Earlier this year, Good Weird became the latest brand to join the crowded beauty space.

Co-founded by Jon Wormser, the genderless brand sells products that mix skincare and beauty: One of its items is a bronzer that doubles as a moisturizer.

According to Wormser, who held marketing roles at companies like M&C Saatchi and The Fader before starting the company, the idea for Good Weird stemmed from a breakout. “I’d say about two-and-a-half years ago, I had a bad breakout,” Wormser told us. “I was looking for a beauty solution and went to a beauty store looking for options and found that there [were] endless products and brands, but didn’t feel like they were made with me or my community and other communities in mind.”

Together with fellow co-founder Stephen Yaseen, the two set out to create a “hybridized approach that’s truly genderless for beauty” targeted toward Gen Z. Wormser and Yaseen named the brand “Good Weird” in an effort to destigmatize the word “weird” and emphasize the brand’s genderless and inclusive approach to beauty.

“There’s a negative connotation with being weird,” Wormser said, explaining that stigmas also exist within beauty regarding who can and can’t use certain products. That’s why they wanted to “flip the narrative” by calling it Good Weird, hoping to make it a word that people are “excited to embrace.”

In its efforts to appeal to Gen Z, Good Weird has implemented a marketing strategy that includes advertising across social channels, a broad influencer program, brand partnerships, and out-of-home advertising across its New York City home base.

Keep reading here.—JS

Podcasts are packed with selling potential, and things are only looking up. In fact, Gen Z is 31% more likely to purchase a product or service as a result of a podcast ad, and millennials are 69% (!!!) more likely.

So how do you position your brand to effectively float into the ears of eager listeners? You turn to Audacy’s Podcast Playbook 2023.

With this comprehensive, modern, savvy report in hand, marketers can better understand the landscape of podcast advertising—which is necessary, seeing that many listeners average 9 pods per week.

Learn how podcast ads are served, grab some media-buying tips, check out different kinds of campaigns, and find top measurement techniques, all in one free download.

It’s no secret that disability representation in advertising is an issue, with one 2021 Nielsen report finding that only about 1% of primetime ads featured people who are differently abled. More recently, brands like Apple and Skims have made it a point to create campaigns with disabled people in front of the camera.

But the lack of representation also exists behind the camera, which is the driving force behind Unilever’s new “Believe in Talent” initiative. The mandate requires that at least one person with a disability works on the crew for any production exceeding €100k (or about $107k)—estimated to amount to about 70% of the brand’s ads, per The Drum.

Aline Santos, Unilever’s chief brand officer and chief equity, diversity, and inclusion officer, told Ad Age that the ad industry “was not really fit [to accommodate] people with disabilities,” so the goal is to show the industry it’s “going to be even more successful” when they’re included. She also confirmed the company has been piloting the initiative for the past 18 months with brands like Hellman’s and Ponds.

In addition to the initiative, Unilever created a toolkit with disability advocacy group Inclusively Made about creating safe production spaces for disabled creatives, which it sent to every ad agency and production company it works with. Some of the tips include:

• How to avoid viewing people with disabilities through pity or inspiration lenses
• How to remove attitudinal and physical barriers from production spaces
• Where to hire new talent in the industry and how to best assign tasks

Ongoing change: These initiatives are part of Unilever’s “Act 2 Unstereotype” initiative, which it began in 2021 as a way to “help influence the next generation of people to be free from prejudice” and “make real, structural changes to the entire marketing process.”—KH

When electric-motorcycle company LiveWire celebrated its stock-market debut last year, employees across the world were able to take part in the ceremonial bell-ringing through a virtual replica of the iconic New York Stock Exchange trading floor.

LGBTQ dating app Grindr decked out the same digital space with a rainbow flag and flying ribbons when it went public last November.

The NYSE is working with video game development and tools provider Unity to make virtual elements like these a more common component of the splashy events it hosts for companies going public. Sarah Murphy, head of marketing at the NYSE, billed the metaverse-like tool as a way for remote workforces to participate in events that were previously limited in attendance by room capacity.

“What I think happened, actually, is that after the pandemic, this became an expectation,” she said. “So it doesn’t really matter that people are back in the office now; they still expected to be able to see the experience in this way.”

Murphy said it could ultimately mark a big shift in the way companies commemorate their entrance onto the stock market. “In terms of really fundamentally changing the way someone experiences an IPO, I would say there’s not been any other technology that’s led to that,” Murphy told Tech Brew.

Read the full story here.—PK

Tagalongs: How the Girl Scouts are leveraging AI for recruiting purposes.

Ready for it: Pinterest has unveiled programming for Pride, including a partnership with Tastemade.

Case study: Read about how one creator grew his YouTube following to more than 30,000 in roughly six months.

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• Delta faces class-action lawsuit over carbon neutrality claims