Brands have been eager to get involved in the excitement around the blossoming relationship between Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. And like a good neighbor, State Farm was there, too.

This fall, the insurance company went an unexpected route for its one and only Swift-Kelce-related activation of 2023 (not including the ads it filmed with Kelce over the summer), and it pulled off one of the more memorable stunts around the couple without directly involving Swift or Travis Kelce. Instead, State Farm called on another two Kelces: Travis’s brother and Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce, and their mother, Donna Kelce, plus the brand’s spokesperson, Jake from State Farm.

The resulting campaign, where the Kelces appeared with Jake at an Eagles game, was pulled off, well, swiftly, according to Head of Marketing Alyson Griffin, and ended up being a marketing touchdown, thanks in part to Kelce star power and the enduring popularity of Jake.

“It was about unexpectedly showing up in a place where our customers and potential customers have passion around—sports, or just pop culture—and uniquely and authentically being there, because we have such a presence in football anyway,” Griffin told Marketing Brew.

We chatted with Griffin about how the viral moment came together, how it paid off, and what’s next for the insurance brand’s marketing.

The kickoff: Swift first rattled the holy ground at Arrowhead Stadium on Sunday, Sept. 24, and the following Friday, Griffin got a call from the team at marketing agency Maximum Effort, which had worked with State Farm in the past and pitched the idea to seat someone with Donna at the upcoming Eagles game.

• Griffin was interested because it was a little different than the barrage of Swift-Kelce posts and campaigns that had already started cropping up, she said.
• State Farm also didn’t want to get on the wrong side of the zeitgeisty couple, she said, and actor Ryan Reynolds, the co-founder of Maximum Effort, was able to provide a direct line to Swift.
• Griffin said Swift gave Reynolds the green light, and from there, the team had less than 48 hours to pull the stunt together for the Oct. 1 game.

Keep reading our conversation with Griffin here.—AM

A seamless customer experience is a huge selling point for brands—one that can make a marketer’s job easier.

In the name of improving customer experiences, Amazon and Panera are turning to large language models and conversational AI to improve ordering. The success they’ve seen so far is undeniable, but is this really the future? Learn how this new phenomenon could change the game.

CES is so back.

Last year’s event saw more than 115,000 people come through the Las Vegas Strip—and, as per usual, many of them were marketers. This year, which is expected to attract 130,000 attendees, is proving to be no different. Despite the effects of the pandemic on business travel, several marketers said CES is just as relevant as ever.

“It’s kind of like an agenda-setter for the rest of the year,” Chris Vollmer, a managing director at media and marketing consultancy MediaLink, told Marketing Brew. “It can be a hard reset coming off of vacation, but the benefits are huge.”

Vollmer was far from the only person to lament CES’s proximity to the holidays. So why, exactly, are agency, media, and brand execs still turning out in droves? In addition to establishing the industry’s agenda for the year (and the proximity to Sphere, of course), here are three other reasons marketing execs told us they keep coming back to CES.

Anyone who’s anyone: CES started out hyperfocused on technology, and in many ways, the tech sector is still front and center. But that’s not all it’s about these days.

“You have this gathering of all of the different publishers, you have a number of different retailers, you have a number of different channel partners,” Emily Ketchen, CMO of Lenovo and a long-time CES attendee, told Marketing Brew. “Marketers might meet with a number of different folks all in one place.”

Duolingo CMO Manu Orssaud, who attended and spoke at CES for the first time this year, said he made the trip in order to “meet a lot of people within the same place,” especially agency representatives and other marketers.

There’s also a whole lot of potential customers to ask about their product needs, Ketchen said, plus stakeholders traveling in from overseas. It’s not every day that execs and consumers from around the world are all accessible in one place—especially since the onset of Covid-19.

Continue reading here.—AM

Each week, Marketing Brew recaps what people are talking about on social media, the trends that took over our feeds, and how marketers are responding.

Bearing it all: Jeremy Allen White’s Calvin Klein ads are causing quite a stir among fans online and in the streets of New York. Just don’t ask his costars from The Bear about it.

Mind the gap: An ad out of Australia about generation gaps is gaining traction online because the product it’s promoting is…anything but expected.

Kids gone wild: Speaking of generation gaps… Much like Victoria’s Secret was once overrun by tweens stocking up on Pink body sprays, Sephora and Ulta stores are apparently now flooded with young Gen Alphas looking for Drunk Elephant skin care—and customers, nannies, and employees have something to say about it. While some have suggested Drunk Elephant is responsible for the development, others say it’s more on the parents. (The brand has indicated that some—but not all—of its products are OK for tweens and kids to use.)

Stop the shop: People continue to vent their frustrations with the proliferation of TikTok Shop videos on their FYPs, including creator Meredith Hayden, known as Wishbone Kitchen, who said the platform is “out” as a result of the number of ads and Shop posts on her feed. YouTube and Instagram Reels, on the other hand, are “in,” according to Hayden.

Gypsy-Rose, influencer? After her release from prison, Gypsy-Rose Blanchard, who was serving a sentence for her role in the murder of her abusive mother, has been all over social media feeds and racked up nearly 18 million followers on TikTok and Instagram. Most of her promotional work has been for her Lifetime series and her new book, and she seems poised to become a full-time influencer. Have any brands reached out to collab with her yet?—KH

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

Full disclosure: New disclosure requirements for political ads on Meta that contain AI are now in effect. Here are the details.

Plan ahead: Tips for setting up a digital media mix.

Water-cooler chats: OpenAI is bringing ChatGPT to the workplace with ChatGPT Team. Here are the details, courtesy of Search Engine Journal.

Stories we’re jealous of.

• Vox explained the Stanley cup phenomenon and why people are seemingly hoarding reusable water bottles.
• The New Yorker wrote about Jeremy Allen White’s Calvin Klein ad campaign and how it harks back to the brand’s “it” boy days of the ’80s and ’90s.
• The Washington Post wrote about photographer Juergen Teller, who went viral recently for simplistic-looking photos of this year’s award-show nominees, asking the question, “When is a bad photograph good?”