Creator Madi Marotta’s first official day on the job as Waterboy’s new social media manager was a tropical and eventful one.

The electrolyte additive company was off on its second-ever brand trip, this year to Tulum, Mexico, with some big-name influencers, their plus-ones, and regular-schmegular customers all in tow. With 38 people representing the brand in some capacity, they were there mostly to party and hang out, and Marotta was there to capture it all.

She created dozens of social videos for TikTok, many taking a casual, creator-as-brand-voice approach and showing Waterboy’s guests indulging in the party scene. But the TikTok audience was unimpressed with the content she gathered, and she took on what some would consider a rather unfortunate title: worst social media manager ever.

Waterboy’s co-founder and CEO, Mike Xhaxho, wasn’t fazed by the criticism. In fact, his TikTok bio recently described him as a “Madi stan,” and the online backlash has inspired the brand’s latest TikTok series featuring Marotta trying to figure out how to be a “good” social media manager, humorously leaning into the critique.

While he told us that the brand trip’s social content wasn’t designed to spark outrage, the team tried to make the most of it, and it fit into the brand’s untraditional approach to marketing.

“It’s just who we are, which is a little bit polarizing, for better or worse,” Xhaxho said.

Continue reading here.—JN

WhatsApp once promised to have No Ads! No Games! No Gimmicks!” on its platform.

Last month, though, the news that ads were in fact coming to WhatsApp, which parent company Meta announced at Cannes Lions, prompted plenty of questions about user privacy and concerns about how user data could be used for ad targeting. (Meta has said that ads on WhatsApp will be targeted based on user details like location, language, followed Channels, and interactions with other ads.)

There are plenty more questions about ads on WhatsApp—but advertisers are already thinking about ways to leverage the new channel.

“The holistic ecosystem is evolving to connect different ways to interact with brands,” Grant Parker, president of ad-tech platform Innovid, told Marketing Brew. “This is just another addition to that that I think needs to be obviously threaded very carefully, in terms of the needle, between relevancy and offering value to consumers versus making sure that they feel really good about their personal communications remaining private.”

With limited targeting options available on the platform, Parker said that brands looking into the channel will likely put “a lot of emphasis on the creative message, because there's going to be less understanding of who the person is.” He also recommended advertisers consider contextual factors, including time of day or whether target users are on the desktop or mobile versions of WhatsApp, to inform ad campaigns in the absence of more granular audience data.

Read more here.—JS

“Summerween,” the summertime twist on October’s ghoulfest, by most accounts originated in 2012, when an episode of the Disney animated series Gravity Falls called “Summerween” first aired. But as Retail Brew noted last summer, the notion of actually celebrating the holiday didn’t really take hold until 2024, when social-media videos about Summerween went viral. Last July saw searches reach a then-historical high, according to Google Trends.

Now it’s back, and it’s even bigger than last year. Internet searches for “Summerween” have skyrocketed yet again, more than doubling this July over last year, according to Google Trends.

On TikTok, hundreds of videos hashtagged #jackomelon show celebrants carving watermelons instead of pumpkins; others feature jack-o-lanterns carved from pineapples. Yet others highlight more newly minted traditions for the holiday, like cheeseburgers where the cheese slices have been cookie-cuttered into the shape of ghosts, and hot dogs wrapped in strips of crescent dough to look like mummies.

Retailers, naturally, are cashing in on the enthusiasm. Michaels, among the stores early to capitalize, has introduced Halloween merch progressively earlier, from the week of July 7 in 2023, to June 24 in 2024, to June 13 this year (which—paging Jason Voorhees—fell on a Friday).

Walmart also is goblin up the holiday, with items like a $9.98 Summerween plush throw with patterns including “Skeleton Beach Party” and “Summer Chills.” All six styles were sold out online at the time of publication.

A Business Insider reporter recently perused the in-store Summerween collections at Walmart and at two TJX retailers, TJ Maxx, and Home Goods. “Halloween is one of the few non-denominational, non-political, purely fun holidays throughout the year,” the article enthused. “Why not double up on it?”

Continue reading on Retail Brew.—AAN

From TV screens to bite-size videos, YouTube is reshaping how creators reach audiences—but not without challenges. As it dominates both long-form and Shorts, what does this mean for the future of content, costs, and creator survival? Dive into the platform’s evolving playbook and its impact on the creator economy.