CAMPAIGNS

Wondering why your mom just gave you all her Tiffany jewelry?

This month, Tiffany & Co. pulled an Oldsmobile. The luxury jewelry brand rolled out a campaign called “Not Your Mother’s Tiffany”—and some mothers didn’t exactly love it.  

The campaign’s multiple videos, running on Instagram and Twitter, feature posters of young, edgy-looking models—coupled with the bolded words “Not Your Mother’s Tiffany”—plastered around LA and New York.  

Le response

NSS Magazine wrote that the ads were “not very well received by some more traditionalist parts of the public,” citing a tweet from entrepreneur Rachel ten Brink—in which she says the brand is “dissing” its longtime customers—as an example. Tiffany & Co. did not respond to Marketing Brew’s request for comment.

On Instagram, the brand’s followers didn’t shy away from critiquing the push. A few particularly representative examples:

• “As a mother who has spent the last 15 months working from home and homeschooling my daughters at the same time I feel really offended by your campaign. Mothers all over the world have been hit particularly hard by the pandemic—I am not sure this is [the] right moment to diminish us (it obviously never is). If it wouldn't hurt my husband I would take off my Tiffany's wedding band and my Tiffany's engagement ring right now,” Instagram user @drea_steiner commented.
• “As a mum and older woman you're saying you don't need me as a customer anymore,” @mexwinder commented.

Zoom out: NSS also noted that “as Business of Fashion pointed out some time ago, Millennials and Gen Z will account for 45% of global luxury sales by 2025.” In recent years, Tiffany & Co. has been attempting to resonate with consumers of a younger variety (remember the A$AP Ferg performance?). So this isn’t the first time the brand has tried to shift its branding into the 21st century—it just might be the most blatant. 

Swing and a miss?

Of course, a few Instagram comments (okay, more than a few) don’t dictate a campaign’s overall performance. But some marketers who work in the luxury sector think this was a miss for Tiffany & Co.

• “Instead of standing for something, they took the more common approach of standing against something, their own history and tone. And to a younger buyer, being common is almost as bad as being ignored,” Joel Kaplan, executive creative director at MUH-TAY-ZIK / HOF-FER, who works with clients like Audi, told Marketing Brew. 
• Katie Keating, founding partner and co-chief creative officer at ad agency Fancy, told us that “tossing one generation away in favor of another” is “not cool, especially when that other generation has been loyal customers for decades.”

But others feel like it could land well: Ryan Jordan, executive creative director at IMRE, told us the loudest voices don’t always represent the overall reaction to a repositioning. “Some mothers may also be looking to identify with a younger feeling brand or campaign—the opinion is personal at an individual level,” he said.

Click here to read what else marketers had to say about the campaign.—PB

SOCIAL MEDIA

Cast a vote

Twitter’s experiments continue. Fleets ended in a breakup, but the company has moved on to another feature: upvotes and downvotes. On Wednesday, Twitter said it’s conducting a “small research experiment” to test the buttons in replies. The details:

• The and buttons are currently only available to some iOS users.
• Twitter is toying around with how they appear—some people will see arrows, while others will see thumbs up and thumbs down icons. 
• Downvotes aren’t public at the moment, and upvotes appear as “likes.”
• The platform said “votes won’t change the order of replies.”

“We’re hoping to learn more about the quality of replies that people vote on and if voting is a feature that people find valuable,” Cody Elam, user researcher at Twitter, said in a tweet. 

But what will the brands think

Nothing has been *officially* implemented yet, so it’s not clear how the testing will shake out. Renee Vafa, director of social strategy at Reprise Digital, told Marketing Brew she anticipates brands being resistant to voting, “especially on promoted tweets due to the impact it could have on their public brand sentiment.”

But, but, but: Vafa said brands could use upvotes and downvotes for “internal insights to understand the true reaction to a post.” Hannah McDonald, social supervisor at agency Two by Four, told us brands might find the feature “interesting from a sentiment standpoint.”

“The information that can be gathered through this feature could help brands improve on a multitude of fronts—from brand messaging to product development,” McDonald explained.

+1: Twitter’s announcement piqued Reddit’s interest.—MS

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EVENTS

Three quotes from Clinique’s Sameer Agarwal on TikTok

On Wednesday, Marketing Brew hosted another session of our virtual event series, The CTA.

• Our conversation with Sameer Agarwal, Clinique North America’s VP of marketing, can only be described as a 360-degree knowledge dump on the company’s TikTok strategy. 
• From outlining the beauty brand’s recent #ZitHappens campaign to sharing best practices for spawning user generated content (UGC) and influencer marketing on the app, we learned too much to fit into this newsletter.

ICYMI: Watch the full event here, or keep reading for our favorite Sameer-isms from Wednesday. 

On its #ZitHappens influencer campaign: “For us, the whole goal here was to make sure that we are reintroducing Clinique to these younger consumers, getting them to reconsider us.”  

On finding inspo from other brands: “TikTok is all about empowering creators and empowering creativity, and so we saw that brands that did a great job of giving their audiences the opportunity to create against their brand were doing better than the brands that were just pushing out messages.”  

On paid TikTok media: “Sometimes even if you find the right dialogue that’s happening [on TikTok] like we did with acne positivity, to get something going you have to seed it a little bit with a little bit of paid media.”  

+1: Keep an eye out for the deets on our next CTA event in September .—PB 

WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• Taboola is acquiring Connexity, an e-commerce media platform, for $800 million.
• Twitter’s revenue grew 74% year over year in Q2. 
• NBCUniversal is adopting Ad-ID, a tool developed by the ANA and the 4A’s, to help with issues like ad repetition.
• Warner Bros. will premiere 10 movies exclusively for HBO Max in 2022. 

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FRENCH PRESS

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren't those.

CTAs: These are the best (and worst) words a marketer can use in their website’s call to action buttons. 

SEO: Google’s new three-strikes policy, explained. 

D&I: Here are three common mistakes brands make when it comes to diverse representation in marketing. 

Breakups at work: Not with your cutie coworker—with creativity-crushing silos. We’ve decided it’s them, not us, and call it quits in a letter inspired by a better beau: Asana.*

ICYMI

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

• Zola debuts largest marketing push since start of pandemic
• TikTok courts marketers with two new features
• Back to school: After a year of Zoom classes, marketers vie for Gen Z’s attention

AD TECH COMPANY OR CRAFT BREWERY?

There are a lot of questionably named companies in the murky marketing universe. So here’s a game: Two of these companies are real ad tech firms. Three are craft breweries. Can you find them? Keep scrolling for answers.

A. Ogury

B. Third Space

C. MadHive

D. Alulu

E. TRVE

AD TECH COMPANY OR CRAFT BREWERY ANSWERS

TRVE is a heavy metal brewery in Denver, Colorado. You can also grab a cold one at Third Space in Milwaukee, or head over to Alulu in Chicago.