ADVERTISING

Guerilla marketing

If you’ve spent time in LA’s Crenshaw neighborhood recently, you’ve probably seen a mural at the corner of Crenshaw Boulevard and 43rd Street. It shows a woman, head wrapped, next to the words “Black Women Get Us Higher,” almost mirroring a church window’s stained-glass panes.

The mural is part of a launch campaign for Gorilla Rx, a dispensary that opened its doors during the last week of August. (Here’s a video of how the mural came together.) Though reflective of the neighborhood’s residents and history, the founder of Gorilla Rx, Kika Keith, doesn’t look like the average dispensary owner: a 2017 survey from Marijuana Business Daily found that 81% of cannabis-business owners and founders were white, while only 4.3% were Black. 

According to Keith, Gorilla Rx is LA’s only Black-woman-owned dispensary.

• “Everything is set against us to make sure this doesn’t happen, which is why we’re celebrating. We’re almost an anomaly,” Keith’s daughter Kika Howze, who’s leading marketing strategy for the dispensary, told Marketing Brew. “As soon as one of us opens the door, it’ll create hope and opportunity for so many more people.”
• The mural was led by marketing agency Decoded, which provides pro bono services to select BIPOC–owned businesses. Aside from creative work, Decoded donated $20,000 to Gorilla Rx for media and other costs.

“Out of home was the one thing that we knew we couldn’t get on our own,” Keith told us. “Now we have metrics. Now I can go back to investors and say, ‘Listen, look at what this did.’”

Gorilla Rx and Decoded had to be strategic with their outdoor placements. As we’ve discussed, advertising pot comes with a whole mess of regulations. For instance, if Gorilla Rx wanted to include any imagery or mentions of the leaf, they would have to make sure the OOH wasn’t anywhere within 1,000 feet of a daycare center, school, or playground. The dispensary would also have to prove that at least 71.6% of people who would see the mural are over the age of 21.

To avoid dealing with restrictions, they opted instead for more abstract visuals and copy instead.

“The words had to stand out; the imagery had to speak for itself without the inclusion of a joint. It compels people to dream the rest, but it’s stifling,” said Howze. The brand added a QR code, which leads to the dispensary’s site, to the mural, and some of its posters. “We have to be cryptic about it because of all the regulations at play.”

Click here to read the full story.—RB

CAMPAIGNS

Social fuel

The Gatorade shower has found a home outside of stadiums: TikTok. The sports drink recently debuted a TikTok campaign driven by nine athlete influencers dubbed the “Gatorade Social Squad,” who will post content related to the brand now through November. 

• The young athletes each have strong followings on TikTok, ranging from tens of thousands to more than a million followers. Gatorade held “tryouts” on the app earlier this year to fill out the squad. Carolyn Braff, Gatorade’s head of brand strategy, said the company got 1,500 video submissions.
• “We were extremely impressed with the creative sports-related content that we effectively crowdsourced through this initiative. We ultimately chose the final athlete roster based on how we celebrate our athletes—through a diverse lens on sports and talent, as well as the creators’ unique personalities and how they’ve established themselves on the platform,” Braff told Marketing Brew. The company declined to discuss how much each influencer is getting paid.

Hmmm. Young athletes? Influencing? The campaign comes on the heels of the NCAA’s recent decision to let athletes monetize their name, image, and likeness, or NIL. But Gatorade says its Social Squad is not the brand’s foray into college-athlete partnerships—yet. Braff said the agreements were signed before the NIL changes earlier this summer. 

“We are assessing the landscape and evaluating opportunities for college athlete partnerships, as we see the value they can bring,” Braff said. “We’re considering all relevant athletes when choosing athlete partners down the line.”

The athletes marked their debuts into squad-dom by posting videos of themselves sporting Gatorade gear—Caitlyn Schrepfer shows off some fancy soccer freestyle moves before getting dunked with a cooler of Gatorade, while Gage Ferguson throws a precision football pass before...getting dunked with a cooler of Gatorade (it’s a running theme). 

