Seeing more ads on the NYC Ferry? Thank Mayor Eric Adams.

While the New York City transit system has always given advertisers the opportunity to reach commuters and tourists, the city’s ferry service—38 boats serving parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island—has started to lean more heavily into partnerships and activations. It’s partially the result of an Adams administration initiative aimed at reducing the ferry’s reliance on public subsidies, Madalena Phillips, VP of marketing for the ferries and transportation division of the Hornblower Group, the company that operates the city’s ferry system, explained. Because, yes, everything is an ad network, even if it’s bobbing in the East River.

The ferry has carried a grand total of 35 million passengers since it first set sail in 2018, and averages a little fewer than 30,000 riders on weekends, according to its latest quarterly update.

• Last year, Phillips and her team began making outbound inquiries to brands to see about partnerships.
• At the same time, the ferry’s social strategy has shifted away from largely informational content (route and transfer details, for example) to something more entertaining, Phillips said, another potential draw for brand partners.

There have been several high-profile activations. In July, the ferry hosted a listening party for the release of Taylor Swift’s Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) album after pitching Swift’s management on a free promotional opportunity. Even though there were only 350 seats, Phillips said 3,500 riders showed up.

The team also pitched (and apparently convinced) Carvel to let its iconic aquatic mascot, Fudgie the Whale, greet riders with free ice cream on National Soft-Serve Day in August. The Ferry saw a 73% YoY increase in ridership the weekend of the Carvel activation, Phillips told us.

More recently, Celestial Seasonings’s Sleepytime Bear rode the ferry in January, taking photos and handing out free samples of the brand’s Sleepytime Tea. The 6 train could never.

Continue reading here.—RB

SiriusXM, Pandora, SoundCloud. You know ’em. You love ’em. And together, they’re the largest audio advertising offering underneath SiriusXM Media.

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February feels more like a buffalo-dip-and-chili month than, say, one for novelty ice-cream confections. But Drumstick, the ice cream “sundae cone” brand, wants to remind Super Bowl snackers that it can be a year-round treat, too.

“Everybody knows who we are, but…it’s sometimes a latent memory, if you will,” Kerry Hopkins, marketing director for Drumstick parent company Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream, told Marketing Brew.

For the 95-year-old brand’s first-ever Super Bowl spot, Hopkins said the wintertime ad didn’t dissuade them.

“As we always say in the office, it’s always 72 and sunny in front of your television, in your living room, at all times,” she said.

The Super Bowl spot—purchased sometime between the second and third quarter of last year—is less about highlighting the brand’s legacy and more about “getting the most from the marketing buy,” she said.

“It’s the stage where you could reach millions and millions of people super quickly at one time where you have their attention,” she said. (Unless, of course, viewers head to the kitchen freezer.)

Read more here.—RB

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.

Bowls over totes: Emily Mariko, the influencer famous for her salmon bowls and lavish wedding, is the subject of some online backlash for releasing a canvas tote that retails for $120—around 3x as much as a large L.L.Bean Boat and Tote bag, and at least 10x more than those Trader Joe’s ones you can get by the cash register. One marketer told the New York Times that people are “very fatigued by influencers…especially as they’re struggling to buy the groceries to put in said tote bag.”

Even still, both colors are already listed as sold out on Mariko’s website, so perhaps the fan fervor is still there…or inventory was low to begin with.

Elmo needs a minute: What started as an innocent tweet from a Sesame Street character asking how everyone was doing turned into a collective internet trauma dump this week. It was mostly all jokes, but Elmo’s earnest response had some people tearing up. Other characters from the show also joined in to offer everyone support.

In an interview with the Link in Bio newsletter in January, Christina Vittas, Sesame Workshop’s social media manager, said that in her “three years working on @Elmo, [she has] come to realize that adults need a little Elmo in their lives, too.”

Continue reading here.—KH

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

Pin it to win it: Tips on how to use Pinterest analytics.

Press Send: A template and tips for writing a press release.

Read it and reap: A rundown of a few newsletters that can help inform your marketing strategy. We strongly endorse the first one.

Audio ace: Are you serious about audio? SiriusXM Media is. With juggernaut platforms like SiriusXM, Pandora, and SoundCloud—plus thousands of podcasts—they’re ready to help you crush your audio ad goals.*

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Stories we’re jealous of.

• Vox covered self-promotion as a marketing tactic and the “tyranny of the personal brand.”
• The New York Times wrote about TikTokers Pookie and Jett and the seemingly endless cycle of boosting and then canceling internet figures.
• The Wall Street Journal wrote about how Amazon Prime Video’s price increase for ad-free viewing fits into the growing trend of subscription fatigue, and whether it will lead consumers to cancel.