TV

Will Marketers Accept this Rose?

While everyone else in the TV marketing world was busy talking about the Biden vs. Trump town hall ratings, I was doing a deep dive into a different TV event—The Bachelorette premiere. 

Sure, the premiere of Clare Crawley’s Bachelorette season wasn’t the most dramatic TV event of all time. The most recent Super Bowl garnered over six billion TV ad impressions, for example, whereas the Bachelorette generated ~280 million. 

However...The Bachelorette—and ABC’s entire Bachelor franchise—has a few things the Super Bowl and political debates don’t: a super-targeted audience and lots of men sobbing (ok, maybe sports have that too). 

Who’s watching?

“What’s this super-targeted audience you speak of?” I’m glad you asked.

According to Inscape and iSpot.tv data cited by TVRev, Tuesday’s Bachelorette premiere audience was… 

• 91.2% female
• 45.4% millennial—between the ages of 25 and 34
• 81.4% U.S.-based, primarily from the West and Southeast

Also, growing: TV ad impressions rose 8% between the season 15 and 16 premieres. 

Cashing in

When it comes to how brands can capitalize on this audience, you could always go the commercial route: a Disney+ ad spot achieved 8.3 million impressions from this premiere.

Or, you could go a different (experiential, social) route.

Popsugar, the digital publications and women’s lifestyle brand, partnered with ABC and YouTube TV to create the network’s first-ever premiere event for the show.

• Covid-19 plot twist—it was drive-in movie themed. On Tuesday, guests parked overlooking The Grove in Los Angeles and watched the premiere from the comfort of their cars in advance of the televised West Coast airing later that evening.
• “Popsugar’s audience is 20X more engaged with The Bachelorette content on Popsugar than the average topic, which made our partnership with ABC the perfect match,” Lindsay Leaf, SVP Experiential Marketing at Group Nine Media, wrote in a press release.

+1: Babe Wine partnered with Lauren Zima, one of the franchise’s many (many) influencers for the premiere. During Tuesday’s episode, fans could play premiere bingo on both Babe and Zima’s Instagrams—everyone who got bingo received 25% off at drinkbabe.net. 

Bottom line: If you think The Bachelorette’s audience sounds like the type of people your brand wants to target, there are more ways to get in on the hype than just commercials.

BRANDS

Closing The Tab

Last week, Coke announced that it’s cutting a bunch of different products, one of the most significant being Tab diet soda. In honor of the soda I have never once sipped, here’s how Tab got to this point:

What Tab got right: Tab got its moniker the same way Elon Musk and Grimes’s baby probably did. After Coca-Cola’s 1963 market research found consumers preferred shorter brand names, Coke programmed its IBM computer to print all possible three- or four-letter word combinations using vowel sounds. Tab was chosen from 300,000 results, per Ad Age.

What Tab got wrong:

• The brand’s core messaging was based on making women anxious about staying thin for their men as the Vietnam war raged on. 
• That messaging worked for postwar America’s dieting, mostly female consumers. But by the ’90s, when Tab released a clear version of the product to little success, it had clearly fallen flat.

My takeaway: It can be hard to know when the right time for a loud rebrand is—but Tab’s ultimate demise proves that treading water for decades isn't a viable plan.

SPONSORED BY CALLTRACKINGMETRICS

So You Think You Know Call Tracking

Time to test your marketing knowledge, Marketing Brew readers. What is call tracking best for?

1. Becoming a secret agent
2. Finding out when your packages will arrive
3. Sourcing powerful attribution data to inform marketing decisions
4. Scaling your org’s growth

If you answered C or D, you’re on the right track. (If you answered A, follow your dreams; secret agents are awesome.)

But even those correct answers are just the beginning. Learn more about the power of call tracking with CallTrackingMetrics, the only platform that combines marketing attribution with contact center automation.

Track which of your marketing campaigns are driving leads and quality across phone calls, texts, form fills, and chats. Then, use CallTrackingMetrics’ contact center solution to take rapid action on those leads.

Accelerate growth and save costs while you’re at it. Check out CallTrackingMetrics here.

CAMPAIGNS

Promises, Promises

After the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, many brands vowed to “do better.” Now, a few months later, we’re paying close attention to which companies actually followed through on those promises—and how doing so affects brand trust. 

For instance: ThirdLove created TL Effect, a program supporting female entrepreneurs of color, in response to the movement. And as of this week, that program is anything but lip service. 

• ThirdLove’s first TL Effect recipient just received a $20,000 grant, dedicated office space at ThirdLove’s headquarters, a spotlight across the DTC brand’s social platforms, and financial advising from the company’s founders, per Adweek. 
• ThirdLove’s social presence centers the grant recipient’s company rather than humble-bragging about TL Effect itself, which should make the initiative feel more authentic. 

Why it matters: 63% of U.S. consumers agree that brands and companies that publicly support racial equality must “follow it up with concrete action to avoid being seen [...] as exploitative or as opportunists,” per a Spring 2020 Edelman survey on brand trust. 

Big picture: Following through on D&I promises made to consumers this summer is more than just the right thing to do—it’s actually proven to help increase brand trust, a major conversion driver.

WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• Facebook rejected more than two million ads and tens of thousands of posts trying to obstruct voting. 
• Facebook’s Audience Network is moving to a bidding-only model (rather than traditional programmatic waterfall ad buying) in 2021, in other FB news.
• Cannes Lions Live is continuing this week.
• Uber is planning to expand its cartop ad network to Chicago and LA in Q4.

SPONSORED BY VALIDITY

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FRENCH PRESS

Marketing tips to make you fancy

Pinterest: Because not every digital channel has something like Google Ads for marketers, Later wrote a comprehensive guide to Pinterest analytics.

Small biz: We know Covid-19 hasn’t exactly been a reason for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to celebrate, but here’s an infographic showing how the pandemic has affected marketing requirements for SMBs. 

Consumer acquisition: Ignoring the fact that it’s probably sacrilegious of me to post a Substack link, these 20 acquisition channels used by startups to acquire early adopters caught my eye this week.

Halloween: In case you were thinking about adapting your SEO strategy to the most exciting event we’ve seen since March, Google just released data on the most popular Halloween costume searches.

CMO SENTIMENTS

Sign up here for Morning Brew CEO Alex Lieberman’s CMO Series on LinkedIn, in which he chats with the most important marketing leaders in the industry. Then read on for three questions that’ll help you get to know these marketing leaders a little better.

SurveyMonkey CMO Leela Srinivasan stopped by the CMO Series last week and taught us a lot about the links between marketing and sales. But she also answered these three questions: 

Alex Lieberman: Favorite survey question?

Leela Srinivasan: Explain your answer—you need to understand why somebody is giving you a specific answer.

AL: What’s a tool you use every day to be a marketing professional?

LS: Salesforce, Tableau, HubSpot, and LinkedIn. 

AL: How do you take your coffee?

LS: I don’t! I drink tea. 

I’d be so upset if “no coffee, just tea” was the secret to becoming a better marketer. Watch the full interview with Leela Srinivasan here.

ICYMI

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

• Using memes in your Twitter marketing strategy: How it started, how it’s going
• We did a deep dive into the branding and strategy behind Glossier’s latest product launch
• Stan Richards fired himself from the Richards Group after racist comments lost the agency a bunch of clients