AGENCIES

Squarespace’s creative VP on its Super Bowl ad: ‘I have no regrets.’

Squarespace’s in-house agency is perhaps best known for its celeb-studded Super Bowl campaigns—and this year was no different. Its 2021 Super Bowl commercial featured a remake of Dolly Parton’s 1980 hit “9 to 5”—sung by the star herself—called “5 to 9.” 

• In it, bored office workers eagerly wait for the clock to strike 5pm so they can leave and work on their side hustles.
• The campaign garnered a fair amount of backlash and criticism. 
• It spurred the hashtag #9to5ShouldBeEnough, per The New York Times, which said “the ad clearly felt, to many of its viewers, like yet another glorification of an economy in which people must work more jobs, for ever longer hours, just to survive to the next paycheck.”

But Ben Hughes, VP of creative at Squarespace, told Marketing Brew he has “no regrets” about the work, which was created internally. “It came out exactly as we hoped it would,” he told us. “There was a very small and very specific part of the audience that intentionally misunderstood it.” 

Zoom out

In fact, Hughes, who joined Squarespace nearly three years ago, thinks the website building platform’s roughly 100-person in-house agency did some of its best work during the pandemic.

• “If you had talked to me in March 2020, I would have told you that was impossible,” he said.
• That’s because, pre-Covid, much of Squarespace’s in-house agency culture was based on being “in the building” together. 
• “It was so much about collaboration, being in the room, and being able to have conversations about these fine, fine, fine details that really matter to us. I didn't know how that was going to happen.”

But happen it did, despite pandemic limitations: Over the past year, the company’s in-house team produced some pretty elaborate campaigns, like these Renaissance-themed entrepreneur portraits commissioned from artist Ignasi Monreal, and ads that imagine characters such as Snow White starting their own Squarespace sites.

By the numbers: Last week, Squarespace said it expects revenue to reach $772 million–$780 million in 2021, for year-over-year growth of 24%–26%.

Hughes credits much of this success to the in-house model itself. While he acknowledges in-housing comes with its own set of challenges, he thinks both internal and external agencies can produce impactful work if they’re approaching it with the right mindset. 

Read how Squarespace’s agency got its start, what Hughes thinks the biggest differences are between in-housing and regular agency life, and how he tries to keep creative fresh while only working on one brand.—PB

PUBLISHING

Comscore and NewsGuard make it official

Most advertisers don’t want to be caught in a screenshot alongside conspiracy theories. And yet, because of the automated nature of programmatic advertising, it happens. 

While Comscore is best known for its measurement capabilities, it also offers contextual targeting options to advertisers. This week, Comscore said it is integrating NewsGuard, a tool that makes publisher inclusion and exclusion lists for advertisers, into its contextual offering.

Refresher: NewsGuard rates publishers to help brands determine which ones are reliable and which ones are likely to post misinformation. It relies on journalists to vet publishers and “score” them based on nine criteria, like whether a site corrects and clarifies errors. Its exclusion lists stop brands from appearing on hoax and fake news sites, while its inclusion lists steer advertisers toward more credible news outlets.

Flashback: This month, we covered a joint report from NewsGuard and Comscore that estimates $2.6 billion in global ad spend goes toward publishers of misinformation. Now, their relationship is getting official—cue the wedding bells.

Comscore is also integrated into most demand-side platforms, Rachel Gantz, Comscore’s GM of activation solutions, told Marketing Brew. Its pre-bid, AI-enabled contextual tool can tell a brand whether a site contains pornography or violence, or prevent an automotive brand from running ads next to a story about a car crash, for instance. 

• Still, it can’t tell fake news from a real publisher with a newsroom, Gantz said.

Now, Comscore’s clients will be able to opt in to either inclusion or exclusion lists of publishers vetted by NewsGuard, should they want to. Gantz declined to detail how many of its clients will opt to use NewsGuard. “This should not hinder reach. Preventing misinformation will be foundational. There’s a lot more attention being paid to these placements,” she told us.—RB

SPONSORED BY PARCELLAB

Raise Your Hand if You Like Spam

...Didn’t think so.

It’s time to stop flooding inboxes and look beyond the traditional marketing approach. How about engaging with people when they actually want to hear from you instead? 

