Jimmy Kimmel is doing some moonlighting this holiday season, taking part in a new branded ad campaign for Google.
The campaign, which launched this morning, sees Kimmel hosting a Google Shopping branded game show titled Can You Gift It?, with new episodes dropping on YouTube every day this week.
The show’s five-minute premiere episode features songwriter/producer Benny Blanco and Eric André as its inaugural contestants. Of course, André is well-versed in the late-night world himself, having hosted the parody sketch comedy series The Eric André Show on Adult Swim starting in 2012—it aired its final season last year.
Each episode of Can You Gift It? is set to feature the Jimmy Kimmel Live! host and a pair of celebrity contestants, who compete against each other in trivia challenges that rely on Google’s holiday shopping stats and search data.
As Kimmel explains in the trailer, “The goal is to score as many deals as possible to mark them off your gift list.”
“We discovered around 60% of people like to treat the holiday gifting period as a little bit of friendly competition, like, ‘Who’s going to give the best gift?’” Google’s senior director of global commerce marketing, Stephanie Horton, told Marketing Dive. “So we centered an entire campaign all around this [idea].”
Other episode pairings include The Daily Show’s Ronny Chieng and comedian Atsuko Okatsuka on Tuesday; Have I Got News for You host Roy Wood Jr. and A Black Lady Sketch Show’s Robin Thede on Wednesday; and comedians Matt Rogers and Joel Kim Booster on Thanksgiving Day. Rogers is likely best known to late-night fans as the co-host of Las Culturistas with Bowen Yang.
WNBA stars Kelsey Plum and Kahleah Copper are set to close out the week’s game-show shopping promotion on Black Friday.
“We wanted people who had that really good friendly competition vibe with each other, because if you think about gift giving, it’s usually for your close friends or people in your family,” Horton said. “When we were thinking about it, we really wanted to choose people who had that same relationship.”
The Google Shopping holiday campaign, which also features ads with celebrity duos like Troye Sivan and recent SNL host Charli XCX, will run through Dec. 5.
You can watch the first episode Can You Gift It? above and get a sneak peek at the full week of the Jimmy Kimmel-hosted adver-game show in the trailer below:
