PLATFORMS

Mouse House > Hype House

TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer resigned from the company on Wednesday, having spent only three months in the role since leaving Disney. 

In comparison with TikTok’s month of scrambling to sell itself off and sue the president of the United States, Disney’s most recent ad biz updates look like scenes from Mary Poppins. 

Disney D&I

Walt Disney's creative agency, CreativeWorks, is making strides toward connecting brand partners to more diverse audiences.

CreativeWorks recently formalized its partnership with Black-owned agency Translation to deliver on that promise:

• After collaborating for more than six months, Steve Stoute’s agency and CreativeWorks entered a multiyear deal this week. 
• By the end of the deal’s first year, the partners hope to see 20 different clients successfully connect with audiences they haven’t targeted before. 

Wise words: Stoute, who started Translation 15+ years ago, told Ad Age that “It’s not only the right thing to do but it is good for business.” 

No repeats

Disney is simultaneously working on fixing the most annoying part of ad-supported streaming services: repeated ads, which became a serious issue with its Hulu takeover. 

That Carvana ad, explained: For all of Disney’s digital properties except Hulu, Disney uses Google’s ad server. Working with two different ad servers makes it impossible to actually control ad frequency, despite more inventory overall.

• In June, Disney announced that it was officially going to merge its ad tech team with Hulu’s, so let’s hope they’ve been working on a solution this whole time.
• Disney’s not alone: On Thursday, Digiday reported that ViacomCBS might figure out how to combine its two separate ad tech servers into one stack by April 2021.

Why this matters: Ideally, solving this Pete Repeat issue would create a better user experience, increase the reliability of ad measurement, and allow for a truly unified buying experience.

Bottom line: Between diversity initiatives that should be great for business and its potential ad tech innovations, Disney’s ad biz seems poised to enjoy a far more triumphant 2020 than TikTok.

CAMPAIGNS

Stop and Sniff the Posters

Luggage company Away was grounded by the pandemic—its revenue dropped by 90% and its founders took some major heat for creating a toxic work environment. But it’s looking to reverse those bad vibes with a lighthearted new OOH campaign for its travel pet carrier. 

Away’s latest travel posters are positioned at just the right height to lock eyes with furry friends, plus they’re guaranteed to make you say “Come on, Tiberius!” to your sniff-happy pet.

• That’s because Away’s posters are scented (and re-scented over the course of the campaign). 
• The Yosemite (cedar-scented) and Buenos Aires (meat-scented) posters should appeal to dogs, while the rare cat on a walk can get a whiff of catnip alongside the Cairo poster.
• The campaign will run in New York, San Fran, Chicago, and Boston, plus Away retail locations.

My takeaway: Sensory marketing isn’t novel to most marketers—researchers believe that over 75% of our emotions are triggered by smells. But an olfactory experience for pets rather than humans is really outside the, uh, crate.

SPONSORED BY ATTEST

What’s in an Ad?

A word becomes a sentence, the sentence becomes a paragraph, the paragraph becomes the creative message for an ad. And when it’s all said and done, a salient question remains: 

What’s that ROI, baby?

While the answer to such a question has sometimes resulted in a collective shrug around the conference table, you can now approach brand building and collect insights through a data-driven lens with Attest. 

Attest can show you how to demonstrate the ROI of brand activity and expose the impact of creative marketing. And—here’s the best part—do it all in-house at a fraction of the cost and at 10X the speed.

Check out their comprehensive guide on how to use their on-demand research platform to run a streamlined brand KPI tracker, and see how clients like Microsoft, Walgreens, Gymshark, and Discovery use Attest to take the guesswork out of brand work.

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BRANDS

Shoot Your Flu Shot

Late October is typically when we all get to feel brave for getting flu shots, but retailers are getting a jump start on marketing the shots this season.

Walgreens believes that U.S. demand for flu, pneumonia and other immunizations could increase 30-50% year over year (YoY). On Thursday, Walgreens and WPP debuted a flu shot video spot earlier than usual—the drug store usually doesn’t roll out any creative around flu shots until September.

CVS started running vaccine promos on August 18, which could give it an edge in the heated competition experts expect between brands offering flu shots this season. Its recent survey found that 54% of U.S. consumers plan to get a flu shot earlier than they did last year.

Big picture: For most of us, flu season and COVID-19 rolled into one sounds terrifying. For retailers getting ahead of the curve, it’s the perfect recipe for marketing that’s actually helpful to people—something consumers say they want in survey after survey.

WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• The NBA Playoffs will resume this weekend after several teams went on strike Wednesday to call attention to the police shooting of Jacob Blake.
• WPP saw a 15% revenue dip in Q2, but it seems to think Q3 will take it out of the woods.  
• Apple’s iOS 14 update could cause a 50% decrease in Facebook’s Audience Network revenue, per tests run by Facebook.
• AB InBev decided not to go ahead with its global media review, retaining its existing agencies instead.
• Bon Appétit named Dawn Davis of Simon & Schuster its new editor in chief after allegations of racism hit the publication this summer.

SPONSORED BY DOING THINGS MEDIA

Reality check: ads can be boring. But Doing Things Media makes memes into ads your customers will actually dig. With 55M+ followers on their 20+ original meme brands—accounts like Sh*t Head Steve, Animals Doing Things, No Chaser, Gamers Doing Things, and Middle Class Fancy—Doing Things Media are meme royalty. Talk your audience’s talk with Doing Things.

FRENCH PRESS

Marketing tips to make you fancy

Case studies: If I had a time machine, I’d go back before Marketing Brew launched and read this case study of how Jot Coffee nailed its social media pre-launch strategy. Or maybe I’d go hang with Zelda Fitzgerald. Or both. 

Errors: In writer Anna Crowe’s opinion, these are the best Error 404 pages of all time. Hit reply if you have a better one. 

B2B: StoryChief made the case for following social media trends in B2B content creation here.

Shopping carts: With Instagram Checkout’s launch comes an avalanche of guides on how brands should use it. Here’s the most comprehensive and easy to read explainer I’ve found so far.

METRICS & MEDIA

Stat: U.S. back to school TV advertising spend dropped 70% YoY this summer, per Kantar data. 

Quote: “Hiki makes products for bodies that sweat, not because sweating is something to be ashamed of, but rather because it’s natural and normal and healthy. And that’s a message I haven’t seen from other deodorant labels.”—brand marketing expert Emily Singer on Arfa, the CPG conglomerate co-founded by former Glossier COO Henry Davis, which creates products in partnership with customers and shares a portion of profits with them (more on Arfa here).

Read: Chris Kelly wrote about how El Pollo Loco tripled its digital sales this year by taking its marketing strategy into the 21st century for Marketing Dive.

ICYMI

Catch up on the top Marketing Brew stories from the last few editions.

• Marketers have mixed feelings about “New Facebook”
• Kendra Scott found a gold mine in its campus ambassador program this year
• Travel brands flooded Pinterest due to increase in travel searches on the platform