ICYMI, this week Shopify’s stock price fell to 50% of what it was a year ago. 

E-comm marketers, does that make you nervous?

• Yes — when Shopify loses, I lose. 

• Nope — there are plenty of other e-comm channels.

Read on for Tushy’s approach to the Super Bow(e)l, a new home for Disney Adults, and the most-downloaded apps of 2021. 

EXPERT Q&A

Inside Tushy's Super Bowel Monday success

You might be wondering what Super Bowel Monday is. 

Well, it’s the day after the Super Bowl — and the day that submissions were due for bidet-maker Tushy’s Super Bowel contest. 

The brand asked followers to submit a photo of their “post-big game poop” to enter. The grand prize: $10K. 

Some in the replies were disgusted. Others just wanted to know why. 

But 2K+ people submitted photos. Keara Spicer, Tushy’s head of social media and community management, told MarketerHire — and the contest got 2M+ organic impressions.

Here’s why Tushy considers it a success, according to Spicer and Tushy’s founder and CCO, Miki Agrawal.

It was rule-breaking — just like Tushy.

“We are a brand that really breaks taboos,” Agrawal said. Tushy talks openly about bathroom matters, and that sets it apart from competitors. 

Bidet brand Toto is comparatively tame on Twitter and mostly posts about product features. Tushy, meanwhile, posts about IBS and coffee’s side-effects. 

That attracts a different audience: Millennials and the “internet obsessed,” Spicer said. 

It had a tie-in to the product.

When Tushy posts on social, there’s always a link to bidet education, Agrawal said. That’s true for the contest, too. 

“It’s like, submit your huge, gigantic poop and … introducing Tushy, that’ll wash it all off!”

The theory: if Tushy’s gross-out tweets get shared enough, eventually, even the most squeamish will check out the product. 

It resonated on the right channels.

This contest found the most traction on Twitter, which made sense to Spicer: “Twitter is where a lot of internet humor is birthed.” 

Plus, Twitter is a lot friendlier to bathroom humor than Meta, which rejected some of Tushy’s Valentine’s-themed ads last week for using words like “fart” and “butt.” 

It highlighted the human side of social media.  

“We want to feel like people talking to people, and not [a] brand talking to people,” Spicer said.

People don’t usually send poop photos to brands, but sometimes they do send poop photos to friends, Spicer said. Tushy is now one of those friends. 

Our takeaway? 

Agrawal and Spicer think of the contest (and its success) as consistent with Tushy’s larger social media strategy — not a sudden pivot. 

TWEET TREAT

What’s wrong with a Disney town?

It seems like every marketer wants to talk about “branded community.” Disney just plans to take the concept back into the physical world with a literal Palm Springs “enclave” called Storyliving.

Just normal stuff. Right?

Not quite. This news reads as dystopian to many of the 16K+ quote-retweeters above. 

4 factors that make Storyliving unsettling

• The website copy makes us feel trapped. “This brilliant living painting is not only fueled by its own dynamic energy, but empowers all who live here,” the Storyliving site proclaims. We’re not sure we want to live in a painting. Sorry!

• Residents will likely be “Disney adults.” Enough said. 

• Storyliving implies Storycrime and Storydisease. We see lots of jokes on Twitter about Disney policing and “the Mickey Mouse psych ward” — both of which feel jarringly off-brand. (Though Disney security already exists at Disney’s theme parks.) 

• It feels like an invasive new kind of brand extension. It’s not quite new, though. Disney built a branded town in the ‘90s: Celebration, Florida, a pastel planned community now owned by a private equity firm.

Our takeaway? 

Brands build digital communities, but physical ones? Twitter isn’t quite ready for that. 

Though maybe us haters will change our tune when we see Storyliving’s “creative oasis” for ourselves. 🤷‍♀️

SMALL BITES

Vibe shifts, the online-offline bridge and more

Heads up, iPhone loyalists: Android users can disable ad tracking, too. 

Meanwhile, some DTC brands are “gamifying data collection.” 

Facebook may have lost users in 2021, but it’s still the most-used social platform. 

Ready to “vibe shift” back to the American Apparel era?

Trade Desk could challenge Google’s monopoly on display ad auctions. 

Peloton’s new ads spotlight bad reviews.

The Coinbase Super Bowl ad’s secret sauce? It bridged the offline-online gap. 

Even tech leaders have questions about the metaverse. 

A shapewear brand is using Pinterest for awareness and FB to retarget.

Content houses are turning influencing into a “stable job.”

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FROM OUR BLOG

3 weaknesses of enterprise marketing teams

Plenty of marketers aspire to work at Fortune 500 companies — like Apple, whose brand alone is worth 240B+.

But bigger isn’t always better. Marketing teams at enterprises may have big budgets, but they often struggle with… 

Speed

Enterprises “feel very comfortable with long timeframes,” Adobe alum Jason Chitwood told MarketerHire. 

That makes it hard to engage with trending topics, like And Just Like That… or Wordle.

Data-driven decision making

Large companies often struggle with data silos, said co-founder of Soul Spirits Stuart Shaul.

It’s common for enterprises to have “eight different systems for collecting customer data,” which makes it hard for marketers to unearth actionable insights.

Big-picture thinking

Each enterprise employee is “a cog in a very big set of wheels and gears,” Adobe alum Jason Chitwood said. “It’s very difficult for some of those folks to zoom out.” 

But that’s key to pulling off integrated campaigns, like Popeyes’ collaboration with Megan Thee Stallion last fall.

Want to learn more about how enterprise marketing teams work — and falter? We got the scoop from three alums of multi-billion-dollar brands. 

DATA SNACK

The 10 most-downloaded apps of 2021

In 2021, life was less COVID-constrained than it was in 2020. 

What did that mean for apps? Were people less interested in the digital world? Sort of! 

They were definitely less interested in Zoom, according to Apptopia data.

Most downloaded: TikTok

It was 2021’s most downloaded app in the U.S. by a huge margin — downloaded 30M more times than second-place-finisher Instagram. 

Biggest YoY download growth: HBO Max

It  was downloaded half as many times as TikTok, but nearly 2X more than it was in 2020. 

It’s the only streaming app that made the top 10. Sorry Netflix!

Biggest momentum losers: Zoom and Meta

It’s still on the top 10 most-downloaded list, but Zoom downloads fell by more than a third YoY, making it 2021’s biggest momentum-loser. 

Facebook Messenger and Facebook were downloaded less in 2021 than they had been in 2020, which tracks: Facebook lost users in 2021, too. 

Our takeaway?

Zoom and Meta downloads slumped in 2021, but video (NOT video calls) had a moment: HBO became the most-downloaded streaming app, while TikTok took over the downloads chart.

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