Black & Unlimited: The Summer Shoutout Tour

Walmart wanted to drive awareness and engagement for the Black-owned brands, creators and founders sold through its Black & Unlimited initiative, and the work needed to reach people in the real-world communities tied to the tour's pop-up locations, not just in social feeds. Influence is usually treated as the preserve of big-follower accounts, while the everyday advocates of Black-owned businesses get less visibility, and a cause-led retail campaign can read as a standard social post unless it earns cultural authenticity and a physical presence.

Influential turned the Summer Shoutout Tour into a creator-led campaign whose content traveled from social feeds onto digital out-of-home screens near the live stops. The agency reports activating 19 Black creators across Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat, then using its Creator360 platform, with partner PubW, to place their content on DOOH screens across five venue types in key local markets. The tour popped up at partner festivals including Broccoli City in Washington, D.C., where design-bar merch, sampling and give-two-keep-two swag bags turned attendees into distributors.

Treating creator content as portable media anchored a national social campaign in the specific communities it celebrated. Influential reports 10.5M organic views, 606K engagements and positive sentiment up 20 percentage points on Walmart's H1 2024 benchmark, with 2.6x TikTok engagement and 2.7x Snapchat view-through. All figures are self-reported; independent press confirms the tour but does not name Influential, and spend, dates and sales impact are not disclosed.