Three years ago, Mo Said left his creative gig at Droga5 to start his own agency: Mojo Supermarket.

Finding himself frustrated with the usual confines of marketing—30-second TV spots, social posts, and so on—he set his sights on creating “a place where we can have all these creative people come in and make the home of their ideas bigger than just advertising,” Said told Marketing Brew.

Even so, much of what Mojo Supermarket has done to date is, in fact, advertising, although Said claims that will change this year. “This is going to be a creative company that solves problems beyond advertising.”

Pay attention

According to Said, Mojo Supermarket wants to help brands “earn attention” instead of paying for it. As he puts it, “Advertising should work like life works. You don’t go to a bar and then just buy a bunch of people’s drinks and become the most interesting person. You have to have something interesting to say.”

• In 2020, it helped Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty lingerie brand promote its second fashion show by putting faux “sensitive content” warnings on Instagram photos plugging the event.
• More recently, Mojo Supermarket worked with the nonprofit Girls Who Code and Doja Cat to create an interactive version of the musician’s “Woman” music video that’s essentially an intro-to-coding course in disguise.

Last summer, once vaccines became widely available, Mojo Supermarket created a campaign for Match.com encouraging singles to “lick every stranger they can.” The brand plastered the message on billboards, social media, and lollipops, telling people to enjoy a “good consensual hookup, or seven” before heading over to Match to look for something more serious.

The results: Match’s CMO Ayesha Gilarde described the campaign as “a great example of earning attention in culture. The strong creative told our POV [at] a particular moment in time. [It] instantly captured attention and got people talking about who Match is and what we stand for today.”

Looking ahead

As of now, Mojo Supermarket, which recently won resale marketplace StockX, has 38 employees. According to the agency, it made $10 million in revenue last year, up from $1.9 million in 2020.

What’s next: At the moment, Said is keeping his creative ambitions for Mojo Supermarket close to the vest, but is adamant that it won’t be just an ad agency in the future.

• He pointed to a few projects the agency has created that weren’t ad campaigns for clients, like “Give Her a Break,” a streaming platform it made in 2020 to “hack the Oscars.” To draw attention to the fact that few women have been nominated for Best Director, the platform, which streamed the Oscars broadcast, replaced standard commercial breaks with trailers for films directed by women.
• “We created that out of our copywriter’s basement,” he said. “We can turn that into a TV channel. We can turn that into an editorial channel. Basically, what I’m trying to say is that when we have an idea, it can go way beyond the campaign.”

Read the full story here.—MS

Campaigns plugging Dry January often strike a somewhat muted…dare we say dry…tone. Take two of the biggest Dry January spots in recent memory, for Heineken 0.0 and Miller’s low-alcohol offering, which both feature celebs sitting on couches as opposed to enjoying a fun, sober night out.

In its latest push for the month, Heineken is having a little more fun by nodding to one specific superstition—bad luck can stem (get it?) from clinking glasses with a non-alcoholic drink (Heineken 0.0, the ad implies, is a clever workaround). The global spot takes viewers through different ages and across different geographies, from the Victorian era to modern day, showing scenarios where people toast with all the wrong drinks—think: milkshakes and juice boxes—while Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” plays.

To find out what else the ad winks at, Marketing Brew spoke with Mihnea Gheorghiu, who serves as CCO of both Publicis Italy and Le Pub, the agencies that worked on the campaign. See a few inspirations behind the ad below, or read the full story here.

Very superstitious: This one is universal. “Growing up in Romania, you get told it’s bad luck to cheers with a non-alcoholic drink. Nobody really knows why. Same in China. Or in Spain,” Gheorghiu told us. Nobody can really agree on the origin of this myth, he explained, but it’s widely respected—so the “killer” song choice was an obvious fit.

The eras: Initially, Gheorghiu explained, the team planned to portray Shanghai in the 1920s. But some colleagues suggested re-creating the Chinese tech boom from the 80s, so the team saved the Roaring 20s for the states instead. Additionally, musician Fela Kuti and the afrobeat movement inspired the 70s scene. “As for the gentle-eyed Viking drinking milk—well, he just had to be there,” quipped Gheorghiu.—PB

The 94th annual Academy Awards, one of Hollywood’s biggest nights (and one of the few remaining linear-TV advertising tentpoles), will once again have a host.

ABC, which is slated to air the broadcast on March 27, will bring back an emcee after three years without one, Hulu Originals and ABC Entertainment President Craig Erwich confirmed at the Television Critics Association’s annual winter press tour Tuesday. They haven’t nailed down who will do it, though. “It might be me,” Erwich joked.

Flashback: Jimmy Kimmel, who hosted in both 2017 and 2018, was the last Oscars ceremony emcee before the broadcast went host-less in 2019 after Kevin Hart stepped down from his hosting duties amid controversy. In the two years since, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hasn’t announced anyone for the job.

It may have been convinced to change after last year. With fewer major titles up for consideration due to pandemic-related release delays, and a muted ceremony, viewership plunged to an all-time low in 2021. The last three years’ average viewership, per Nielsen, declined steadily:

• 29.6 million viewers in 2019
• 23.6 million viewers in 2020
• 10.4 million viewers in 2021

Turning the ship around: Tapping a charismatic host may urge audiences to tune back in. But it won’t be easy: Awards shows, like most other programming, have lost audiences as consumers increasingly favor on-demand viewing. Even so, major advertisers still signed up for the show last year.

Zoom out: Televised awards shows may be in for a reckoning, if they can’t keep audiences interested.

Social: Hear it from the horse’s mouth—how TikTok is driving offline sales, according to TikTok.

Spending: Why curbside pickup isn’t going anywhere, and other e-commerce trends to prepare for in 2022.

We’re aware: Turns out, folks are more willing to buy a product if they’ve actually heard of the company. Fancy that. So hurry up and get going with these tips on brand awareness.

Looking for more? Check out Marketing Brew’s latest article: “What’s it like creating a Super Bowl ad?” sponsored by Impact.

Look: Luxury fashion brand Bottega Veneta is taking over the *checks notes* Great Wall of China for the Lunar New Year. Click here for photos.

Quote: “The people at the end of the line who are flipping NFTs do not fundamentally care about distributed trust models or payment mechanics, but they care about where the money is,” writes former Signal CEO and cryptographer Moxie Marlinspike in a blog post.

Read: “Podcasting hasn’t produced a new hit in years,” argues Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw.