The Winter Olympics are going great. No, don’t look at the ratings—open up TikTok.

NBCUniversal, which is broadcasting the 2022 Winter Games from Beijing, has been aggressively promoting the event across several TikTok accounts. The videos, which range from short clips of competitions to athletes like snowboarder Shaun White doing ASMR, are among the more than 250 short videos that @NBCOlympics has posted since Feb. 1.

Some of them are breaking through: “GIVE WHOEVER RUNS THIS ACC A RAISE OMG,” reads one comment on a video of a skeleton race that features an irreverent voiceover.

• The breakneck posting is part of a collaboration NBCU struck with TikTok to promote the Winter Olympics and the Paralympic Games, according to an NBCU spokesperson. As part of the deal, daily content is being posted across several NBC TikTok handles, in addition to a three-episode livestream show produced by NBCU.
• In all, @NBCOlympics—which also includes TikToks from last summer’s games and a handful from the 2018 Olympics—has racked up 57 million likes and more than 1.8 million followers; other accounts, like @NBCSports, have attracted upwards of 23 million likes.

Big picture: The efforts represent just one component of NBCU’s wide-ranging marketing efforts to convince the American public to tune into the Beijing Winter Games even as audiences on traditional TV have been slowly drifting away from the Olympics for years, and as concerns about human rights violations in China have prompted others to steer clear.

Watch wherever

From the lead-up to the games through now, NBCU has been on a marketing blitz, which has ranged from spending tens of millions of dollars on local and affiliate station support to social activations, Jenny Storms, NBCU’s chief marketing officer, entertainment and sports, said at a press event late last month.

Content is : Dan Lovinger, president, advertising sales and partnerships at NBC Sports Group, told Marketing Brew it’s the network’s “obligation to provide Olympic content” across different platforms so it can reach as many people as possible.

“We just want to make sure that the content is there for our viewers, because one thing we’ve learned with the Olympics is: If you provide more, they’ll consume more. People love the Olympics,” he said.

But as the end of the games fast approaches—the closing ceremony is slated for Feb. 20—has it worked? That depends on who you ask. Read the full story here.—KS

If you recently saw a TikTok like this and felt nostalgic, then boy does Mtn Dew have the ad for you.

The brand is bringing back its “Puppy Monkey Baby” character, which first debuted during the Super Bowl in 2016. The creature, Frankensteined together to highlight three commonly used ad clichés, can be seen at the end of the brand’s newest commercial, which pokes fun at product placement as a whole.

This time, Puppy Monkey Baby is coming for the NBA All-Star Game as part of a 10-ad campaign debuting this weekend. Pat O’Toole, VP of marketing for Mtn Dew at PepsiCo, told Ad Age that the brand had been “looking for the right time to bring him back” and felt this campaign, also starring actor Charlie Day and Chicago Bull and All-Star guard Zach LaVine, was a solid fit.

Actually, it’s Puppy Monkey Baby’s monster: O’Toole said the little creature was “very jarring for some when [they] did it back in 2016,” popping up on Reddit, birthday cakes, and permanently on people’s bodies since then. No, seriously.

• It’s also a costume, for those interested in terrifying everyone around them.

+1: In MEL Magazine’s oral history of Puppy Monkey Baby, Monty Pera, the creative and art director of the original ad, said he credited the brand with not over-using the character so he could remain special. Maybe Mtn Dew has Puppy Monkey Baby on a cicada-like cycle?—KH

There’s an old saying: Marketing and retail go together like cheese and wine.

Okay, we made that up. But it’s true. And while we’re on the topic, marketers can learn a lot from our friends over at Retail Brew, which you can sign up for here. Check out a smattering of their recent stories below.

Fragrance sales growth suggests the scent craze isn’t slowing down

It’s the little things, right? Turns out, “home-bound consumers” have been ponying up for perfume since the pandemic hit.

Saks is finally on TikTok

The retailer is an “elder millennial” no more, writes Retail Brew’s Julia Gray. Saks made its TikTok debut on Tuesday.

Secure delivery lockers are huge all over the world. Why not in the US?

Retail Brew’s Andrew Adam Newman breaks down why the US can’t have nice things open-network lockers.

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

Culture shift: Meta published a 57-page report on cultural trends based on user engagement data.

Free to be me: LinkedIn added new service offerings to help freelancers drum up business.

In no particular order: Google Ads laid out its top three priorities for the year ahead.

Check out this brand-new superpower. With Tubular Labs, you can see what no one else sees. Interested in understanding how content drives culture? Tubular provides a unified view of shifting audience values, interests, and shopping behavior across social platforms, so brands can make decisions that grow their business. Take a peep here.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}

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

• Why ViacomCBS switched its name to Paramount
• The sounds of Super Bowl ads, analyzed
• Inside the social strategy that squeezy bottle olive-oil brand Graza used to make its DTC debut

Which headlines are real marketing news, and which one is fake?

1. DJ Khaled Just Joined The Chicken Sandwich Wars
2. Coke Launches ‘Space-Flavored’ Variety Called Starlight
3. Deepfake Dolph Lundgren Sweats Buckets for Old Spice
4. Martha Stewart and Guy Fieri Announce Collab After Super Bowl Pic Goes Viral

Keep scrolling for the answer.