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Marketing Brew

Katie Hicks

marketingbrew.com

Ahead of ticket sales for Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour, Capital One debuted an ad featuring the star. 

Mood Board: Every Taylor Swift era, everywhere, all at once

Alyssa Meyers

a dog with glasses on that say "Wild" in each lense

The 5-month campaign includes a digital audio element and a new sonic logo with a Mortal Kombat Easter egg.

Mood Board: Hootsuite goes into the wild for its first brand campaign

still from an ad from The Woolmark Company

The latest campaign from the not-for-profit puts a visual on the amount of oil used in clothing production today.

Mood Board: A surreal ad from Woolmark reminds us that our clothes are made of oil

an image that visualizes the inspirations for Axe's summer 2021 campaign

Mood Board

When you’re filling out your March Madness bracket this year, forget all the research, stats, analytics, and 

No, you’re not being scammed by the frenemy who won your March Madness pool last year. This is real advice from ESPN, which recently rolled out its March Madness campaign for the year called “Go With Your Gut.”

Created with longtime partner BSSP, an independent creative agency, the campaign wasn’t designed with a specific target audience in mind but instead aimed at encouraging “anyone who wants to join in the fun” to fill out their own bracket on the ESPN Tournament Challenge platform, BSSP Creative Director Robyn Tenenbaum told us.

“There is no such thing as the perfect bracket,” Tenenbaum said. “It’s really hard to do. So with that pressure off the table, we really want to urge people to just listen to those instincts, those little gut hunches that they might have.”

The campaign, which started running across broadcast, streaming, digital, audio, and social in late February, is centered around three 15-second spots:

 a man deciding to go with the UConn Huskies after feeling “husky” in an ill-fitting shirt.

 a woman landing on the Notre Dame Fighting Irish after fighting with an Irish man while building furniture.

 a blue jay while birding, which convinces her of the merits of the Creighton Bluejays.

The concept came both from research that showed some people really do fill out their brackets this way—and also from the personal experiences of the creative team. Seth Ader, ESPN’s VP of brand marketing, once picked Wisconsin to win a round of his bracket because his young daughter told him it rhymed with the name of her teacher, he told us.

The main KPI of the campaign, according to Ader, is measuring new-user signups and the number of brackets filled out for both the men’s and women’s tournaments year over year. Users who fill out a bracket and correctly pick the champion will be entered for a chance to win cash prizes.

Expectations are already high, Ader told us: ESPN is anticipating a total of 20 million brackets this year based on last year’s record high of about 19 million, and March Madness doesn’t officially begin until March 14.

Before the team settled on their final three concepts, they wrote dozens of other ideas that didn’t make the cut. The first, for instance, involved someone eating a sandwich, which led them to pick Wichita State, Tenenbaum recalled. Ultimately, ESPN went with UConn because of its “powerhouse” women’s team, Creighton because it’s an underdog, and Notre Dame because the concept involved two people working together to arrive at the epiphany, not just one, Tenenbaum said.

Those who come across the Creighton spot in the wild should keep an ear out for the bird sounds in the background. As it turns out, they’re real azure-hooded jays chirping away, according to Tenenbaum.

Ader said that he has heard stories of some TV networks editing “piped-in bird sounds” into the broadcast of golf tournaments that were “called out” by viewers who noted that those bird sounds were not accurate considering the tournament locations.

In addition to the attention to detail, ESPN decided to “spend a few more resources of ours in making the investment for live-action [advertising]” this year, Ader said. The brand promotes its Tournament Challenge every year, but not always to this extent, and sometimes the network has rerun campaigns from years past.

“We’ve seen very strong brand growth and brand-health metrics, so we’re doing really well,” Ader said. “We’ve also seen our Tournament Challenge game lead the way in the industry, and we wanted to just fuel that momentum.”

a woman in a jean jacket and hat staring at a yellow birdhouse outside

For this year’s March Madness, ESPN is encouraging basketball fans to trust their guts

The multichannel campaign features three 15-second ads depicting people having epiphanies about their brackets. 

“Spotify is everywhere,” said the company’s host and storyteller of its owned editorial channels, Lea Palmieri, during an Instagram Live promoting its latest experiential campaign. Spotify is even in Manhattan, where it’s near impossible to rent an apartment these days.

