Ageless wonder Paul Rudd, who plays Marvel superhero Ant-Man, will appear in a Super Bowl ad for Heineken 0.0, the brand’s nonalcoholic beer.

He’s not the only one reaching for an alternative to alcohol these days.

• Google Trends data indicates that search volume for “Dry January,” which spikes at the beginning of each year, has grown over the past five years in the US.
• According to a Morning Consult report, 15% of US adults planned to take part this year—down from last year’s 19%—though nearly three-fourths of previous participants said they would partake again this year.

Big picture: Brands have taken note of the trend in their product development and marketing, and many small businesses and restaurants have leaned into low-alcohol and alcohol-free alternatives in January and beyond.

Cocktails with a twist

Ron Alvarado, co-founder of Ficks Beverage Co., said when Dry January first came on his radar a few years ago, he assumed it was something of a Covid fad. Instead, it became “a mainstay” of the month.

• That might seem like a problem for a company that primarily sells cocktail mixers and hard seltzers. But Ficks has been working to capitalize on the trend: It recently rolled out a new "nonalcoholic cocktail mixer" in partnership with Buzzfeed’s Tasty. Unlike its other nonalcoholic mixers, the drink was intentionally created to stand alone as an alcohol-free alternative in addition to serving as a mixer.

January is a particularly big month for Wilderton, which sells nonalcoholic spirits, in terms of both sales and marketing, Eric Ariyoshi, its director of marketing, said. The brand spends “disproportionately” on marketing in January, Ariyoshi explained. Its revenue was up 125% from 2021 to 2022, and is on track for at least 300% YoY growth this year, according to Ariyoshi.

Click here to read the full story.—AM

One of Apple’s latest ads shows how its tech can make a whole host of things easier: parenting, waking up in the morning, navigating somewhere, and so on.

What makes the ad notable is the fact that it almost entirely features people with disabilities, a group that’s underrepresented in media and advertising. According to a 2021 Nielsen study that analyzed 450,000 prime-time TV ads, only 1% showed someone with a disability, even though more than 60 million adults in America live with one, per the CDC.

Over the past few years, certain brands have taken steps to incorporate disability representation and accessibility into their marketing efforts, both on and off screen. For example:

• Slick Chicks, a brand that sells adaptive clothing, debuted a campaign this week starring Jamey Perry, a TV writer, actor, and adaptive athlete.
• Diageo announced the creation of an inclusive design training program specifically for marketers last fall designed to help them “remove unconscious bias from the design process and ensure promotions are accessible for all.”
• Tide created a version of its 2021 Super Bowl ad that featured audio descriptions.

Looking ahead: According to Josh Loebner, global head of inclusive design at Wunderman Thompson, the marketing industry should prioritize accessibility “through policy change, advocacy, workforce recruitment, [and] ongoing and end-to-end commitments” throughout 2023.

“We’re moving beyond one-dimensional representation on screen to multifaceted and deeper end-to-end inclusion through service and customer design that builds layers of accessibility,” he told us, pointing to Mastercard’s Touch Card and campaign. “Accessibility needs to be integrated across omnichannel and offline communications from the top of the marketing funnel through conversions and loyalty.”

Additionally, Loebner said that marketers should:

• Prioritize leaders focused on accessibility, “whether via consultants or internal leadership.”
• Be accountable; for instance, he said that “brands are weaving accessibility into campaign KPIs where disability inclusion moves beyond altruism and more toward proven ROI.”
• Take conversations “beyond compliance and toward creativity” so that accessibility is “not just a minor task on a checklist for an IT department.”

Read the full story here.—MS

Emerging Tech Brew’s Hayden Field recently talked to Pinterest’s chief revenue officer about what the platform will focus on this year. Read a snippet below or click here to read the Q&A.

A majority of our Pinners are telling us that they come to the platform not just to get inspired, but also to shop. We’ve got nearly half a billion users around the world, but I think just as interesting, we have hundreds of billions of pins, or objects, that have been organized into single-digit billions of collections, or boards—these are products that people are going to go buy, or things that they’re going to go do, in their real lives.

At that scale, when a majority of our Pinners are telling us they’re coming to shop, it’s our responsibility to make shopping ubiquitous on the platform.

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

New year, new you: How marketing leaders can plan for the year ahead, according to Sprout Social CMO Jamie Gilpin.

LeanIn: Tips for how to use LinkedIn for social media marketing this year.

Plan ahead: Here’s a primer on using the Google Ads Keyword Planner.

Trendsetter tea: Wrapping your head around the metrics of your influencer campaigns can be a doozy—until now. Tagger’s Signals tool offers insight into key data points, creator strategies, and relevant trends. Get the scoop.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}

BeReal is a new social app that’s gaining popularity. Founded in 2019, it has picked up steam recently. Check out our exclusive report to learn best practices and find out what brands are experimenting with the platform.

Download your free report.

More than half (54%) of “US online adults with a smartphone” surveyed said they’ve used it to research products and services, according to a report from Forrester. An even larger share (59%) said they’ve used their phone to make a purchase.

Here are a couple takeaways for brands from that report, which analyzed the mobile sites of 10 US retailers.

Devil’s in the details: When choosing a retailer to shop online with, potential customers are “highly influenced” by details like free shipping or free return offers.

• 83% of US online adults said “it’s important to them to see the final price, including shipping and taxes, of their transaction on a retailer’s or brand’s website.”
• Online retailers should include that info on the cart page to hopefully prevent people from navigating away in search of details and “potentially abandoning their purchases altogether.”

Keep it simple: One-third (33%) of those who don’t make purchases on their smartphones said it’s because buying via computer is easier. About a quarter (23%) said it’s because their phone screen is too small. To help address these potential issues, retailers should…

• Keep the entire mobile-checkout process to single page
• Offer autofill and autocomplete for information like names and addresses
• Make promo codes easily accessible. The report notes that Office Depot lets shoppers easily apply discounts to products they’re looking at by clicking a button on the product detail page.

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• More advertisers are using clean rooms, but not to their full potential, research says
• Why is CMO tenure so low?
• How HBO Max marketed ‘The Last of Us’ into a global hit