If you haven’t encountered the Truff hot-sauce brand on its own, you’ve probably seen it with another brand—like Bagel Bites, Taco Bell, or Hidden Valley Ranch.

Those collaborations have Michelle Gabe to thank. The truffle-infused hot-sauce brand’s director of marketing, who took on the role in 2020, has overseen partnerships with all of the above and, most recently, The Super Mario Bros. Movie with limited-edition sauces. In the last three years, she’s also overseen the brand’s first national TV commercial and its first OOH campaign, and plotted to get bottles into the hands of celebrities like Lizzo and Machine Gun Kelly—all to boost Truff’s retail sales and heat up the conversation.

“We have a good gauge on what people want to hear and what makes people talk,” Gabe said.

Prior to leading Truff’s marketing team of five, Gabe built her career in the PR world, working with brands ranging from Tao Group Hospitality to Health-Ade kombucha. Now, she’s taking her industry experience and making it her mission to douse brands of all kinds with hot sauce.

Read the full story here.—KH

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Some fans will go to bat over their favorite players no matter how many darkness retreats they go on. But for marketers looking to sign athletes, hype—or even high social engagement—doesn’t necessarily translate to the perfect brand partner.

To address client questions over brand safety tied to athlete partnerships, Kantar recently created the Sports Monitor Athlete Reputation Tracker, aka SMART, according to EVP Ryan McConnell. Kantar expects to run the survey twice a year.

“Awareness and likeability are really the key factors,” he told Marketing Brew. “The things that sponsors are often looking for these days is to break through the clutter and do it with somebody who’s likable who you can associate your brand with. Athletes have obviously been a good outlet for that for many, many years.”

Keep reading here.—AM

In an era when Allure’s top pick for a facial moisturizer, La Mer’s Crème de la Mer Moisturizer, costs $380 for a two-ounce jar, it may come as a surprise that one of the moisturizers at the center of a TikTok beauty trend, Vaseline petroleum jelly, costs $4.89 for 7.5 ounces.

But the 153-year-old product is featured in many videos about the trend, called slugging, on the platform, nearly half of whose users (47.4%) are under 30.

Slugging, the before-bed ritual of smearing a petroleum-jelly (aka petrolatum) product on the face, draws its name from users who slather on so much they resemble certain garden-dwelling gastropods.

Although the ritual “has been part of the Black community for decades,” according to Vaseline’s website, the “slugging” coinage—and broad popularity—are new:

• Videos tagged #slugging have racked up 1.2 billion views on TikTok.
• Google searches for “slugging” started surging in late 2021, and peaked the week ending July 15, according to Google Trends.

While many beauty trends on TikTok are blessedly short-lived (coffee grounds facial scrub, anyone?), slugging has been widely endorsed by dermatologists and unmistakably has legs.

Keep reading on Retail Brew.—AAN

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

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