Home But Not Alone: a holiday campaign that turned nostalgia into a conversation about aging at home.
The holidays bring joy, rituals, and togetherness, but they also surface those things families tend to skip over. Adult children come home, notice their parents moving differently, and quietly wonder what’s next. Home Instead saw this not as a tension to avoid, but as the opening.
We sought to spark a conversation aging and in-home care during a season famous for distraction.
So we leaned into the one ritual almost every family actually shares: watching holiday movies. Over 60% of households watch at least one classic together, and the most rewatched of all time? Home Alone. It was the perfect doorway into a conversation they never have.
The campaign lived across TV, social, digital, and earned. It quickly became one of the most talked-about holiday ideas of the year. From Entertainment Weekly to People, it drove over 1 billion earned impressions in 3 weeks, plus a wave of fan reactions calling for this storyline to anchor a future sequel.
But the real outcome was simpler: it opened the door. It gave families a way to talk about aging, independence, and support through a story they already loved. We didn’t just show up for the holidays. We reshaped what the season’s most iconic movie could mean.
With the support of Home Instead and the original IP, we created Home But Not Alone: a new narrative set in the Home Alone universe that reframes Kevin McCallister’s complicated relationship with his mother through the lens of modern caregiving. Not parody. Not nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. A true extension of the canon built for emotional relevance today.
