied in to a popular holiday toy that Target is selling at the space. Visitors can have their picture superimposed on a giant Etch A Sketch and share it on social media, frolic in a ball pit around a life-size replica of the Lego pirate ship Target featured in its holiday ads and test drive drones, the BB-8 robot from Star Wars or miniature cars controlled through a smartphone app on a peppermint-patterned racetrack. “It will be a wonderful gift to our guests in New York during the holidays,” said Jeff Jones, Target’s chief marketing officer. “But strategically, it’s a continued evolution for us to think about what physical shopping is like when we blur the lines with experience and digital layers.” The Wonderland experience isn’t something Target can fully replicate in its 1,800 stores.
But it is a way for the retailer to test ideas and see how consumers react to help guide its thinking as it works on the store of the future. For example, when visitors enter Wonderland, they will be given a lanyard with an RFID tag to wear around their neck. As they visit various displays, they can scan the code on it at various kiosks if they want to purchase that item. At the end of the experience, they check out and pay for those items, which they pick up from a chimney that Santa’s arm pops through to hand them their packages. Having customers scan items in a store as they go along and pick up the products at the end is an idea that some retailers are already exploring. “The idea is to make the shopping experience feel weightless and less encumbered and to make the transaction more seamless and effortless,” said Amy Koo, an analyst with Kantar Retail. That population is increasingly urban, especially as Target looks to build more of its small-format stores in cities.
Target, which already has several stores in New York including one in Harlem, is opening three more stores there next year. New York is often Target’s favorite place to roll out marketing initiatives like this one since they are often expensive, and New York can often give Target the most bang for its buck by getting it in front of a large concentration of people, including those who are highly influential. “Target loves being in New York because it’s cool, and Target wants to be cool and hip,” Koo said. “There are a lot of tastemakers there, both in the general public as well as with fashion magazines and style folks.” Target Wonderland is near a studio and office the company opened last year and that, earlier this year, it used for a weeklong art installation called Target Too. That exhibit, where Target’s designers created huge interactive displays such as a giant smile mural made of 3,000 EOS lip balm packages, was part of the inspiration for Wonderland.