In parcelLab’s latest guide, they lay out a strategy for using your transactional emails—the emails related to customers actually buying something—as a way to create an incredibly engaging experience during moments when customers actually want to hear from brands. 

And it makes sense that parcelLab has keyed in on transactional emails as a key opportunity: According to Forrester, 64% of people say these are the most valuable emails they receive.

Download parceLab’s guide here to learn how brands can harness transactional emails and create experiences hotter than that short-form video social network with dances which we can’t name for legal reasons.

And sign up for OX Fest ’21 to up your e-commerce game even more.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Will it trend?

Snap debuted a tool on Tuesday that allows marketers to gauge the popularity of a given keyword or topic on its app. It’s called Snapchat Trends, and the similarity to Google Trends in name and functionality probably won’t be lost on marketers—but maybe that’s on purpose. 

The platform is positioning it as something marketers can use to look for insights, find creative inspiration, and conduct product and competitive research as they try to reach the app’s 293 million daily active users.

The tool is publicly available, so anyone can visit the site and plug in a keyword (up to five at a time). It then spits out a line graph showing the volume of the keyword’s use in the text of Snapchat Stories over time. 

• As an example, Snap found that the phrase “third wheeling” spikes every weekend, which could be useful intel for, say, dating apps. 
• The tool draws from captions on public and shared Stories, and in some instances shows a set of human-moderated sample Snaps.

Snapchat has gone through a number of evolutions to keep advertisers interested:

• Last month, it added a “My Places” feature to the Snap Map, giving users an avenue to engage with restaurants and businesses around them.
• It also introduced a “Campaign Lab” where advertisers can experiment with how they’re running campaigns.
• And last year, it introduced a competitor to TikTok and Instagram Reels called Spotlight.

Zoom out: According to a blog post, some of Snap’s partners were able to apply insights from its Trends tool through early testing, but a company spokesperson declined to give examples. While the tool is publicly available, the spokesperson told us Snap can take custom requests on a case-by-case basis.—ZS

WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• Major League Baseball has a new lead marketer: former Marriott International CMO Karin Timpone.
• Amazon has surpassed Walmart as the largest retailer outside China.
• The National Hockey League will add advertising patches to jerseys beginning in the 2022–2023 season. 
• Old Navy has committed to ensuring all apparel comes in every size, ranging from XS to 4X.
• Bud Light Seltzer’s fall flavors include Pumpkin Spice, Maple Pear, and Toasted Marshmallow. It’s old news, but we felt that you, dear reader, needed to know.

SPONSORED BY ASANA

Sayonara to workplace silos. They’re outdated. They’re inefficient. They keep people apart. And they’re lingering around your workplace without your even knowing it. There’s a better future for you and your teams with silos out of the picture. Get rid of your toxic relationship with silos like we did in our latest article breakup letter. 

FRENCH PRESS

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

Writing: Read these 14 tips for writing copy. You know, for “results.” 

Hashtags: Your guide to hashtag campaigns, just in case you thought hashtags were so 2019.

Learn: This article explores whether marketing education is keeping up with social media. Any guesses?

Cookie’s crumbling: Come 2022, you’ll need first-party data to power your ads. Sailthru sees you, and hears you, and has put together a guide to help you understand the true value of first-party data. Read it here.*

METRICS AND MEDIA

Read: Our very own sister pub, Retail Brew, on why our coffee fix might soon be getting more expensive.

Quote: “It makes for great theater,” said Tim Hwang, a former Google lawyer, on why media buyers love digital advertising, in Harper’s story on disinformation.

Stat: “We have reached a 100-percent COVID-19 vaccination rate.” The Atlanta Falcons tweeted this after becoming the first NFL team to vaccinate every player against Covid-19.

FROM THE CREW

It’s About to Get Personal

Yesterday was a big day here in the Brewniverse. We launched Money Scoop, our new personal finance newsletter. Every Tuesday and Thursday, our writer/CPA (but like, the cool kind), Ryan Lasker, will discuss anything and everything you want to know about student loans, mortgages, portfolio management, retirement planning, and like a million other things. Make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss an issue. It could just be the most lucrative newsletter you ever read. Subscribe to Money Scoop here.

ICYMI

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

• Reddit hits a quarterly milestone
• Budweiser made a candle with Homesick
• How good is AI at writing marketing copy?