For the second year in a row, Ouai is making summer all about St. Barts—this time by land, air, and sea.

Earlier this summer, the hair and body-care brand released a St. Barts hair and body mist and doubled down on some of its marketing strategies from last summer’s campaign for its St. Barts body cream and body cleanser, like in-flight media on the airline JetBlue. This year’s campaign seems to be about embracing travel in all its forms, including putting billboards on boats in Miami and hosting sampling events out of Adgile trucks in New York.

While there are digital aspects to the campaign, which wraps at the end of the month, OOH has been crucial to marketing the St. Barts line, both by capturing people’s attention and through conveying the feelings of “accessible luxury” and being on vacation, said Nicole Solórzano, VP of brand marketing at Ouai.

So far, Solórzano said the hair and body mist has been Ouai’s biggest release at Sephora. The mist, which sold out for a time, has been the brand’s best-selling product since it came out.

“It all goes back to the fragrance itself and the storytelling around [it],” Solórzano said. “People just want to feel like they’re on vacation. They want that warm and fuzzy, yummy feeling.”

Continue reading here.—KH

Who said that? Marketing leaders, that’s who. They’re referring to AI as their No. 1 priority and challenge. They want to explore its possibilities, but they’re unsure of their approach.

From differing data strategies to wide-scale personalization capabilities, marketing is, ~surprise surprise~, undergoing pivotal changes this year. That’s why Salesforce gathered the details in their 9th Edition State of Marketing Report.

Salesforce surveyed nearly 5k marketers to unpack the latest trends and learnings in AI, including:

• AI adoption among marketing leaders
• marketers’ biggest AI use cases
• changes in first- and third-party data usage

So, what’s the scoop? Get it in the free report.

There’s chum in them thar iPhones.

Content recommendation giant Taboola reached a deal with Apple to handle the ad inventory for Apple’s News and Stocks apps, Axios reported this week.

As part of the deal, Taboola, which is best known for its chumboxes found at the bottom of many publishers’ websites, will sell ads that run in the apps’ main feeds, as well as within articles for select publishers, according to Axios. Taboola will operate native advertising placements inside the apps that are intended to blend in with the surrounding content.

So what? The companies, one a premier tech company with a (nearly) bulletproof brand and one an ad tech giant partially responsible for littering the internet with clickbait, make for strange bedfellows.

It could be that Apple may need a little help to bring its nascent ad network, which is primarily mobile-based, up to speed, Axios noted.

Read more here.—RB

What do Cîroc, Buffalo Wild Wings, and FanDuel have in common? They’re all apparently great TV advertisers.

The three brands ran some of the most effective TV ads of the first half of the year, according to the measurement company EDO, which ranked national TV spots across 15 categories. EDO gauges effectiveness based on how likely the creative is to motivate consumers to engage with a brand online after seeing the ad, whether that’s searching for it, visiting its website, or downloading its app.

Here’s a look at some of the other brands that stood out among their categories so far in 2024:

Summer of seltzer: Cîroc’s ad for its Limonata vodka, which aired 102 times for 35 million impressions, was 271% more effective than the average alcohol ad, according to EDO. Budweiser followed close on the vodka brand’s heels with its “Folds of Honor” ad, which was 270% more effective than the category average across 301 airings and 26 million impressions.

• Budweiser’s “Crack of a Bat” ad was the third most effective alcohol ad, per EDO.
• Both of the top Budweiser ads centered around baseball.

Keep reading here.—AM

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Stories we’re jealous of.

• The Wall Street Journal wrote about the increasingly fancy nightly turndown gifts that are becoming branding mainstays at some five-star hotels.
• The Atlantic covered Meta’s plans to work with researchers on studies around teens’ use of Instagram and their mental health.
• Vox wrote about the branding behind wedding trends over the years and the myth of a “timeless” look.