In July, Qianna Smith Bruneteau was at an influencer-marketing conference when the following question came up: Is the word “whitelisting” an inclusive term in 2022?

“The overall sentiment was that the term is fairly outdated,” Smith Bruneteau, founder and executive director of the American Influencer Council, told Marketing Brew.

Explain: If you haven’t heard the term before, whitelisting is when an influencer lets a brand run ads from their account, meaning that the influencer’s handle—rather than the brand’s—is used for the ad. It’s a tactic brands use to make the most of their influencer marketing partnerships.

• Widely considered to be noninclusive, the term is being reconsidered across other industries as well.
• As Lola Bakare, CMO advisor and inclusive marketing strategist at her brand be/co, told us, “everything’s connected.” A term like whitelisting, she said, can perpetuate unconfronted bias. “We need to confront the idea that anything that uses the word ‘white’ to describe [something] is somehow good,” Bakare said.

Looking ahead: Influencer marketers and DE&I experts we spoke with think it’s time to retire the term “whitelisting” and opt for not only a more inclusive word, but also perhaps one that’s more indicative of what the term actually means.

Read the full story here.—PB

NYU Stern marketing professor Scott Galloway once said that “the strongest brand in the world is not Apple or Mercedes-Benz or Coca-Cola. The strongest brands are MIT, Oxford, and Stanford.”

According to a new special report from Morning Consult on the most trusted colleges and universities, Galloway isn’t exactly wrong. The report (which was conducted June 11–15 and surveyed 11,050 US adults) found that…

US colleges and universities are more trusted than other institutions: The US government, corporations, and media orgs all scored lower on trust than the place where you used to get food poisoning from the dining hall on a quarterly basis.

But Gen Z still isn’t sold: The age group that had the lowest trust in US universities of any generation, trusting higher ed 14% less than baby boomers…probably because many of them haven’t yet realized how valuable having four straight years to focus on mastering the noble sport of beer pong is.

Johns Hopkins was the most trusted school overall. William & Mary clocked in at No. 12, the University of Florida came in at No. 43, and Washington University in St. Louis being No. 83 most trusted.

Looking ahead: It’s no wonder why colleges are spending billions on marketing these days, with more and more marketers joining campus C-suites.

+1: Fostering trust could become even more important as some reconsider the value of college—enrollment across undergrad programs was down 4.7% in spring 2022 compared to a year prior, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. As another great scholar once said, it’s brutal out there.—PB

Last Thursday was a scorcher in New York, the sort of day where you emerge from the subway shiny-faced to unspeakable smells rising from the sidewalk. But it couldn’t have been more different inside 65 Bleecker Street in the Noho neighborhood of Manhattan, where the smell of freshly made waffle cones filled the chilled air.

It was the day before the opening of Catch’n, a new ice cream shop from Dylan Lemay, who appears much younger than his 25 years. In 2020, Lemay, who is from Taylor, Michigan, was working at Cold Stone Creamery when he started posting videos on TikTok of him throwing scoops of ice cream for customers and coworkers to catch in their cups or cones.

• All that catching, fittingly, caught on. Today, Lemay has 11.2 million followers on TikTok and 3.73 million subscribers on YouTube.
• “If you want, you can really go hibachi on it,” Lemay told us, as he leaned over a cold slab and made a chopping motion using his steel spades to mix freeze-dried strawberries and Golden Oreos into ice cream.
• You’d be forgiven if at first you mistook this for just another trendy ice cream shop, because it has the trappings of one.

But here’s the scoop: This is serving up the social media content-creator-as-a-brand trend in a big way. And the cherry on top? Venture capital is behind it, and a dollop of forward-thinking store design.

Read the full story in Retail Brew.—AAN

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

Tok about it: TikTok published a “tokumentary” with tips for brands looking to improve their campaigns on the app.

Reel ’em in: The best hashtags to use alongside your Instagram Reels.

Brand-building: The case for small businesses leaning into Facebook Groups to build communities.

Better data = better engagement: With PwC’s Customer Link, you can use a rich data fabric and privacy-first approach to help sharpen your audience targeting, build stronger relationships, and drive better engagement with your ideal prospects. Start here.* 

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}

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• Apple is “building a demand-side platform if recent job listings are to be believed,” according to Digiday.
• Facebook is saying “goodbye” to its live-shopping efforts.
• Walmart is laying off hundreds of corporate workers.
• Triller, a TikTok rival, recruited Black creators by offering them lucrative contracts. But their payments have been “erratic—and, in some cases, nonexistent,” the Washington Post reported.
• Some podcast guests are paying hosts thousands of dollars to appear on episodes, something that’s not always clear to listeners.
• TikTok is lagging significantly behind Instagram in terms of influencer marketing revenue.

Snap poll: Do you think measurement for influencer marketing has evolved significantly over the past two years?

Yes

No

Not sure

Today’s market research is coming from inside the house. Retail Brew teamed up with Harris Poll to survey 1,986 US adults about how inflation is impacting their preference for products branded as “Made in the USA.”

Bye-bye, Miss American tie: Almost three-quarters (72%) of consumers said they seek out American-made products very often or somewhat often.

• But 64% of those who have shopped for US-made goods said inflation has negatively impacted their decision to do so.
• Roughly one in four (26% of that group) said inflation has a lot of negative impact.

Pay up: Close to half (48%) of respondents said they’d be willing to pay around 10%–20% more for American-made goods over imported goods.

Okay, boomer: Millennials and Gen Zers were more likely than older generations to strongly agree with the sentiment that American-made goods are too expensive.

• About one-quarter (23%) of millennials and 16% of Gen Zers strongly agreed with that statement.
• Just 9% of baby boomers and 13% of Gen X strongly agreed.

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

• Spotify, SiriusXM, and Acast report growing podcast ad biz in Q2
• Audio gets its own track at this year’s Advertising Week
• Brands are getting creative with being real