A nondescript gift shop on Brooklyn’s Driggs Avenue sells the usual New Age accoutrements you’d find at other stores throughout Greenpoint—artisanal lavender soaps, rose-scented “body milk,” sandalwood diffusers, greeting cards, and incense holders. Christmas ornaments were sold over the holidays.

But Sparrow also sells something a bit more unusual—urns for the remains of deceased loved ones.

Sparrow, a “contemporary funeral home” that opened in November, looks nothing like a typical funeral parlor.

• Ceremonies are held in “celebration rooms” flooded with natural light. The walls of the largest one are covered in a soft-hued, hand-painted mural, where funerals can be (and have been) held in-the-round. Did we mention the gift shop? The Addams Family mansion, this is not.
• “Yes, we look different than what you expect a funeral home to be, but that’s okay,” Erica Hill, the co-owner of Sparrow, told Marketing Brew. “Nobody wants to celebrate or plan for death, because that’s the end. But it doesn’t make any sense…You can’t avoid death.”
• She’s aware of criticism that Sparrow is a “hipster funeral home”; a post from a local news organization announcing the business got comments like, “Wow, they gentrified death!” If Hill didn’t own the business, she said she’d probably feel that way, too.

Big picture: Still, she believes there’s an underserved audience that’s thinking about death differently. Though few may want to spend much time contemplating The End, Sparrow isn’t alone. The pandemic has lots of us thinking about—or dealing with—death, and a wave of companies are cashing in, ushering in a modern refashioning of an industry that’s seen little change since the Civil War.

No way to die

For starters, the casket industry isn’t as popular as it once was—fewer people than ever want to be put in the ground.

• In 2021, more than half of Americans who died (57.5%) were cremated. By 2040, that figure could rise to 78%, according to the National Funeral Directors Association’s 2020 Cremation and Burial Report. (And we thought our jobs were fun.)

A decade ago, James Forr, head of insights at Olson Zaltman Associates, a market research firm, was hired by the Funeral Service Foundation to figure out why people were turning away from traditional funerals and turning towards cremation and nontraditional services.

Findings: Forr’s team spoke with people ages 50–70 who said they were uninterested in traditional services, asking them what they thought about funeral homes and what they wanted for themselves.

“They framed a traditional funeral like a lonely, lifeless tomb. The setting is stuffy and confining; the mood is cold and dark,” Forr told us. “All of the recommendations that we made are things that, generally speaking, were not being done in the industry…like all the things that [the] funeral home in New York is doing.”

Personal touch

At Sparrow, Hill wants to offer funerals that are reflective of the deceased. To that end, Sparrow offers to write and publish obituaries on its site. At one family’s request, Sparrow’s funeral director, Lily Sage Weinrieb, made sure to blast a Europop playlist in the car while bringing the body to the crematory.

“The funeral home industry, seeing as it’s been delivering the same thing for so long, doesn’t feel like a place people are connected to anymore,” Sage Weinrieb told Marketing Brew.

Read more about Sparrow, as well as other new brands trying to modernize death care here.—RB

Turning a meme into an advertising campaign is a practice as old as the internet. Just ask the honey badger, an internet sensation turned shill for pistachios.

In a campaign for its fruit cups, Dole mined memes and came back with two spots that would make absurdist comedy duo Tim & Eric blush. Called “Hold My Fruit Bowl,” Marketing Brew chatted with the team behind the campaign to find out how it came to be. See what they had to say below, or read the full story here.

The meme: It’s built around the “Hold my beer” meme, usually referencing a precursor to something incredibly stupid and done under the influence. It’s the epitome of machismo, which is the joke considering the creative is aimed at families with children, according to Eric Kallman, founder and chief creative officer of Erich and Kallman, the agency behind the ad.

“When you’re advertising to parents, it’s about your kids’ food. It’s a serious subject a lot of the time…it can lead to creative work that gets a little boring, looks and feels a little generic.” (So much so that it’s been parodied.)

In your face: The brand almost went with “Hold My Dole Bowl” as the tag line, but decided against it. “We got strong guidance from the creative team that was like, ‘You’re pushing your brand too much,’” Dole’s VP of marketing Orzse Hodi told us.—RB

Picsart, a tool for editing videos and photos, must have heard about Gen Z’s early aughts nostalgia craze, because it’s channeling Extreme Makeover: Home Edition in its latest campaign.

• Picsart visited three local businesses in Boring, Oregon, hoping to show them how easy it is to “Unboring” their logos, socials, and more.
• The Canva competitor appropriately dubbed the campaign (its first major marketing push geared toward small businesses) “Unboring Boring.”

The point: Picsart has previously targeted individual creators in its marketing efforts. With “Unboring Boring,” it’s going after small businesses, according to Shachar Aylon, the company’s executive creative director. “We want to highlight how design can benefit your business,” rather than just self-expression, Aylon told us.

Before and after: The North American Bigfoot Center, Boring Bean Coffee, and Nutz-n-Boltz Theater all received the Picsart treatment. Spots depicting how exactly Picsart made each of these brands look less boring debut today. Picsart said it spent “multi-millions” on this campaign, which it defined as over $1 million but less than $10 million.

+1: It will run on streaming, out of home, social, and in a nod to small businesses—local movie theaters in and surrounding Portland. The campaign is running from today until the beginning of March in Boring and the surrounding Portland Metro area, with plans to roll out to several other cities including New York and San Francisco throughout the year.—PB

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

Blue check: We aren’t verified on Instagram (yet), but here’s how you could be in 10 steps.

Centralize it: Not sure what Facebook Business Suite is? This guide has you covered.

Stars: Speaking of being verified, if you’ve ever wondered who the highest-paid YouTube stars are, Forbes recently dropped its list. Go forth and plan your influencer deals accordingly.

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Stat: 48%—the percentage of Starbucks’ workforce that was BIPOC in 2021, according to the coffee chain, up from 47% the previous year.

Quote: “Surveillance advertising is a predatory and invasive practice. The hoarding of people’s personal data not only abuses privacy, but also drives the spread of misinformation, domestic extremism, racial division, and violence,” said Senator Cory Booker, in a statement announcing the Banning Surveillance Advertising Act.

Read: How effective is advertising? It’s up for debate, but the ROI on ads has been increasing in the last five years, according to data cited by Marketing Week.

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

• More people are streaming. But only so much is ad-supported
• Twitter’s tips for what brands should do (and avoid) on its app this year
• Our first edition of Coworking