It’s not every day that Kendall Jenner shows up on your doorstep. But for one group of housemates in Arizona, that day came in September.

Last month, a video of Jenner appearing on a Ring camera at the residence of a group of students and alumni at Arizona State University and posing in their bedrooms once let in went viral on TikTok. It was part of Jenner’s tequila brand 818’s College Bar Tour, where she and the brand travel to campuses across the country to reach 21+ Gen Z drinkers.

While the surprise visit from Jenner was planned, 818 CMO Kathleen Braine told us the video itself was not.

“They genuinely had no idea that Kendall was coming, because when we got to that woman’s house, she was the only person there of her four roommates,” Braine said. “We literally woke her up from sleeping, and everyone’s calling her because I guess everyone has the [Ring] app on their phone…They were like, ‘Answer the door! Answer the door!’”

In the last year, 818 has shown up at colleges in the Midwest, the South, and the Southeast as part of the College Bar Tour, and Braine said each time it generates “more virality”—and more calls, via DMs and comments, to come to additional campuses.

She said the tour is “a continuation of [the brand’s] broader strategy of giving everyday consumers the influencer experience,” creating post-worthy events for 21+ Gen Zs and millennials and helping 818 compete with larger alcohol brands through social media.

“A lot of brands are looking at experiential marketing through the lens of only inviting influencers and how they can sort of amplify their brand that way,” she said. “We also want to make sure that we’re driving liquid to lips and sampling and awareness with our consumers, who may not be influencers, but who may be just normal seniors in college or postgrad students.”

Continue reading here.—KH

When most people think of sports content sponsors, brands like Nike, Adidas, Lululemon, and Athleta likely come to mind.

Sports newsletter and media company The Gist, which just announced that it crossed the 1 million newsletter subscriber mark, has worked with all of those brands—but it didn’t increase its ad revenue 20 fold in the past two years by targeting typical sports marketers alone, Jacie deHoop, co-founder and head of partnerships at The Gist, said.

“We certainly bring on a lot of sports-endemic partners, but it’s been so fun to work with that next layer of partners too, that maybe historically haven’t really put their stake in a sports tentpole or in a sponsorship,” deHoop told Marketing Brew.

The Gist isn’t the only sports property to experience increased interest from a more diverse group of brand categories—there’s been a number of less traditional sports sponsors and advertisers in leagues like the NFL and WNBA in recent years. At The Gist, deHoop said experimenting with sports veterans and rookie brands has helped grow both its revenue and its audience.

Read more here.—AM

TikTok Shop may be all the rage with marketers, but it’s also inciting rage among some users whose feeds are filled with influencers hyping Shein hauls. Backlash to TikTok’s shopping tsunami spurred buy-less preaching deinfluencers in 2023, and a related trend has emerged recently: “underconsumption core.”

Antithetical to haul videos, underconsumption videos highlight not new purchases but rather long-owned possessions. Videos also show Spartan collections of personal care and beauty products in uncluttered medicine cabinets and shower caddies.

“While having a heavily adorned Stanley cup, Lululemon leggings, and the newest iPhone makes you cooler, it makes our planet warmer,” Kasturi Tale, a sophomore at Arizona State University, wrote about underconsumption in student newspaper The State Press. The trend, Tale continued, “encourages buyers to…use what they already own to its full potential and buy things that are made to last.”

Brands strive to stay on top of TikTok trends, so when #tinnedfish goes viral, they can sell more sardines and when an unlikely #cottagecheesecookiedough recipe goes viral, they can sell more cottage cheese.

But what’s a marketer to do when the hot new thing is to stop buying hot new things?

Tok to the hand: The #underconsumption hashtag has been used in 15,800 videos on TikTok; searches for underconsumption on Google peaked on July 30, according to Google Trends.

Andrew Roth, CEO and founder of Gen Z research and strategy firm Dcdx, told Retail Brew that the trend reflects “influencer fatigue” among Gen Zers.

“It’s like, ‘I just don’t want to be sold to as much as I’m being sold to, and I want to just close my eyes to some of that and consume less,” Roth said.

Read more on Retail Brew.—AAN