It might not sound like a winning marketing strategy for a restaurant to refer to its most-popular dish as “slop.” But it’s working for Cava.

“Our guests lovingly call it that [online],” Rachel Karten, a social strategist who works for Cava, told Marketing Brew about the fast-casual restaurant’s Mediterranean bowls, which can tend to look slop-like when mixed up. “They’re saying it in a way that’s nice, so we use that word too and show that we’re in on the joke.”

Being tongue-in-cheek is part of Cava’s broader approach to social marketing, which also includes posting memes and working with comedic creators like ironic song-mixer DJ Mandy and Alex Hartman, who parodies certain lower Manhattan residents on his Instagram account Nolita Dirtbag.

According to Karten, being self-deprecating and taking on the tone of a friend has resonated with the brand’s social audience, which tends to skew younger.

But as any social manager knows, edgier social strategies don’t often happen without the blessing of higher-ups: “They have a lot of creative license,” Andy Rebhun, Cava’s chief experience officer who oversees brand marketing, told us of the brand’s social team. “I very much am a believer of letting creatives create and making sure that it reflects the way we want to be perceived in the world.”

Cava, which has more than 300 locations in the US, is preparing for its first Midwest location, opening this spring in Chicago, as part of a larger growth of its physical presence in the US. The expansion has prompted Rebhun and his team to think about growing as a brand while maintaining its “passionate fanbase” and rewarding customers on social and in-app.

Continue reading here.—KH

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If you’ve got a chief marketing officer, odds are they’re probably still employed at your company by the time you finish reading this story.

On average, chief marketers in 2023 had held their position for 4.2 years, or about 50 months, according to head-hunting firm Spencer Stuart, which has tracked and reported on CMO tenure for nearly 20 years across 100 of the top advertisers in the US.

That figure was slightly less than the 4.6-year (or 55-month) average for the rest of the C-suite, the firm found.

Marketers might want to celebrate: Though CMO tenure in 2023 remained the same as in 2022, it was up considerably from 2021, when chief marketers held their roles for around 40 months on average, or about 3.3 years.

What else:

• In 2023, three out of four CMOs working for the top 100 advertisers were holding the position for the first time. That’s the most since Spencer Stuart began tracking the metric in 2016.
• 59% were promoted from within their own company, the same as the year before.

Among the CMOs Spencer Stuart tracked in 2023, 52% were women, essentially flat from 2022’s 53%. Among Fortune 500 companies, women CMOs achieved parity for the first time. However, CMOs from “underrepresented racial and ethnic groups” grew just 1%, to 19%, from 18% in 2022.

Sayonara: Where are all these CMOs working? Well, not at brands like Starbucks, UPS, Walgreens, and Etsy, which have all recently eliminated the position entirely.—RB

Powerade is vaulting its way into the Paris 2024 Olympics early.

More than 100 days before the start of the games, the brand released a new campaign starring Olympic gymnast Simone Biles. The work is the latest iteration of Powerade’s “Pause is Power” brand platform, which debuted in 2022 and was inspired by Biles’s decision to take a break from competing to focus on her mental health during the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.

“The platform was really focused on continuing to challenge the win-at-all-costs mentality associated with modern sports culture,” Matrona Filippou, president of the global hydration, sports, coffee, and tea category at Powerade parent company Coca-Cola, told Marketing Brew. “It’s not always pushing yourself to the limits that makes you stronger. Sometimes just taking a pause, taking a breath, can actually help you come back stronger and better.”

Press pause: The new addition to the brand platform features an almost two-minute short film called The Vault, which begins with a close-up shot of Biles taking a deep breath while audio clips about her career—and her break from it—play. The camera follows her through a vault in slow-motion as she explains why she “decided to take a pause” and ends with a shot of Biles landing on a mat before jogging off (past a bottle of Powerade, of course) while a young girl looks on.

Shorter cuts of the film are set to run on social media and TV, according to Filippou, and the campaign extends to digital, out-of-home, and broadcast channels as well.

For the new campaign, Powerade has KPIs in place, including attracting new consumers and driving sales, Filippou said, but her primary goal is to get people to feel connected to the campaign, and to The Vault film, which she said “everyday athletes can relate to.” While it can be hard to measure a feeling, Filippou said the brand will also track conversation on social media, as well as sales transactions.

Read more here.—AM

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Stories we’re jealous of.

• The New Yorker wrote about the world of reservation bidding and customer data-sharing that’s taken over the restaurant-going experience.
• The New York Times wrote about Mark Zuckerberg’s personal style rebrand.
• The Wall Street Journal wrote about how digital videos—and the ads that will inevitably come with them—are poised to take over NYC rideshare vehicles.