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In the last month, coconut-water brand Vita Coco hit 1 million TikTok followers, marking a significant social milestone for the brand, which has 677,000 followers on Facebook and 137,000 followers on Instagram. Jane Prior, CMO of Vita Coco, attributes much of the brand’s success on TikTok to its playful tone and community-first approach.

“We’ve always had this perspective that consumers want authenticity, not ads,” she said. “They want to hear from real people.”

That’s especially evident in the brand’s latest viral moment on TikTok with creator Romeo Bingham, who first gained traction online after posting a made-up Dr Pepper jingle that was eventually used in one of the brand’s TV ads. Tapping Bingham to create a Vita Coco jingle and star in its online Super Bowl campaign ultimately helped the brand amass 130,000 new TikTok followers in the span of a month and reach 1 million followers and drove Google searches for the brand to a four-year high.

Vita Coco plans some branded campaigns in advance, Prior said, but it’s increasingly focused on finding quicker ways to inject the brand into cultural conversations as it looks to further increase household penetration.

“That’s the beautiful part, and the need for fluency in social,” Prior said. “It’s often the organic campaigns that generate the most value.”

Continue reading here.—KH

In the days immediately following the Super Bowl, ad industry chatter is all about which ads people loved—or hated—the most. But as time goes on, marketers start to get a sense of whether or not their $8-million-plus campaigns are actually driving business impact.

Just over a week after the Big Game, data from marketing analytics company Big Chalk indicates which advertisers may be winning in the long term, based on surveys of more than 2,000 consumers that the company ran in the 24 to 48 hours following the Super Bowl that tested recall of the commercials.

Budweiser, Pepsi Zero Sugar, Dunkin’, and Lay’s—all brands that made the top 5 of the USA Today Ad Meter—clocked the highest unaided awareness, according to data shared exclusively with Marketing Brew. Big Chalk defines unaided awareness as the share of people who can name an advertiser from the game without being prompted by a list.

History repeats: Budweiser’s Super Bowl supremacy continues. The AB InBev beer brand has won the Ad Meter for the past two years in a row, and it also secured the highest unaided awareness in Big Chalk’s surveys in both 2025 and 2026.

• About 32% of respondents to the 2026 survey named Budweiser as a Super Bowl advertiser, up 10 percentage points from last year.
• Pepsi Zero Sugar, meanwhile, clocked about 20% unaided awareness.
• Dunkin’ had about 17% unaided awareness, up from 9.5% last year, when the brand also came in third place on Big Chalk’s list. But that’s down from about 20% in 2024, when Dunkin’ had the highest unaided awareness.

Read more here.—AM

Dipin Oberoi is a social listening expert who has had stints at Walgreens, Ava Labs, and Microsoft and who recently joined JPMorganChase as senior associate, social intelligence and insights. He is set to speak at Marketing Brew’s upcoming event, The Art and Science of AI in Marketing, on February 25.

Ahead of the event, we caught up with him to hear how he and his teams use AI for social listening.

How are you and your teams using AI today? We’re mainly using it to process the massive amount of social listening data we handle. Instead of manually combing through millions of consumer conversations, AI helps us spot trends and sentiment shifts quickly. We also use it to pull together competitive intelligence and turn complex analytics into reports that merchants and executives can actually use. It’s really about getting from insight to action faster, not replacing strategic thinking.

What’s the best real-life application of AI you’ve seen in marketing? Honestly, predictive trend spotting for retail. We can now catch what consumers are talking about four to six weeks before it shows up in search or sales data. We saw certain beauty ingredients gaining traction in conversations way before they became mainstream requests. That head start is huge for planning what actually ends up on shelves when people want it.

Continue reading here.

Creators played a bigger role in this year’s Super Bowl campaigns, appearing in ads and powering influencer trips. Here’s how brands are weaving influencers into tentpole marketing moments.