What started as a fun way to pass the time has evolved into a full-time career for creator Ash Xu.

After graduating high school in 2020 during the pandemic, Xu found herself in need of a way to pass the time before starting college at Northwestern University to pursue film.

“I started seeing people on the internet do product commercials from their living room, and I was like, ‘That is such a cool concept,’” she told Marketing Brew.

Cut to 2024, and Xu has built a social media following of more than 1.4 million across TikTok and Instagram by making product videos for brands like Microsoft, Olay, and Lenovo, largely from the comfort of her own home. Most recently, she filmed her first TV commercial for Taco Bell.

We spoke with Xu about how she’s built her career online and what it was like bringing her skills to a TV production set. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Taco Bell was your first TV commercial, but you’ve done a lot of branded work online since 2020. Tell me about how you got to this point.

My first [social] commercial was for a clock and then a coffee company. Smaller businesses would come to me and be like, “Hey, we’ll send you our product and pay you a little bit if you make a commercial for us and then make a little organic piece of content,” and I was like, “Oh, bet. Okay, great.” So that’s how it got started.

The first huge spike was my freshman year of college. I had just moved into my dorm, and we were still completely remote, so I was spending a lot of time in there. At the time, I had a can of Sprite that I brought off the airplane with me, and off the cuff, I was just like, “I’ll make a commercial for this can of Sprite.” It ended up getting 20 million views on TikTok…That’s also when I signed to my management agency and the brand deals started flowing in.

Continue reading here.—KH

On Nov. 5, as the world waited with bated breath to find out the outcome of the US presidential election, the mental health app Calm saw a prime advertising opportunity.

The company, which offers subscribers meditation recordings and other products, ran ads on ABC, CNN, and Comedy Central offering viewers “30 seconds of silence” amid Election Night coverage. The ad buy allowed the brand to show up in front of millions of eyeballs while avoiding an overt political message.

It’s a marketing playbook that other mental health apps are following as the second Trump administration begins to take shape. Other mental health and fitness apps including Talkspace and Headspace are navigating the post-election period with advertising and branding that seeks to project impartiality while also acknowledging the heightened emotions that some segments of their customer bases may be experiencing in the current political climate.

“In the US, we conducted a poll back in September and found that one in four Americans said that elections caused them to have poorer mental health, and half of our members told us that the current political climate is one of their top stressors,” Connie Chan Wang, SVP of marketing at Headspace, told Marketing Brew. “How we’ve approached it is by empowering people with the tools to help them get through those stressful moments.”

Read more here.—JS

Holiday gift guides curated by Alicia Keys and Paris Hilton, among several others, are about to take over your Pinterest feed.

The social platform, which has been trying to drive more shopping on its service, is hoping to make holiday shopping easier for its 537 million monthly active users. It will do so by offering them more than 1,000 curated gift guides, which carry 30–40 items each, curated by top creators and celebrities like RuPaul and Emma Chamberlain.

Hilton even called Pinterest “a moodboard in your pocket.”

Martha Welsh, chief strategy officer at Pinterest, told Retail Brew that gift guides are a “natural extension” of everything Pinterest has been doing over the past two years to make the platform more shoppable.

At a high level, the idea is to enable customers to not only discover products they love, but to make it easier to save them into a single wish list and buy them through Pinterest, Welsh said.

“You can think of it as almost a shopping cart, you know, where you’re putting stuff in there, and then you can come back to it,” she said.

Read more on Retail Brew.—VC

Stories we’re jealous of.

• The Wall Street Journal wrote about how marketers are preparing for Omnicom’s planned acquisition of IPG.
• Business Insider wrote about LinkedIn’s video ambitions, which include a feed that looks a lot like TikTok.
• The Verge wrote about how YouTube is embracing its place on TV screens.