There’s power in a good recommendation.

According to recent data from influencer platform Mavely, a quarter of consumers, and nearly half of Gen Z consumers, said they have used a gift guide to make a holiday shopping decision.

As the founder of PR agency Dreamday and co-founder of product recommendation website The Quality Edit, Lauren Kleinman has experience seeing both sides of the gift guide pitching process. In her experience, she said the majority of her clients’ press coverage is published in November.

Kleinman starts pitching legacy gift guides that have long lead times (like, for instance, Oprah’s Favorite Things) in June and targets digital-first outlets that tend to have shorter lead times in September, she told us, but pitching for gift guides is an ongoing process. In other words, it’s never too late for brands to jump in—especially if they’re looking to land on a last-minute shopping list or pitch a creator’s gift guide.

We spoke with Kleinman and Mavely CEO and co-founder Evan Wray about some strategies brands can use to help their chances of making the cut.

The power of print: At The Quality Edit, which has a primarily millennial audience and often highlights DTC brands and start-ups, Kleinman said her editors test products and vote on which will make it into its gift guides. While pitching her Dreamday clients for other publications, Kleinman said she thinks about how to get product into the hands of editors even before that final testing period through year-round product seeding and meetings.

“We’re thinking about gift guides and relationship-building around the year,” she said. “Ideally, it would be that the editor you’re pitching for a gift guide, you’ve also gifted that product to back in February, and they’ve been using the product for six months.”

Read more here.—KH

Hulk Hogan, Taylor Swift, Jason Aldean, and Beyoncé all have one thing in common: In 2024, they used their celebrity status to endorse a presidential candidate.

And while Swift’s childless cat lady-signed Instagram post spurred headlines and Hogan’s shirt-ripping “Trumpamania” proclamation took over social feeds, at least one question remained: Do celebrity endorsements actually do anything to move voters?

In a rapid message test conducted on Oct. 30 to an audience of 4,023 adults nationwide, market research platform Grow Progress tested nine real celebrity presidential endorsements from 2024 and sought to determine whether watching these endorsements moved the needle in favor or against the candidate being endorsed. Grow Progress found that celebrity statements don’t often impact voters’ opinions of the candidates—but when they do, it’s not likely to be positive for the candidate the celebrity is endorsing.

Backwards effect: For the study, Grow Progress examined Beyoncé, John Legend, Eminem, Bruce Springsteen, Maggie Rogers, and Leonardo DiCaprio’s endorsements for Kamala Harris, and Hulk Hogan, Jason Aldean, and Dr. Phil’s endorsements for Donald Trump.

• Five of the six endorsements for Harris had “no measurable effect” on viewers’ opinions of Harris, Grow Progress found.
• Jason Aldean and Dr. Phil’s endorsements likely moved respondents’ feelings away from Trump.

Continue reading here.—JN

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

Lara Cohen is SVP of marketing, partnerships, and business development at Linktree. She has also held senior roles at Twitter and at The OutCast Agency.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? I have a lot of favorites. At Linktree, it’s been orchestrating our partnership with Vote.org for National Voter Registration Day in the US, where we got over 100 Linkers of all sizes and scale, from Stephen Curry to Maggie Rogers to Hank Green, to hand over their most valuable real estate on the internet—their link-in-bio—to mobilize their fans to register to vote.

At Twitter, I was proud of the “Tweet It Into Existence” campaign, where we flipped the notion that Twitter was only about negativity and highlighted how a bunch of top-tier creators had manifested their dreams earlier in tweets. The campaign did a great job reimagining what Twitter truly was—a place where people put their ambitions out into the world and called their shots.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? It’s hard to beat Nike. They do a best-in-class job in storytelling via the creators they work with. I loved their “DRIBBLE &_____” campaign featuring LeBron James in response to criticism suggesting that athletes should “shut up and dribble” to show athletes can be much more than just athletes.

Read more here.

Retail media is evolving fast, with new ad formats, non-endemic partnerships, and competition from financial media networks changing the game.

According to the EMARKETER forecast, US omnichannel retail media ad spending will account for nearly a quarter of total media ad spending by 2028, reaching $129.93 billion.

Explore retail media’s rise.

Mergers and acquisitions, company partnerships, and more.

• Liquid Death collaborated with Dr. Squatch on a limited-time soap called “Dirt Murderer.”
• SharkNinja worked with brand ambassador David Beckham on a holiday campaign.
• Van Leeuwen’s latest brand collab is with Discover Puerto Rico and celebrates the 70th anniversary of the piña colada.
• MediaSense acquired marketing consultancy R3, stretching its presence deeper into North America and Asia-Pacific.
• SoundCloud partnered with PubMatic on programmatic ad sales.