You can learn a silly dance on TikTok. You can learn obscure trivia about Civil War generals. And you can obtain a de facto master’s degree in branding—at least if you follow Ashwinn Krishnaswamy, a branding guru in New York.

He’s built an audience by ripping into brands on TikTok, pointing out branding “fails” and explaining where he thinks they went wrong. He also posts walk-throughs of design trends and how-tos, producing what are essentially stylized marketing case studies that have amassed an audience of more than 124,000, resulted in brand deals, and helped his burgeoning consulting business, with many leads coming from the social platform.

Zoom in: Krishnaswamy’s videos are often more digestible than your average Twitter thread, more clever than much of the thought leadership one might find on Linkedin. He shows his work, frequently offering a critique of a specific brand and what he’d do differently.

• For example, one video is a “teardown” of Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy’s watch brand Brick, followed by how he’d rebrand it.
• In another, he rewrote ad copy for Allbirds running shoes (his suggestion of “all nerds wear Allbirds” probably wouldn’t make it far).

“I’m going to critique this, but I’m also going to take my shot at trying to make it better or trying to improve this. I think that resonates with people because they’re like, ‘Okay, he’s not just a hater,’” he said.

As his #content might suggest, Krishnaswamy has a diverse résumé paired with a deep reservoir of opinions in design, product, and vibes.

A graduate of NYU’s Stern School of Business, he founded a browser extension called Point, worked product and design for Ense (now SmallTalk), an audio platform similar to Clubhouse, founded a jeep-rental company for New Yorkers looking to go upstate, and *deep breath* co-founded design and branding agency Forge, which has worked with brands like Muddy Bites and Troy Aikman’s Eight beer.

Keep reading here.—RB

Netflix and GM. Molson Coors and DraftKings. Heineken and Disney’s Ant-Man. For this year’s Super Bowl, brands teaming up for campaigns is one of the biggest trends we’ve seen ahead of Sunday.

Perhaps we should have seen it coming. Partnerships are nothing new, and they’ve certainly picked up steam over the past few years, especially unconventional ones. Remember Oreo x Barefoot Wines?

• In late 2021, the Lego Group’s head of US marketing told Adweek she was “excited about the innovation that is happening in the unexpected brand partnership space,” explaining that “in the near future, shoppers, families, and kids will want solutions from brands that are more integrated, convenient and exciting than ever. This will require brand partnerships that might never have been considered in the past.”
• Bloomberg Opinion’s advertising and brands columnist spotted the trend last year, writing that “as subcultures flourish, no new collaboration is too zany.”

When we asked Marketing Brew readers last week if you thought branded partnerships would become even more popular this year, most of you—65%—said yes. Only 17% said no, while the rest weren’t sure.

This week’s poll: Do you think product placement will become a bigger part of marketing strategies this year?

🟢 Yes
No
🟡 Not sure

I’d wager your brand has posted content every single day for years now, if not a decade. That’s 365 pieces of content annually at a minimum—maybe nearing 2,000 posts a year if you subscribe to the five-tweets-a-day thinking. Multiply that by however many years your brand’s been tweeting, and you’ve got a colossal archive of content.

All that great content? Those evergreen pieces that performed so well?

You should use them again.

Every brand should dig through their content archives and reuse the top performers. I’ve got a whole slew of reasons for you. Read them here.—JA

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

Audit season: You’ve heard of tax audits, but have you thought about auditing your Instagram?

Head east: The basics of sitemaps and whether you should have one.

More options: TikTok has expanded its “Promote” tools—get up to speed on the changes here.

Go glocal: The top-down approach to branding just doesn’t work anymore. Frontify’s report with WARC dives into all things global brand governance, plus how you can execute your global brand strategy and empower local markets.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}

Which headlines are real marketing news, and which one is fake?

1. Avocados From Mexico returns, mostly naked, to Super Bowl
2. Rawlings encourages people to buy baseball caps ahead of ‘You’ season four premiere
3. E.l.f. Cosmetics is giving us an extra 30 seconds of ‘The White Lotus’
4. Priceline is hiding $5 million worth of travel deals in its Super Bowl ads

Keep scrolling for the answer.

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

• ‘Deinfluencing,’ defined
• More Black Americans are listening to podcasts on a monthly basis, research shows
• E-Trade CMO Andrea Zaretsky on the brand’s Super Bowl legacy and the return of its iconic baby