But for two days in early August, the brand transformed an industrial venue in the West Village into a home and led visitors on IRL and virtual tours of the space in an effort to educate users about its many bells and whistles, like its partnerships and in-app features.

The event, dubbed “Spotify Everywhere,” was far from Spotify’s first experiential rodeo, even since the pandemic. It had a 

 this summer, for instance, bringing artists like Kendrick Lamar, Dua Lipa, and Post Malone to perform on its “Spotify Beach” thanks to its in-house experiential team.

For Spotify Everywhere, that team was faced with the challenge of turning the listening experience into something that people could also see, touch, taste, and smell. To pull it off, the experiential team relied on partners like Sony, Google, Xbox, Samsung, Philips Hue, and Roku, as well as free food and drinks. Why else do people go to events?

Spotify Everywhere started with the idea of creating an “immersive house of audio where music and podcasts were everywhere you turned,” Keyana Kashfi, Spotify’s global senior director of experiential and content production, told Marketing Brew in an email.

It took three months to plan the two-day event, according to Kashfi. Finding the right venue was of particular importance.

“We needed a space large enough that we could build our very own house and make it feel like when you entered the space, you were walking up to a home built by Spotify,” Kashfi explained.

Each room featured a product or tool that can be used to listen to audio, like the array of smart speakers on display in the living room greeting visitors as they entered, or the closet filled with Sony LinkBuds, Garmin smartwatches, and Amazon Echo Frames.

One of the main attractions of the house was, of course, the kitchen, which “took inspiration from the infamous 

The room featured a “fun, colorful countertop to create a unique content-capture moment” for the influencers in attendance, Kashfi said.

The kitchen wasn’t purely aesthetic, though. It also featured treats from local bakeries plus a Samsung fridge that can be integrated with Spotify.

Inside that fridge were a number of Easter eggs. Also actual eggs, which doubled as a hidden message thanks to a scannable code leading to a related Spotify playlist. There was even real caviar in the fridge, another Easter egg that scanned out to RapCaviar, one of the most popular playlists on the platform, according to Kashfi.

“You might discover a new playlist that you didn’t know about, and it made the event feel even more interactive than it already was,” Palmieri said.

The move was, quite literally, catering to Gen Z, one of the key target audiences for the event. The demo “loves discovering hidden easter eggs,” Kashfi said, and the fridge was indeed a hit, Palmieri told us.

“I saw how many times they had to wipe that down because there were so many fingerprints on it,” she said. “People were obsessed.”

Palmieri was recently tapped to host events for Spotify—including its Spotify House during CMA Fest earlier this summer—given her background as a journalist and video and audio content creator, she said.

Spotify’s temporary digs were full of pink and purple hues, from the walls to the t-shirts the employees were wearing. The colors “felt fresh and light for the hot NYC days,” Kashfi told us.

Plus, the color palette was highly Instagramable for all the social media stars in attendance, including influencers Robbi Jan and Alex Costa, astrologer Aliza Kelly, and actor Emily Meade.


Kashfi didn’t share any specific metrics associated with the event’s performance on social, but said it “generated a high volume of social buzz across Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter.” All in all, over 200 people showed up for the event, Kashfi said.

an image of a pool from the "Spotify Everywhere" event in NYC

The event was filled with treats, Easter eggs, and Insta-worthy backdrops for the influencers in attendance. 

Mood Board: How Spotify built a ‘house of audio’ in lower Manhattan

With all this talk of a potential recession, freelance companies are 

“The way we work changed so dramatically in the last two and a half years, and with macroeconomical changes that are happening, I think the timing is super relevant,” Fiverr CMO Gali Arnon said of the company’s latest campaign, adding that freelancers can be a “great solution” for companies undergoing layoffs.

 shows workers celebrating freelancer Marco’s last of eight days at a company by eating cake in the break room. The catch? Marco isn’t actually there IRL.

Arnon said the goal of the campaign is to show corporate decision-makers “how they can extend their team” and “think about new ways of working” with freelancers, including considering them part of company culture.

“[Freelancers] work from the coffee shop or from their home office, but they still need to be recognized for their work,” Arnon said. “They still need to get feedback and praise and be part of the social fabric of a company.”

