It takes nine months to make a baby—and, evidently, to turn around a baby brand’s social media strategy.

Last year, the team at Frida, which sells products for babies and their parents alike, found that the curated, graphic-centric content that was successful on Instagram 10 years ago just wasn’t resonating with today’s parents. So, last summer, it tapped branding expert Ashwinn Krishnaswamy, who has built a following on TikTok posting about marketing and design, to help build a new organic video strategy.

“An issue that so many companies have is they think about Instagram and this highly curated, highly polished era,” Krishnaswamy told Marketing Brew. “Now, the nature of social has changed.”

The first video he worked on with the brand, posted last June, shows a product that helps babies…relieve themselves, and has since gotten more than 2.5 million views. Since then, Frida has continued to post content that leaves little to the imagination, and has racked up more than 110 million organic views in the process, Krishnaswamy said. Frida’s two separate TikTok accounts, @fridababy and @fridamom, have a combined 257k followers. And as multiple product videos have gone viral, Amazon sales and traffic have also increased for the brand, Samantha Yehle, director of social at Frida, told Marketing Brew.

The positive response to the brand being more creative—and even a little shocking—in its in-house content means that Frida’s marketing team “has completely rewritten the way that we approach social,” both on TikTok and Instagram, Yehle said.

Continue reading here.—KH

Creating memorable and personalized marketing experiences requires serious tact and a whole lotta know-how. Need some inspo?

We teamed up with Attentive to moderate the NYC and LA stops of their Thread World Tour, a must-attend in-person event that brings the buzziest marketing minds together to chat about personalization, performance in email, and SMS.

We’ll be hosting panels with Attentive to discuss the topic currently on everyone’s minds: AI. Yep, we’re covering everything from what marketing leaders and execs need to know about testing AI tools to measuring their impact on performance.

And, of course, there will be plenty of time to link + build with other marketing GOATs. Hurry up and save your spot.

And if you can’t make it IRL, register on demand.

Wake up, babe. New media marketplace just dropped.

Fan intelligence company Sports Innovation Lab has teamed up with media agency Trailblazing Sports Group to create the Trailblazing Marketplace, which gives media buyers access to women’s sports inventory across sports and platforms. The marketplace was announced Thursday during Sports Innovation Lab’s Women’s Sports Club NewFront, which the company describes as “the first NewFront dedicated entirely to women’s sports.”

“Women’s sports does not have a supply problem,” Sara Gotfredson, founder of Trailblazing Sports Group, said during the presentation. “What we have is opportunity.”

The marketplace is designed to provide buyers with opportunities to achieve scale and target specific audiences to maximize campaign performance, Sports Innovation Lab CMO Gina Waldhorn said on stage, and it comes as more brands look to incorporate women athletes, teams, and leagues into their marketing.

Scaling: While certain women’s sports events like the World Cup or March Madness draw massive crowds by any standard,Waldhorn said that fans are looking for content beyond those tentpole moments, and “brands need to hold on to that connection with their consumers in between.”

To “keep advertisers always-on in women’s sports” and increase the reach of their campaigns, Waldhorn said, the marketplace will allow brands to buy packages of media that can include cross-channel content from publishers like The Athletic, media companies like Re—Inc, deals with athletes, and sponsorships of leagues like the World Surf League and events like the X Games.

Keep reading here.—AM

Stagwell is playing both sides this election cycle.

Assembly, its media buying arm, worked with Michael Bloomberg’s presidential campaign in 2020, and SKDK, which consults for Democrats, has worked with clients like Future Forward, a super PAC supporting President Joe Biden’s re-election. Meanwhile, Stagwell’s Republican political comms agency, Targeted Victory, is staffed with Republican presidential campaign alums.

While the agencies cater to different political parties, some members from each also come together to advise companies on ways to address hot-button social and cultural issues, which some brands have famously struggled to do.

That group is Stagwell’s Risk and Reputation Unit, which has been evolving to help brands navigate the polarized 2024 political climate. Together, Stagwell’s politics-focused agencies, along with Stagwell corporate comms firm, Sloane & Company, are advising brands on ways to navigate changing public interests and expectations.

“We’ve expanded our crisis practice to include political polarization, because it is such a new and startling risk to business,” Ray Day, vice chair at Stagwell, said.

The pressure isn’t just external; many companies have employees who are concerned about certain political or social issues, Pia Carusone, president of SKDK Political, said. According to her, the Risk and Reputation Unit aims to help those brands understand how their employees “are probably existing outside of their job and maybe engaging in conversations around hot-button issues.”

Continue reading here.—JS

Ready to compete? Because that’s just one of the findings in the latest report from SurveyMonkey: Marketing Trends for a New Era. Want to learn more and hear strategies for getting ahead? Register today for Curiosity Con 2024 on June 12, celebrating the power of curiosity to answer big questions and drive big results.

Executive moves across the industry.

• Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy is stepping down and the company will lay off around 400 employees as part of a wider restructuring that the company says is an effort to “bring its spending in line with its revenue.”
• Gymshark hired Kim Dolder, formerly SVP and GM for Abercrombie & Fitch-owned activewear brand Gilly Hicks, as GM for North America.
• BBDO New York hired McCann New York’s Emily Portnoy as chief strategy officer.
• Optable, an SaaS advertising platform, hired Google alum Kristy Schafer as VP of US sales.