Josh Cliffords, CEO of the beverage company FreeWater, is turning bottled and boxed water into a new form of direct advertising.

The idea is this: Slap an ad on the side of a water bottle, and you can give it away for free. Freebies, Cliffords is convinced, are the best way to win over consumers.

“Other advertising mechanisms harass you into buying something, and it’s an inconvenience—TV commercials, a YouTube commercial, a popup, that annoying person on the corner that won’t let you walk by without taking a flier,” Cliffords told Marketing Brew. “​Even if you want what they’re selling and your dream product is on that flier, you have to get past the split second that you are inconvenienced. With this, it’s the exact opposite.”

• The Austin, Texas-based startup is in the midst of one of its biggest marketing moments at the annual South by Southwest conference, where it is distributing free, ad-supported aluminum bottles and paper boxes around Austin with ads for FreeWater clients, including the crypto banking app LVL and the consulting firm Juice Consulting.
• FreeWater is hopeful that positive results for its clients during SXSW, including an influx of QR code scans, website visits, and subsequent business inquiries, will help propel the company to attract even more advertisers throughout the year.

Why water? Cliffords realized the extent of the global water crisis while running an NGO assisting refugees. According to the World Health Organization and Unicef, 771 million people around the world lacked access to “even a basic level of [water] service” in 2020, and about one in four people were without access to safely managed drinking water.

Cliffords relocated to Austin, where he thought free water and other free supermarket items might be well received. By February 2020, the company was preparing to incorporate—and then the pandemic came.

Test and learn: In the earliest days of the pandemic, shoppers in Austin waited in line to buy groceries. So Cliffords showed up with an old-school beta test: FreeWater prototypes made out of cans of beer.

Cliffords removed the shrinkwrap, rewrapped them with FreeWater labels, and asked shoppers if they wanted to crack open a cold one while they waited.

Free works: The core selling point behind FreeWater is simple: Freebies are “one of the most reliable ways to build goodwill and favorable brand associations,” Adam Alter, a professor of marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business, told Marketing Brew. In other words, he said, “How can you dislike a company that gives you something for nothing?”

Read more about the strategy behind FreeWater and Clifford’s approach to winning over advertisers here.—KS

Can’t decide if you want to see tweets listed in real time or served according to an algorithm? You’re not alone—Twitter can’t decide, either.

• Last week, Twitter made it so the default timeline on the app was the Home (algorithmic) feed instead of the Latest feed, per The Verge.
• Users still had the option to view the Latest feed, but, when opening the app, it defaulted to the Home feed “with no option to make the chronological view the default,” per Protocol.

A change of heart: On Monday, after user complaints rolled in, Twitter doubled back, tweeting, “We heard you—some of you always want to see latest Tweets first. We’ve switched the timeline back.”

TL;DR: Users can now once again make their default feeds display the most recent activity first.

Chrono trigger

Social Media Marketing Consultant Kendall Dickieson told Marketing Brew that the classic feed is a good thing for marketers on Twitter, especially when it comes to organic content.

• For brands that comment on other people’s tweets as part of their organic content strategy, she said, defaulting to the Home feed complicates things.
• “They may miss a really big tweet where all the other brands are acting because it just didn’t show up in their feed,” she told us, as the chronological feed allows marketers to “act faster” without missing opportunities to get eyes on their accounts.

For example, Dickieson said a brand might want to respond quickly when a major celeb tweets something funny. “If they are late because they saw it days after, their chance of even being seen shrinks,” she said.—PB

It all started, as it so often does, on TikTok’s For You page.

That’s where Kelsey Whipple, a copywriter at the Martin Agency working on the Old Navy account, first spotted a video from teenager Samuel Beasley in which he joked that Silk Sonic’s (superduo Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak) song “Fly As Me” would make for “the most fire Old Navy commercial ever.”

When Whipple and Martin Agency art director Paige Nuckols flagged the TikTok to Martin Agency executive creative director Ashley Marshall, Marshall knew the idea just might help them make a memorable campaign.

“Immediately I was like, we’ve got to make this commercial,” Marshall told Marketing Brew. “We’ve got to give these people what they’re asking for.”

A few months later, comments from TikTok users on Beasley’s videos were transformed into the apparel brand’s spring ad campaign, “Written by the Internet,” in which comments suggesting kids playing hopscotch, dancing dads, and a slo-mo jump appear seconds before those wishes are granted on-screen.

1,500 is a crowd: Marshall and the Martin Agency team combed through about 1,500 TikTok comments to write scripts for the spot. The hardest part of working through the comments section wasn’t identifying which suggestions were best—it was contacting the commenters and getting approval to include their suggestions in the ad production elements, Marshall said.

Read more about how the agency pulled off this commentary coup here.—KS

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Meta: Tips from three Mexican beauty and lifestyle creators about how they use Facebook Live.

BS: Is the metaverse “safe” for brands?

Wordle: How a pet project sold for seven figures.

Looking for more? Check out our latest article: What to expect from speakers at SXSW 2022, sponsored by WeTransfer.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}

Stat: 104,270 vs.15,560. The number of insurance commercials versus the number of beer commercials that ran in 2021, according to iSpot. BTW, Flo >>> the Liberty Mutual Emu.

Another stat: CD sales grew by 21% YoY to $584 million in 2021, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. It’s the first time CD revenues have increased since…2004. The top-selling album that year was Usher’s Confessions.

Read: Why pulling ads from Russia is a lot harder than it sounds, per Digiday.

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• What happens when a brand’s name is synonymous with a sport
• Russia bans Instagram but warns other companies not to leave
• Neutrality is the future of product marketing, experts say