Zoom out: TikTok is solidifying its seat at the big kids’ table among social platforms, and brands are taking notice. US users’ time spent on TikTok surpassed YouTube for much of the past year (at least for Android users), per an App Annie report. Plus, the company itself has been building out tools to help brands connect with influencers.—ZS

SPONSORED BY MONDAY.COM

A Handy Guide to Marketing Mediocrity

Ever wanted your marketing team to grumble at you? Here’s a step-by-step guide:

• Write down campaign ideas illegibly on a big whiteboard
• Send out calendar invites for tedious status update meetings
• Make an ugly spreadsheet with timelines and to-dos
• Pester your team every day to manually update said spreadsheet

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If you like not knowing which version of a nine-tab spreadsheet you should be looking at, by all means, carry on. 

But if mediocrity is not in your Q4 KPIs, try monday.com for a 14-day free trial today.

SPORTS

Game time

Sit back, relax, and eat copious amounts of buffalo chicken dip. The 2021 NFL season kicked off last night, and brands are here for it. As the games begin, several are revving up their marketing engines to get in front of eyeballs that are increasingly hard to come by on regular old TV.

• Lowe’s—the “official home improvement sponsor” of the NFL—rolled out a spot yesterday that stars former New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees.
• Celebrity Cruises debuted a multi-million-dollar campaign yesterday to encourage travel.
• Uber Eats tapped Lil Nas X and Elton John to star in the latest installment of its “Tonight I’ll Be Eating” campaign that will run during games.
• FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange, released an ad starring Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady and his wife Gisele Bündchen.
• FanDuel, one of the league’s official sports betting partners, recently unveiled details about a marketing push that will run throughout the season.

And that’s just a few. Plus, the NFL made a kickoff ad of its own. 

Bottom line: As streaming continues its popularity streak, it seems harder and harder for marketers to reach large audiences on live TV. But football provides that opp—per Nielsen data cited by Ad Age, 73 of the 100 most-watched broadcasts in 2019 were NFL games. According to Sportico, “By the time Tom Brady had earned his seventh Super Bowl ring, Fox, NBC, CBS, and ESPN had generated a combined $3.9 billion in ad sales.”—MS

WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• Amazon will start selling its own line of smart TVs next month.
• Microsoft introduced a personalized news feed. It’s called Start, just like the button. 
• Facebook and Ray-Ban are selling camera glasses. First there was Google Glass, then Snap Spectacles. Now we have Ray-Ban Stories. What’s next?
• Twitter is testing a feature called Communities, which lets users tweet to groups with a shared interest. 

SPONSORED BY ATTEST

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FRENCH PRESS

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

Facebook: The platform put out a guide to creative prototyping, with a focus on gaming.

Google Ads: Here are some tips on how to make sure you’re not wasting your budget. 

Social: Do Instagram Reels outperform TikToks? Hootsuite recently tried to find out.

Tap into influence: Tagger’s end-to-end influencer marketing and social listening platform gives you exclusive access to 11+ billion unique social data points—and supports you through every stage of campaign planning and execution. Connect with the right influencers and the right audiences with Tagger here.*

ICYMI

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

• Why junk news ad sites are alive and well on the internet
• What brands are saying and doing about Texas’s anti-abortion law
• Why so many brands are shopping for new agencies

AD TECH COMPANY OR FICTIONAL BRAND?

There are a lot of questionably named companies in the murky marketing universe. Two of these are real ad tech companies. Three are fake brands seen in TV and movies. Can you distinguish them? Keep scrolling for the answers.

1. Dinoco
2. POOF
3. Coull
4. Scoota
5. Initech

AD TECH COMPANY OR FICTIONAL BRAND ANSWERS

Initech is the sleepy software company in Office Space. Dinoco is a gas station seen in some Pixar movies. POOF is mentioned in HBO’s The White Lotus. We’re not sure what the company does, but the CFO seems to always have a “Zoom with China.”