From the mod-piercing parlor Studs to influencer Serena Kerrigan’s conversation-starter card game, in-the-know upstarts have been popping up in Deuxmoi’s seemingly endless thread of Instagram Stories.

Deuxmoi is an Instagram account that’s basically an IRL Gossip Girl…if Gossip Girl had 1.3 million Instagram followers. The anonymous woman running the account gets celebrity gossip from her henchmen, then posts it on Instagram Stories for viewers to salivate over.

Funny Face Bakery, famous for making cookies with people’s (and celebs’) faces on them, recently partnered with Deuxmoi for an organic Instagram giveaway.

• The giveaway itself was simple: Deuxmoi shared a few posts on its Instagram Story about the giveaway that not only featured photos of Deuxmoi-themed Funny Face cookies, but also linked to the bakery’s own Instagram account. For its part, Funny Face posted contest details on its own Instagram grid and Stories.
• According to the brand, it was hoping to achieve “brand awareness, follower engagement, and organic reach” through the collab.

Results: After the giveaway, Funny Face said it gained around 188 new followers. The partnership also resulted in hundreds of comments on a Funny Face Instagram post plugging the giveaway since people had to tag three friends in order to be entered for a chance to win five cookies.

Recipe for success

Funny Face went into the partnership not knowing how many average views Deuxmoi gets on its Instagram Stories—or who, exactly, the account’s 1.3 million followers are. And the entire partnership was planned via Instagram DM.

Olivia Nickel, Funny Face’s digital marketing and content manager, said she saw similarities between the account's fanbases. Nickel told Marketing Brew that tools from Later Media, Google Analytics, and Facebook helped the Funny Face team understand that its audience is predominantly women, and most interested in topics like media and entertainment—categories that overlap with Deuxmoi’s bread and butter, celebrity gossip.

• Funny Face is no stranger to the celebrity world; the bakery’s cookies made an appearance at Keeping Up with the Kardashians’ final day of filming, with each star getting a personalized cookie with their face on it.

Food for thought

Funny Face founder Sarah Silverman (no, not that one) told us that, while she’s “so happy with the exposure that Deuxmoi was willing to give us through her platform,” she thinks the return “would have been higher if we paid her to post in-feed.”

Regardless, Silverman said she was satisfied with the collab’s results in part due to the number of comments Funny Face got on its own Instagram post about the giveaway—there are currently 264, compared to zero comments on its posts both directly before and after it.

“I feel like they post so much on their Stories that sometimes their partnerships get lost, or their giveaway partnerships get lost,” Nickel told us of Deuxmoi’s prolific Instagram account. But she added that her team was okay with the results because of how inexpensive the giveaway strategy was for them.

• Details: While no money was exchanged between Deuxmoi and Funny Face, the bakery estimates it spent about six and a half hours on the giveaway in total—one hour designing the cookies, two hours baking and piping them, and an hour and a half “corresponding, planning, and scheduling.”

+1: Funny Face has done similar Instagram partnerships before, including with athleisure brand Outdoor Voices.—PB

It’s that time of year again—the sun sets before dinner, it’s cold, and advertisers are blowing their marketing budgets on commercials. Yes, we’re talking about the Super Bowl.

Though there are still a few weeks before the big game on Feb. 13, we figured we’d give a brief update on some of the movers and shakers showing up this year.

$$$: As we wrote last week, NBCU is charging as much as $6.5 million for a 30-second spot, so if you have ambitions to play in the background of roughly 90 million bathroom breaks, you’d better start saving.

New entrants: Yes, you’ll probably see headlines calling this the Crypto Bowl. That’s because, for the first time, crypto exchanges like FTX and Crypto.com are running ads during the game.

Who else: Taco Bell is returning after a five-year absence. So is Lay’s, which took a 17-year break from the Super Bowl. Other companies include DraftKings, which ran its first spot last year (gambling!), and General Motors, which last year featured Will Ferrell hating on Norway. Oh, and how could we forget Meta?

: Anheuser-Busch’s InBev is still the exclusive alcohol-rights holder for the Super Bowl but hasn’t announced which of its brands  will advertise during the game, according to Ad Age.

Who’s out: Hyundai and Lexus are both parked in the garage; Mars Wrigley, Tide, and Kraft-Heinz will be sitting out on the sidelines as well.—RB

If you unplugged over the holiday break, you might’ve missed the results of our end-of-year survey, which asked Marketing Brew readers to weigh in on 2021’s most overhyped and overlooked trends. Nearly 700 of you responded.

And the winner is: You thought social audio, the metaverse, and NFTs were overhyped. Not that surprising. The resurgence of out-of-home advertising got the most votes for overlooked.

This got us thinking: How many of you plan to invest in OOH this year? Take our *very formal* survey to share whether or not your brand (or clients) plans to put media dollars behind OOH in 2022. We’ll share the results next week.

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

Algorithms: TikTok’s, specifically…click here for a breakdown of how it works.

Voices: Here’s how you can grow your share of voice on social media.

The January slump: If you’re struggling to get back on track with work after the holidays, you’re not alone. Enter: “slow productivity.”

One powerful CMS: Streamline your content ops with a CMS built for the future. Learn how you can connect with customers everywhere, all at once, with Brightspot’s guide to modernizing your content platform. Download the white paper here.*

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If nobody orders us flowers-by-wire about a month from now, it is definitive proof that no one loves us…per this 1956 Valentine’s Day ad.

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

• How NBC was able to sell Super Bowl inventory so quickly
• Social-commerce stats for the year ahead
• This video-game mega-deal just supercharged the mobile market