A showerhead that costs $165 (or more, if you include the cost of quarterly shower-filter replacements) might seem like a luxury product to most. But that’s not how Arjan Singh, co-founder and head of brand marketing and operations at Jolie Skin Co.—which sells a showerhead that promises to filter out “chlorine, heavy metals, and other contaminants” to improve skin and hair health—sees it.

“We would not say Jolie as a product is a want or something that’s nice to have, but more a necessity,” he told Marketing Brew.

Since going to market in December 2021, Jolie’s showerhead has been featured in more than 25,000 pieces of user-generated content, according to Singh. The brand, which has more than 200k followers across Instagram and TikTok, has also run activations in the New York City area as part of what he says is an effort to generate conversation.

“Word of mouth—whether that’s word of mouth online or across the dinner table—that’s really the end goal,” Singh told us.

The company says it brought in $28 million in revenue last year, which Singh attributes in part to the brand’s marketing. By keeping operational costs low with a team of three and a robust gifting strategy that is “far lower” in cost than paid advertising, Singh said Jolie is able to reach audiences online and IRL to encourage them to add a Jolie showerhead to their existing beauty routines.

Jolie, for you and me? Jolie’s marketing strategy centers on product seeding to “not necessarily influencers, but people of influence,” Singh said, and the brand currently sends out free products on a monthly basis. (Singh declined to share the number of free products sent each year.)

• The brand has worked with well-known influencers like Devon Lee Carlson and Becca Moore, but Singh said the goal is not exclusively about racking up big-name endorsements; encouraging word-of-mouth recommendations can work just as well.
• “We want many different types of people to represent the brand,” he said.

While Singh said that Jolie isn’t “overly protective of who represents the brand,” it isn’t sending products without a strategy, either. Instead, Jolie’s marketing team targets people who it thinks are likely to be interested in the product at a time when inbound requests are exceeding outbound, he said.

Continue reading here.—KH

Set up a 401(k), buy a starter home, retire by 65—we’ve heard it all before. But is that traditional financial advice still valid? And should it be?

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Pause ads may be the key to upping consumer engagement, according to new research.

Around half of streaming viewers have taken some action upon seeing a pause ad, according to a report from the Video Advertising Bureau, a trade organization that represents major media companies including Disney+, NBCUniversal, and Paramount+.

Pause ads, which appear on screen when a consumer halts a TV show or movie to, say, run to the bathroom or grab a snack from the kitchen, have become increasingly commonplace across the streaming landscape, and platforms including Max, Hulu, and Peacock (which are all VAB members) have all incorporated pause ads as they focus on increasing revenue.

We broke down some of the VAB’s other findings below:

A rise in live sports viewing: Of 1,600 TV consumers surveyed, 50% reported using a subscription streaming service to watch live sports in the past 12 months. Streamers are looking to invest in live sports, and particularly women’s sports, according to Danielle DeLauro, EVP of the VAB.

“Obviously [women’s sports have] gotten a lot of media attention in the last month because of Caitlin Clark,” she told Marketing Brew, but investment in women’s sports has been growing for years, DeLauro said, and sporting events like the 2023 Women’s World Cup and women’s March Madness have smashed viewership records.

“The question moving forward is, what other sports are under-invested in that women participate in?” she said. “That’s probably where a lot of programmers at this moment are looking. Where can they potentially be the first movers?”

Read more here.—JS

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

Rachel Sterling is CMO of Identity Digital, a domain name services company. She’s also held marketing roles at Instagram, Twitter, and Google.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? When I worked at Nest Labs, we knew that dads were our core customers for smart-home tech. So it was a given that we would run a campaign for Father’s Day. But we realized that dads hated receiving gifts if it required them to do work. So for Father’s Day 2018, we created a campaign that offered the Nest Hello video doorbell with the gift of professional installation.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? This is an oldie but a goodie: for the Super Bowl in 2000, EDS ran a spot about cat herding (not metaphorically, but literally) to describe the value of what they do. It was absolute perfection.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: I’m weirdly competitive about only one thing: fishing. If we’re going out on a boat together, I’m going to catch the biggest fish of the day.

Continue reading here.

Come congregate and celebrate. Remember last year, when Canva unveiled their new AI-powered design tools? Well, their biggest-ever event, Canva Create, is back with a jam-packed keynote and exciting launches and announcements that will improve the future of visual communication. Be among the first to see it all unfold. Register for free.

Mergers and acquisitions, company partnerships, and more.

• NBCUniversal and Instacart announced a new retail media data partnership that will enable advertisers to gauge the efficacy of campaigns on NBCU streaming properties using first-party purchase data from Instacart.
• Oracle and Accenture expanded a partnership aimed at encouraging increased adoption of generative AI among their clients.
• Sony Pictures Entertainment and Apollo entered negotiations with Paramount on a possible acquisition, the New York Times reported, after exclusive talks between the media giant and the Hollywood studio Skydance lapsed.