The beauty brand known for bath bombs and body scrubs has scrubbed itself from the internet…for the most part.

It’s been more than three years since Lush announced it would no longer post to Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Snapchat from its brand accounts as part of its “anti-social” policy, which it said was created in response to concerns over content moderation, addictive algorithms, and platforms’ data collection policies. In that time, the brand—which previously left social in 2019 before returning during the early days of the pandemic—has also ceased posting on X, and since FY23, it has divested from Google, Apple, and Microsoft by 50%. The brand is on track to bring its paid ads on Google to zero by FY26. Its previously used accounts still stand as reminders of the brand’s anti-social stance.

Jack Constantine, chief digital officer of Lush, told us that “things have gotten worse” with social media platforms since Lush logged off. Case in point: Meta’s new content moderation policies, pro-Nazi hate speech proliferating on X, and continued concerns about third-party data usage.

“It’s more and more evident that the tech billionaires in charge don’t really care,” Constantine told Marketing Brew. “They just want to make sure that the platforms are making money.”

Still, Lush is not entirely offline—and its anti-social stance has a little wiggle room. As of now, the brand is still active on YouTube, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, and it operates an affiliate marketing program, which Constantine said is part of the brand’s larger word-of-mouth marketing strategy. With that said, the focus has largely been on building up the brand’s owned channels, including its newsletter and shopping app.

With concerns about the future of social platforms at a fever pitch, Lush’s social media hiatus feels more prescient than ever.

Read more from our conversation with Constantine about what the brand has learned from its time offline and what it takes to embrace anti-social marketing.—KH

The year 2004 was memorable for many reasons: Ken Jennings’s 74-game Jeopardy! winning streak, the introduction of Gmail, the founding of Facebook, Nipplegate. It was also the year you could see Napoleon Dynamite free of charge in theaters, over and over again, before the movie was released.

The screenings, held nationwide, were part of an against-the-grain marketing campaign for the unconventional indie film about a tall, awkward, low-energy teenager living in Preston, Idaho, and his unusual friends and family. The movie was “this totally wackadoodle, insane comedy,” Stephanie Allen, former SVP of creative marketing at Searchlight, said, and with its offbeat humor, awkward pauses, and absence of both obvious laugh lines and big-name stars, it posed something of a marketing conundrum.

“It was hard to convey the film’s vibe and unique use of humor that sucks you into its world over the course of the film,” recalled Nancy Utley, who was president of marketing at Searchlight at the time. The movie “looked odd in traditional trailers and TV spots,” she said in an email.

But the team at Searchlight believed that the movie could take off, if only it could find the right audience. So how were they to get people to see an oddball movie about an oddball kid with an oddball name? Cristi Lima Sliter, who was VP of field operations at Searchlight, said the answer was rooted in the marketing team’s own experience with the movie.

“We found that as we saw the film the second and third time, the Napoleon Dynamite character was just so lovable,” Sliter said. “We thought, ‘Okay, you know what? Repeat viewing is the key to this.’”

So the Searchlight team decided to screen Napoleon Dynamite for free hundreds of times and incentivize attendance by offering merch and clout while building out a website and online fan club designed to create a community around the movie.

Megan Colligan, who worked in publicity at Searchlight and came up with the idea for the fan club, said giving audiences ways to fall in love with the film and proselytize to others about seeing it was central.

“To become part of the zeitgeist, you have to kind of get ahead of the wave and make a wave for yourself,” Colligan said.

Read more here about the marketing campaign that was just as weird and wonderful as Napoleon Dynamite itself.—BL

What do Beyoncé, Mia Farrow, Jacob Elordi, and Carmela Soprano have in common? We know what they’d look like as Bratz dolls.

Bratz, the nearly 25-year-old doll brand, has become known for its social re-creations of paparazzi shots, memes, music videos, red carpets, and other pop culture moments. One video from 2022, in which animated Bratz dolls re-create a scene from the HBO series Euphoria, has amassed more than 42 million views and 10 million likes on TikTok alone.

Josh Hackbarth, CMO of Bratz parent company MGA Entertainment, told us the brand intentionally looks to re-create tastemakers in art, music, and fashion on social media to keep it on the “cutting edge of culture.”

Bratz, he said, have always been known for being edgy (and sometimes controversial), but it could still come as a surprise to see a doll brand promoting cocktail Friday or horror movies like Nosferatu and The Substance, which aren’t exactly made for kids. Hackbarth said that’s by design: the brand has shifted from targeting kids to Gen Z and younger millennials online, specifically those that may have played with the dolls as children or watched Bratz’s TV show or any of Bratz’s movies from the mid-2000s.

“We’ve evolved with our audience,” Hackbarth said, adding that “whatever’s hot in pop culture goes down [from young adults] to kids and up to parents and older.”

Bratz has amassed more than 5.5 million followers across TikTok and Instagram. While not every young adult is collecting dolls, Hackbarth said the fan engagement, brand differentiation, and cultural relevancy are more important to the brand than hard sales figures.

“You don’t last for 25 years by just focusing on sales,” he said.

Read more here about Bratz’s take on social.—KH