Eye cream by Ellen DeGeneres. Body wash by Alicia Keys. CBD beard oil by DJ Khaled. These are all very real products, and if you’re one of the people using them, consider yourself in the minority.

New Morning Consult data shows most people are largely unaware of celebrity beauty brands (with a few exceptions—looking at you, Rihanna). Still, only 31% of more than 2,000 US respondents said they’d seen, read, or heard “some” or “a lot” about her Fenty Beauty line. And that was the largest percentage; only 12% said the same for DJ Khaled’s Blesswell.

What’s more, it found 74% said they were not interested in buying beauty products from celebrity brands at all.

Overkill: Last month, a piece in The New York Times asked stars to stop coming out with beauty brands of their own. For one, the article laid out, the market is oversaturated, with new lines released at a “dizzying rate.” Recent examples include a nail-polish line by Harry Styles and an upcoming makeup and wellness line by Hailey Bieber.

• The list is growing so long that The Cut took it upon itself to make an encyclopedia of celebrity beauty brands.

Plus, people seem to be wary of—or uninterested in—products that they can’t be sure celebs use themselves. Or, if they do, people might suspect their use is likely accompanied by the work of top dermatologists, aestheticians, plastic surgeons, etc.

• “Celebrities are saying, ‘This is my skin care, this is what I use, and, no, I don’t get Botox, it’s just my products,’”’ Stacey Berke, 34, told the Times. “It makes it hard to believe.”
• According to Morning Consult, 31% of Americans uninterested in celebrity beauty brands said they do not trust celebrities to have well-made products.

The Times partly cites Kylie Jenner for ushering in the celebrity-makeup era in 2015 with Kylie Cosmetics. Notably, Morning Consult’s survey did not include the brand, which has since expanded to Kylie Skin and most recently, Kylie Baby.

Whatever her next venture is (Kylie Food? Kylie Décor?), precedents suggest more brands will follow—and many people won’t know the difference.—KH

Imagine a world without Covid-19. You’re blissfully breathing your germy particles all over everybody else, and you’re breathing in everybody else’s germs. You’ve never known the feeling of a face mask’s elastic bands cutting into the back of your ears. The term “BinaxNow” means nothing to you.

In this alternate universe, major US brands would’ve spent an additional $17 billion on advertising, according to Standard Media Index’s Covid-19 Advertising Report, which recently looked at what ad spend would’ve looked like during the first 13 months of the pandemic—if it had never happened.

• How’d they figure that out? According to the media-tracking company’s report, its analysts used data directly from global advertising agencies to estimate what major brand advertisers were on track to spend had the pandemic never existed.
• Could have been worse: Researchers say the dent is tiny compared to other major economic downturns. If adjusted for inflation, the downturn in ad spending during the Great Depression and Great Recession equaled hundreds of billions of dollars each, according to SMI. So $17 billion is “beyond a best-case scenario,” analysts wrote in the report.

Myth-busting: As has been commonplace during past economic downturns, the pandemic considerably rejiggered the advertising media mix. But despite what some experts had presumed, digital media did not, in fact, gain more ad spending during the Covid-19 era. Instead, it simply lost less revenue than traditional media, like TV, radio, and print. (Case in point: Google’s digital ad revenue declined by 8% in the second quarter of 2020, while ad revenue at broadcaster NBCUniversal dipped 27% in the same time frame.)

+1: And unlike traditional media, digital media has largely recovered from the effects of Covid-19 to its pre-pandemic growth estimates.—KS

If you like piña coladas, well, you’re far from alone. Liquor is having a moment—and the folks working for Big Beer probably aren’t too happy about it.

Explain. There’s an alcohol race going on, and Team Spirits seems to have an edge, thanks to the popularity of drinks like canned cocktails. A recent piece in The Wall Street Journal said “distillers reported their best sales in four decades—including ready-to-drink cocktails—while beer sales dropped” in 2020. And spirits makers aren’t exactly sitting back with a cold one to celebrate their success.

That’s where marketing comes in. Instead, they’ve spent recent years trying to capitalize on this momentum by pushing sales even higher via lobbying efforts, per the Journal, which highlighted a promo video created by liquor-trade body the Distilled Spirits Council.

• In the video, young people happily toast cocktails over appetizers while a voiceover encourages viewers to “make your voice heard and tell elected officials to take action on issues affecting our great industry.” Issues like taxes, which tend to be higher for spirits than beer, and restrictions on when liquor can be sold in some states, according to a site run by the Distilled Spirits Council.
• The beer industry has been trying to come together as a united front as well, the Journal noted; apparently, beer brands attempted to pull off a campaign akin to “Got Milk?” not long ago, but the push reportedly started to fall apart when Budweiser controversially used its 2019 Super Bowl spot to mock Miller Lite and Coors Light for using corn syrup .

More drama: The fighting comes as all alcohol brands grapple with the “sober curious” movement. Last year, Heineken told Marketing Brew it spent nearly half of its US media budget in 2021 on marketing its zero-alcohol offerings.—MS

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

Trendz: We won’t pretend to know what the future holds, but here are nine social media trends we’ll probably see in 2022, according to Hootsuite.

$$$: It’s easier than ever to set up (literal) shop on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Check out some tips on how to get started.

TikTok: The app shared why brands shouldn’t neglect sound when creating ads for its platform.

Stat: $500 million. The price Fanatics paid for trading-card company Topps.

Quote: “There are 200 million people who are college-educated, who read in English, but who no one is really treating like an audience, but who talk to each other and talk to us,”—Media columnist Ben Smith’s incredibly vague details on why he’s leaving The New York Times to join Justin Smith in a new news venture

Read: “New Balance lawsuit shows how flimsy the ‘Made in USA’ label actually is”—Fast Company’s Elizabeth Segran

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

• How one brand is trying to make deodorant less wasteful
• Why the leggings biz might look a little more relatable this year
• CES is back. Sort of