Nine months after Super Bowl 57, there aren’t many people who are still talking about it—with the exception of the e.l.f. Cosmetics marketing team (and the Kelce family, probably).

The beauty brand first partnered with The White Lotus actor Jennifer Coolidge for its Super Bowl ad earlier this year, a 30-second spot highlighting its Power Grip ultra-sticky makeup primer—during which Coolidge’s face gets stuck to her phone and a shower door.

A couple months later, Coolidge posted an outtake from filming the ad on social media in which she joked about creating her own lipstick with names like “dirty pillows” or “swollen.” On Sept. 27, Dirty Pillows became a reality in the form of a lip kit—and within a day the kit had sold out, according to Patrick O’Keefe, VP of integrated marketing communications at e.l.f.

There are a few reasons why e.l.f. executives suspect the Cooldige ad and product collaboration have grown so popular. One theory is that Coolidge and consumers—not the brand or its marketing execs—are calling the shots, O’Keefe and Brian Vaughan, partner and executive creative director at e.l.f.’s longtime agency Shadow, said.

Where it all began: During e.l.f.’s Super Bowl shoot with Coolidge, Vaughan said the comedian was riffing off the popular “get ready with me” video trend and cracking jokes. The team was careful not to overscript her, he said, and instead allowed her to largely improvise with only a few general directions.

When she made the “dirty pillows” joke, “we had a hunch that there was something magical there,” Vaughan said. That hunch was confirmed when the brand opted to share the outtake.

“The real moment that sold it for us was the community response we saw when we posted it,” he said. Several of the comments on a TikTok video are from people saying they’d buy the then-fictional line of lip products. “That was all that we needed to be like, ‘Alright, let’s do this thing.’”

Continue reading here.—AM

Fine-tuning your holiday marketing campaigns? Make sure your strategies are ready to deliver results with Intuit Mailchimp’s webinar on Nov. 9.

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Google is putting a little more AI in its AI.

The company’s previously announced generative AI advertising tools, which can generate images and text for digital ads, will begin rolling out Tuesday to all advertisers in the US within Performance Max, the company’s AI-powered advertising tool.

Performance Max, which began as a pilot in 2020 and has been described by AdExchanger as “the blackest black box” of all of Google’s advertising products, automates many of the traditional buying methods for buyers, who can load their campaign and brand assets as well as information like budget into the tool before Google blasts them across its entire portfolio of owned media, including YouTube, Search, and Maps.

In an example shared with reporters, the new Performance Max AI features rolling out this week can scan a brand’s website before generating digital assets, keywords, and headlines for ads, which can then be modified with prompts like theming for the Thanksgiving holiday. Any AI-generated ad will contain an invisible watermark, indicating that it was created by AI.

The new functionality will only be available within Performance Max and come at no cost to advertisers. Any images generated or suggested by the tool can be saved and used elsewhere, even off of Google ads.

The tools are designed to help advertisers create engaging ad copy and creative to help scale campaigns.—RB

Each week, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.

Khalid El Khatib is CMO of Stack Overflow, an online community for developers.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? Since I started at Stack Overflow in 2018, I’ve had the privilege of running and expanding the Stack Overflow Developer Survey. Each year, we get nearly 100,000 developers to give us their opinions on everything from current and emerging technology to how they work and are compensated. It’s the largest survey of its kind, and I’ve worked with my team over the last several years to orient even more around trends people are curious about—everything from generative AI and Web 3.0 to burnout. Massive tech companies use it to set their OKRs, it’s cited in hundreds of articles each year, and CEOs and CTOs even look at trends like the interest and availability of remote jobs to do workforce planning. Also, bonus: It’s one of the highest-converting assets for Stack’s demand generation efforts!

What’s your favorite ad campaign? While Google’s “Year in Search” campaigns were among the first to marry big data with storytelling, the success and reach of Spotify Wrapped blows me away even years after it launched. It floods social media channels with millions of pieces of user-generated content, it taps into influencer marketing by engaging major artists around their stats, and more than anything, it catalyzes users to more deeply engage within the app (and Apple Music users to consider switching to Spotify).

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile? I’m a writer! For over a decade, I’ve contributed to outlets such as Vice, Paper, and Food52, and more recently, I’ve been working on a book. Every time I try to incorporate my writing into my LinkedIn profile, it confuses people into thinking I’m a professional journalist (I leave hard-hitting, investigative work to the pros and write about things like hummus). Though I’ve always thought of it as a hobby, I credit a lot of my success as a marketer to my passion for writing. Crafting a great, company-wide email (whether it comes from you or the CEO) is a wildly underappreciated skill.

Read more here.

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

Perfect layouts: A collection of Instagram template resources to keep the posts a-flowin’.

Get the sentiment: A roundup of sentiment analysis tools and how to take advantage of them.

Even more AI: Read up on new generative AI features on YouTube.

’Tis the season…to turn trends into holiday marketing tactics. Join Intuit Mailchimp on Nov. 9 for a webinar digging into the revenue-driving insights + strategies that’ll help you deliver this holiday season. Don’t miss out.*

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Mergers and acquisitions, company partnerships, and more.

• MediaRadar, an ad intelligence platform, acquired Vivvix, Kantar’s North American ad intelligence business.
• LVMH, the luxury conglomerate, bought the eyewear brand Barton Perreira for roughly $80 million.
• Stagwell acquired the creative social agency Movers+Shakers for about $15 million.