Times are a-changin’. Eighty percent of marketers surveyed think marketing will look completely different 18 months from now, and nearly 90% said that agility is the most important trait for a marketer to have these days, according to a survey conducted by Morning Brew and shared at our annual Marketing Brew Summit in New York.
Marketers from Sephora, Duolingo, and more showed up onstage at the summit to talk about how they’re working to stay agile amid the shifts. Below are some key takeaways from panelists on how they’ve adapted their marketing strategies ahead of 2026.
Meeting the moment: Campaigns that take into account the specific audience they’re catering to and/or social trends of the time can boost impact. Take Duolingo, which, while known for its often-viral Duo the Owl mascot, is rolling out an anime series in October after seeing manga lovers drive a spike in the number of users learning Japanese on its platform, Manu Orssaud, Duolingo CMO, said onstage.
“It’s the same thing with Korean. People learn Korean because they’re really into…K-pop,” he said. “It’s connecting language to that cultural affinity they have. Anime is a huge fandom, and it’s also one that really connects to our core offering, which is language learning.”
Relatedly, Audible altered its marketing playbook for the Japanese market after an initial batch of global creative did not perform as well in the market as it did in Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US, Cynthia Chu, Audible’s chief financial and growth officer, said onstage. “We actually had to create the word ‘audiobook,’” she said.
While the team was focused on driving brand awareness, “we had to create category awareness” too, Chu said. With that said, she added, “The consistency is the core of the messaging…That didn’t change, but the execution of that did change marketplace by marketplace.”
New tricks: Sometimes, new audiences inspire brands to think outside the box. When video game developer Gamefam worked on a 2023 campaign promoting Cher’s holiday album, Christmas, on Roblox, the team took into account the fact that Roblox is largely populated with Gen Alpha users who may not know Cher as well as older generations might, Ricardo Briceno, Gamefam’s chief business officer, said onstage. To drive awareness of Cher and her music among a potentially new set of listeners, Gamefam created a Roblox quest to collect and deliver holiday presents that were set to songs from Christmas. The activation coincided with an uptick in Spotify streams of the album, he said.
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Sephora similarly supplemented its marketing as part of a push into women’s basketball. In January, it became the official beauty sponsor of women’s 3-on-3 basketball league Unrivaled, and created, among other things, a “glam room” at the league’s facility in Miami, Florida. In April, Sephora was announced as a founding partner of WNBA expansion team the Golden State Valkyries. As part of that partnership, Sephora has placed a kiosk at Chase Center in San Francisco, California, where the Valkyries play, where fans can try and buy beauty products, Emmy Brown Berlind, SVP and general manager of loyalty at Sephora, said.
The Unrivaled partnership is “an example of how we’ve been able to connect the self-expression that already exists within those spaces with what we offer as a brand,” she said. At Valkyries games, “people take selfies in front of [the kiosk]. They’re buying their lip glosses while they’re at the game.”
Listen closely: In an era of continual generative AI creep, marketers may benefit from focusing on their tech capabilities. Duolingo created its own social scraper tool that scrapes comments from social platforms to help the brand identify themes within relevant fandoms to help inform its strategy, Orssaud said. Unilever similarly uses social scraper tools, developed by an agency it works with and customized for different Unilever brands, for social listening, Kathleen Dunlop, CMO, beauty and wellbeing, North America, at Unilever, said onstage. That listening can help inform big-swing campaigns: for its award-winning “Vaseline Verified” campaign, Unilever used social listening to identify the many ways that consumers use Vaseline, including beauty hacks along with household uses, like softening a baseball glove.
Many brands are also embracing AI to help create video to meet an increasing demand for content, Aston Ford, manager of video operations at Mntn, said onstage, but he noted that a human touch is still key.
“The marketers that want to continue to have an edge will need to depend on human creativity in order to stand out from the rest,” he said.