STRATEGIES

Hill House Home sees its influencers as artists

For those who went on a fashion magazine detox over the past year, Hill House Home is a six-year-old lifestyle brand that entered the 2020 zeitgeist when its “Nap Dress” found market fit in one Covid-19 pandemic. The Nap Dress quickly grew in popularity, first becoming the thing to wear while working from home (and yes, to literally nap in) during quarantine—then morphing into the thing to rock at post-vax brunches.

Why you should care: That virality just so happened to coincide with the brand’s first experiment with influencer marketing. 

• “We actually started with influencer marketing really out of necessity,” Hill House Home CEO and founder Nell Diamond told Marketing Brew. “It was May of 2020 for our first big summer [Nap Dress] drop…and we couldn't shoot our product in an e-commerce photo studio because of Covid regulations.” So they cast 12 influencers instead. 
• Since then, Hill House Home and its PR and influencer marketing agency Communité have worked closely on strategizing influencer partnerships—and their resulting content—around drops. 
• Although today’s more relaxed Covid-19 regulations allow Hill House Home to do more formal e-commerce shoots with models, influencers have remained a major part of the lifestyle brand’s content strategy. 

News you can use: The brand’s recent “Mermaid Drop”—which just so happened to be drenched in influencer content—marked not only the roll-out of new Nap Dress prints, but also its first full apparel collection.

Feels > followers

Together, Communité and Hill House Home approach influencer marketing—specifically on Instagram, where the majority of its influencer content ends up—as more of a funnel for content creation, and less of a customer acquisition play. 

• Hill House Home doesn’t obsessively track whether influencer posts lead to clicks or sales; instead, the brand treats its influencers as content studios who can produce the same kind of work that an ad agency or production company might. 
• That’s partly because of Hill House Home’s popularity—its drops almost always sell out day-of. 

“The product sells out so quickly, and that gives us the freedom to not have to worry about the clicks or conversions…because we know each collection will sell out. So we don't have to worry about the conversion because the conversion is happening on its own,” Communité founder Danielle McGrory told us. 

What’s trendier than a Nap Dress? 

Apparently, it’s Hill House’s approach to influencer marketing. eMarketer senior analyst at Insider Intelligence Jasmine Enberg told us she’s seen the feels > followers mantra become more and more popular. 

“Metrics still matter. But brands are increasingly moving away from so-called ‘vanity metrics’ like follower count and engagement rates and toward metrics that better reflect the success of an influencer marketing campaign,” Enberg explained. 

Click here to read more about Hill House Home’s influencer marketing strategy, like how the brand finds the best people to partner with and how it pays them.—PB

IBM

Watson’s hunting for bias

IBM—creator of Watson and the rumored inspiration behind the killer robot from 2001: A Space Odyssey—is creating an artificial intelligence tool that it says will help marketers better recognize and reduce bias in targeted advertising.

The company seeks to audit brand campaigns after they’ve run to see which audiences were missed, and whether marketing algorithms over-indexed for a specific group or demographic.

• It has already signed up The Ad Council to audit the nonprofit’s historic “It’s Up To You” vaccine PSA effort. 
• “The application of AI to advertising has rapidly increased, so we just feel it's a space we should investigate and find those [bias] patterns where they exist. And if we can do something to better that, it’s a worthy task,” Robert Redmond, IBM’s head of AI advertising product design, told Marketing Brew.

Step back: Marketers obviously have an intentional bias for specific demographics—makeup companies largely target women, for example—but when ad tech mechanisms optimize for performance, some audiences might get lost in the mix. Think serving classified ads for cashier positions to mostly women, or primarily showing taxi jobs to Black people.

Although IBM’s initiative might read like an altruistic investment, there’s an efficiency play here for marketers, Redmond told us. Campaigns that are more efficient against bias will reach more relevant audiences, the thinking goes. 

“There's a whole group of people who are just secluded because the campaign itself is optimizing them out,” said Redmond. Product plans are still in development, Redmond noted, but presumably IBM could offer the anti-bias tech to media agencies or brands.—RB 

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AGENCIES

Creatives on this year’s Cannes surprise party

Let’s be honest—there was a lot of weirdness surrounding Cannes Lions this year, from the “Is Cannes still virtual, or will it relocate to NYC?” debacle to a seaweed-based edible packaging winning a Design Grand Prix. Okay, fine, it was technically the seaweed’s branding agency Superunion that won the award...but you get the picture.

We asked the experts—aka creative directors and chief creative officers (CCOs)—what stood out to them at this year's unconventional festival. Here's what they said.

TBWA\Chiat\Day NY CCO Chris Beresford-Hill: “This year I’m seeing lots of ‘for good’ work earning top prizes, which makes a lot of sense, given how the world is thinking and feeling these days. Much of that work has made a big, meaningful impact, and makes me proud to be in this business. However, I can’t help but notice another portion of this work, where the only real impact is at Cannes.”

AKQA Senior Creative Gustavo Machado: “It's interesting the serious turn the festival took this year. We all know that it has a lot to do with all the social convolution we're living in a short time span. And maybe that's the reason I saw a lot of fun, nonsensical ideas not receiving medals, but staying in the shortlist realm only. Some of them are my faves, because I appreciate every time a brand doesn’t take itself too seriously and plays with the nonsense to pay homage to pop culture (speaking as someone who just won a Lion for a weird project called Stranger Antenna). I love when both people and brands laugh at themselves.”

WPP Global CCO Rob Reilly: “I am surprised, but incredibly proud to see how resilient we were as an industry over the past 18 months. And how we helped the big brands of the world show up when the world needed creativity the most. But, it is no surprise that the ideas that took the top spots at Cannes this year are ones that not only delivered a powerful purpose but entered culture in a massively disruptive way.”—PB

WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• F9 took home $70 million over the weekend in a much needed windfall for theaters. 
• AMV BBDO was named agency of the year at Cannes Lions.
• Clubhouse partnered with the NHL ahead of the Stanley Cup. The platform teamed up with the NFL in time for the draft a few months ago.
• Southwest raised its minimum wage to $15.
• BET has a new logo.

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FRENCH PRESS

Reeling ’em in: Use these nine strategies for 2021 customer retention—Sprout Social says they’re tried and tested.  

LinkedIn: The virtual job board just rolled out what it’s calling a “pocket guide” to its ad targeting options—but we think it’s pretty comprehensive.

ATT: If Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) was a celebrity, it’d be Clare Crawley—she blew up The Bachelorette, while ATT blew up the advertising landscape. Here are six tactics for adjusting to this brave new world. 

Engage: Thousands of top Shopify-powered brands use personalized text messaging to drive shopper engagements. We’re talkin e-commerce big boys like Steve Madden and Olive & June. Learn what to look for in an SMS provider.*

AD ANTIQUES

—Vintage Ad Browser

“...who has scaled the difficult heights of the new simplicity.” Us, working from home. 

ICYMI

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• A look at Tripadvisor’s post-pandemic offerings
• NBA Ratings: What’s going on?
• We Are Rosie survey: 63% of marketers plan a 2021 job change