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Branded is a weekly column devoted to the intersection of marketing, business, design, and culture.
Christmas is a holiday defined by familiar and comforting rituals, repeated annually with a dash of novelty—decorating the tree, gathering for a big family dinner, and, perhaps, watching an endless stream of Hallmark movies. The venerable Hallmark brand has long understood the appeal of the ritual, feel-good tradition, and has now, surprisingly, turned borderline-sappy holiday movies into a tradition of its own.
A brand built around sending expensive paper products bearing sentimental messages through the mail sounds like a tough sell in the 21st century. Worldwide, people still buy billions of physical greeting cards every year (Christmas being the leading occasion), and Hallmark, regardless of offering a slew of e-card alternatives, is still the category leader in analog cards. Even more remarkably, the Hallmark Channel cable network (and sibling Hallmark Movies & Mysteries channel) has proven surprisingly resilient despite the rise of streaming and cord-cutting. In fact, it’s as potent as ever.
While most cable channels are cutting back on original content, Hallmark’s annual “Countdown to Christmas” series of happy-ending holiday movies features a remarkable 40 new titles this year. That adds to a library of hundreds produced since the first “Countdown” in 2009, many of which viewers seem happy to watch again. It’s a strategy that helped make Hallmark Channel No. 1 in entertainment cable networks last year—ahead of rivals like HGTV and the Food Network—a feat it appears on track to repeat in 2023. The “Countdown” has helped the network top all competitors among women 25-54 and “persons 18+” in the fourth quarter for seven years straight, according to Hallmark.
Many of the movies in the Hallmark holiday oeuvre involve tropes like a young woman taking a Christmas break from a big city power job to return to her small hometown, where she runs into her high school crush. Add gazebos, snow globes, hot mugs of cider, and (spoiler alert!) a proposal. It’s become a highly satirize-able genre of its own, often ribbed for cookie-cutter plots and a “Hallmark Cinematic Universe” of recurring performers. “It’s quantity over quality, people!” chirps one SNL parody. “Can you spot the sets we used multiple times?”
Jokes aside, this is not laziness; it’s strategy. Lisa Hamilton Daly, a Netflix veteran who recently joined Hallmark to oversee its media content, told Vulture she “wasn’t really ready for how central the brand is to everything that they do” at Hallmark. Everything gets filtered through the question: Is this right for the Hallmark brand? And it works. “Our formulas are beloved for a reason,” she added. “People find them very comforting.” (Others, including Netflix, have dabbled in holiday content, but so far none have seriously threatened the Hallmark Christmas-flick juggernaut.)
As a practical matter, this has translated into Hallmark remaining focused on serving its linear cable audience rather than pivot hard toward stream-on-demand options. While there is a $60-a-year Hallmark Movies Now streaming platform, there’s been little in the way of tentpole exclusive content. Similarly, Hallmark does have some streaming deals and digital rental options—offering some Christmas movies via Hulu, for example, and a live feed through Peacock. But cable still seems to lead Hallmark’s thinking, and prioritizing cable viewers means treating the premieres of its original movies and shows as appointment-television events—a throwback strategy hardly discussed anymore outside the context of sports and awards shows.
Hallmark has likely been helped by the fact that much of the rest of the linear cable universe is cutting back on original content. So, merely holding steady looks almost ambitious—but that’s deceptive. The first Countdown to Christmas involved just nine films; while the slate has steadily grown, Hallmark doesn’t chase big-budget stars or productions, keeping budgets around $2 million per film and shooting in Canada. These are “events” for a particular audience—a seemingly growing one.
Serving that audience means it’s fine if the Hallmark Channel doesn’t throw off the sort of critical heat that has powered the rise of prestige TV and groundbreaking streamer boom. It’s not that the company, which has sold holiday cards since the 1910s, doesn’t have plenty of innovation in its deep history: The founding Hall brothers are credited with inventing modern gift wrapping, plus the brand has been intertwined with mass media from the early 1950s as the sponsor of NBC’s Hallmark Hall of Fame. But Hallmark the brand doesn’t signify groundbreaking innovation; it signifies reassurance and familiarity.
“You know the core of our business is really the individual greeting cards, the ones you pick out specifically for somebody else,” Hallmark’s marketing chief told CNBC a few years ago, right around the time “Countdown to Christmas” was truly ramping up. “It really is still a thriving and stable business.”
In fact, its cable movies and shows aren’t so different from the greeting card aesthetic: infinite, marginally novel variations on familiar themes. (Critics have denounced the Hallmark content for being overwhelmingly white and straight; the company has indicated that it’s exploring more diverse stories.) To its fans, though, it’s the entertainment equivalent of comfort food. There’s always a happy, upbeat ending, which maybe we can all use at a sometimes stressful time of year. “Predictability is the point,” as Wired recently put it. Repackaging comfortable predictability requires its own form of innovation—and few do it better than Hallmark.
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