It’s generally frowned upon to create ad campaigns or fudge campaign numbers with the primary purpose of winning industry awards. What if taking home a prize became the ad itself?

Consider the Guinness World Record, which allows for people and organizations, including brands, to attempt to go down in history by doing just about anything at all—as long as it is the biggest, the loudest, the longest, the tallest, or some other-est yet to be determined. The latter was the case last month when Nascar installed what would become the World’s Loudest Billboard in Times Square, according to Guinness, while Apple TV set a world record for the World’s Tallest Drone Show to promote its series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.

For brand marketers, setting a world record through marketing serves as a shortcut to break through in a fractured media environment where attention can be hard to come by.

“We can say ‘World’s Loudest Billboard’ all we want, but having the Guinness stamp of approval really makes it legit,” Tyler Hoke, senior director of brand marketing, Nascar, said.

As some consumers reward realism in advertising campaigns amid increasingly common AI ad creative, some marketers said good old-fashioned stunts—complete with official documentation—may help brands stand out.

“In a world where feeds are dominated by AI video left and right…Guinness World Records is going to be increasingly more important,” Kevin Prince, founder of creative drone show agency Heads in the Sky, the shop behind Apple TV’s world-breaking effort, told us. “We wanted to plant a flag in the ground that this was real.”

Continue reading here.—KM

The line between creators and traditional Hollywood is so blurry these days that even those with perfect vision are squinting.

At SXSW this year, creator chat wasn’t hard to come by. Whether it was at the Creator Academy activation hosted by Sam’s Club (a major sponsor of the festival), on a panel about creators in Hollywood with Recess Therapy host Julian Shapiro-Barnum, or at any of the many brand events catered toward creators complete with Instagram-ready photo ops, internet stars are mingling with A-listers.

The speed at which the creator economy has grown is a reality that both the entertainment industry and brand world are reckoning with. “In the last year and a half, two years, creators and digital shows became the press cycle,” Shapiro-Barnum said during the panel discussion. “[My show] went from like a thing where we were like, ‘Oh my God, we’re so excited to have one [celebrity] on’ to something where we’re constantly turning people down.”

Shapiro-Barnum was only the second creator the Golden Globes invited to interview celebs during its official red-carpet preshow, following in the footsteps of Chicken Shop Date’s Amelia Dimoldenberg and setting the stage for comedian Mary Beth Barone, who appeared this year. Inviting creators into traditional and often prestigious Hollywood spaces is just one way brands like the Globes are looking to modernize their relationship with viewers and younger audiences—one that, if many of the comments under this year’s videos hosted by Barone are any indication, seems to be paying off.

“When brands are getting involved, we’re always thinking about, ‘What’s that behind-the-scenes moment? What’s that memeable moment that can really get amplified and matter?’” Amanda McArthur, SVP of client strategy and brand partnerships at Doing Things, said during the same panel. “That’s where events are really serving a dual purpose, because you get that one-on-one for the creators and the fans that are actually there, but then it also needs to translate to an online audience as well.”

Read more here.—JN

There’s a long history of food marketers trying to get consumers to eat what typically are considered breakfast foods long after the rooster stops crowing. Cereal brands have done it for generations through recipe development, with Rice Krispies expanding eating occasions beyond breakfast with its Rice Krispies Treats recipe introduced in 1940 and Chex hitting it out of the park in 1953 with Chex Mix, a non-breakfast recipe that required purchasing multiple varieties.

In the 1970s, a popular Florida Orange Growers campaign featured celebrities drinking orange juice in the PM and delivering the tagline, “It isn’t just for breakfast anymore.”

In food marketing parlance, it’s expanding a food item’s dayparts. Now Chomps, the brand of self-described “better-for-you” meat sticks, is taking the opposite tack. Although its products are not typically breakfast fare, it is introducing a new flavor for when consumers are waking up to Steve Inskeep: Savory Breakfast.

The breakfast product is among three new chicken flavors, the first chicken products for the 14-year-old brand.

“Our founders have been trying to tackle chicken since the beginning,” Stacey Hartnett, SVP of marketing at Chomps, told Retail Brew. (Editor’s note: No chickens were actually tackled for this story.) “Without getting too technical, it’s very difficult to do, and it’s even more difficult to do without the use of sugar.”

Read more on Retail Brew.—AAN

Executive moves across the industry.

• Glossier has a new CMO: Nicole Solorzano, who joins from hair care brand Ouai.
• Lands’ End hired Victoria’s Secret marketer Sarah Sylvester as its first CMO in almost a decade.
• Wonder tapped Gabrielle Rabinovitch as CFO ahead of a planned IPO; she joins from the financial services company Worldpay.