Amazon Holiday is a North American shopping event for residents of the United States to shop online, providing thousands of options for holiday gifts, decorations, outfits, hosting basics and decor party essentials. With the large demand from customers during this time of year, Holiday runs as a high-velocity, long-term event that serves as a one-stop shop for everything related to the holidays, deals on favorite brands and to order last-minute gifts.
Spanning between mid-September until New Year’s Eve in 2024, the Holiday event was divided into 3 phases. Starting with Early Holiday, Peak Holiday and ending with Last-Minute Gifting, each phase catered towards inciting excitement and preparedness for the upcoming festivities across all the holiday months. From the November through New Years, the Holiday event assets and colors spanned across all corners of the site that also involved UX color takeover to tie the Holiday event brand to the navigation and search bar across the entire site. Alongside our own timeline of planned launches, the event also featured collaborations with the Toys team, the new Amazon shopping AI tool, Rufus, gift wrapping services, and celebrity collections from Mariah Carey, Adam Driver and Alicia Keys.
Working under the creative team and leadership of North American Stores, I held a role in producing designs across homepage, the Holiday Hub, search, detail page and paid social. On my own I produced over 2,000 total assets across the full event. In owning these channels, I aimed at bringing consistent excellence to the creative, placing attention to detail in order to raise the bar and allow the campaign to continually exceed customer expectations.
A key entry point to event pages and special deals, Homepage heroes were designed by the team as stand out creative pieces. In an effort to support in production, I was looped in to execute on several heroes during the Peak Holiday phase where showing a broad selection of available projects and diversifying on the use or color and sparkle textures. While using product images to showcase products, an internal 3D environment tool was also utilized to create renders of products for top down or in standing positions if not already rendered previously.
Holiday was split up into phases and followed a color strategy of only featuring a selection of Amazon Smile orange and Holiday reds for the fall, the full color palette for the Peak Holiday phase, and exclusively Persimmon red to emit urgency and speed for Last-Minute gifting.
The Holiday Shop
The event was discoverable not only on the Homepage but through search keywords prompting ad banners that drove to the Holiday Page or sub-category page of featured items and the full collection.
Across the mobile app, we took advantage of the Search Autocomplete feature to display relevant subcategories based on the searched keyword being typed in. The autocomplete widget has increased the visibility of the Holiday Hub to customers coming to the site with a specific find in mind. Autocomplete images consisted of a single ASIN product image to help distinguish these categories. Across search and the Holiday Hub, Gen AI was utilized to scale the creation of single-ASIN images across different background colors and texture options within the event identity.
An opportunity arose for us to partner with the Rufus creative & UX team to help market Rufus as the holiday shopping assistant for generating personalized gift results. Running during the Peak Holiday phase, two homepage heroes launched in November and December to drive users to try and use Rufus to find the perfect holiday gifts.
The creative also served an educational purpose by featuring rotating sample queries demonstrating the informal, everyday language that can be asked in the Rufus pop-up.
It's a no-brainer that almost any item can be found and ordered from the e-commerce giant. And what better way to spotlight different brands, age ranges and interests through playful, social media collages!
Paid social focused on making the products the hero of the image — pushing for autonomy to take up its own space and interact alongside other products. The visuals are paired down from the solid colors and textures background shown across the site, allowing decorative elements to connect with the holiday theme and visually fill in some gaps.