We spoke with Arnon about the creative elements that went into creating the new campaign—the first created in-house for Fiverr.

After going through the agency pitch process, Arnon said Fiverr “wasn’t quite happy” with the ideas presented and put out a call to its internal creative team. Upon seeing this idea, she said, “It was clear that they know the product and the company and our culture and our ethos and our values more than anyone else.”

: In addition to using its own creative team, Arnon said Fiverr also tapped freelancers on its platform–something it’s done in every campaign to date—for creative elements like voice-overs.

One Easter egg Arnon said may not be obvious to the average viewer is the setting of the ad, which is Fiverr’s headquarters in Tel Aviv. Shooting the ad required shutting two floors of the office down for two days. From start to finish, she said the campaign took about two to three months to create.

 In keeping with the theme of the video, Arnon said, “As a surprise, we’re going to send a few cakes to our top freelancers in a few markets where they’re going to have their picture on it.” She said the plan is to document the deliveries and share on social.

“We were preaching the fact that talent is global and you could work remotely for the 10 years that we existed before Covid hit,” Arnon said. The campaign is running in “key markets” around the world, including the US, UK, Germany, Australia, and France—all places where Arnon said Fiverr has observed a shift to freelance. She said Fiverr is putting “significant investment” in the campaign, which will run “for at least a few months” on linear and streaming TV and/or digital, depending on location.

 Pending public reception, Arnon said she can envision this campaign evolving into more than a single ad: “We do have other ideas around [this concept], other kinds of cultural moments in a workplace or traditions or ceremonies that were extremely funny,” she said. “So I think this has the potential to be more than a one-off.”

a photo of a man's head on a cake with the text "Bye Bye Marco" below

The campaign comes as freelance and staffing companies anticipate business growth and a possible recession.

Mood Board: Fiverr ad encourages business leaders to consider freelancers part of company culture 

Phoebe Bain

 influencers could start showing up in Super Bowl ads more and more. TBD if influencers will appear in Super Bowl 2023, but they’re already making commercial debuts during another TV staple.

On July 11, during the premiere of ABC’s reality dating show 

, two former contestants-turned-influencers appeared in a Maybelline ad: Joe Amabile and Serena Pitt, an 

 who met on the franchise’s steamy summer spinoff 

The spot shows Pitt talking into her phone camera, pretending to make a social media ad for a Maybelline foundation…which is ironic being that she’s 

 making a TV ad for the same company. Another bit of irony: Amabile thinks she’s talking about how great he is, but the viewer knows she’s actually describing Maybelline, ostensibly her other great love.

Marketing Brew sat down with Andrea Muguerza, Maybelline’s VP of marketing, face makeup, to get the behind-the-scenes scoop on the ad, which the couple also posted on 

While Maybelline was the only brand that paid for the TV spot, it was 

, too. This Disney ad inventory type is called an “

,” Muguerza explained, meaning that the Maybelline team knew the ad would promote both its product and the show.

Pitt ended up shooting influencer content in the ad because the Maybelline team wanted to show her doing something “natural to her,” or that she’d be comfortable doing in real life. “That is a very natural kind of behavior for her to be doing,” Muguerza said.

Muguerza joked that on set, Amabile kept singing the brand’s classic “Maybe it’s Maybelline” jingle, despite the tagline being retired in 2014. (Fun fact: the brand brought it back in 2020 as a 

While Pitt wasn’t actually filming a real video to post on social media in the ad itself, the partnership extended to social, too, with Pitt and Amabile posting a few 

 about the ad and the Maybelline foundation.

 The experience got the team excited about potentially using influencers in Maybelline TV ads in the future, Muguerza told us. “This seems to be a great initial performance,” she said.

imagery from Maybelline campaign starring Joe Amabile and Serena Pitt

The ad stars two former contestants-turned-influencers.

Mood Board: Behind the scenes of Maybelline’s ‘Bachelorette’ commercial

Ryan Barwick

No amount of fake blood, crawling spiders, and knife-wielding maniacs is more frightening than seeing Halloween candy at Walgreens in July.

And yet, Wieden+Kennedy went all in on #spookyszn this summer to promote the new Ford F-150 Raptor R, a supposed beast of a machine with 700 horsepower made for “extreme off-roading,” according to the 

Like Frankenstein, Marketing Brew resurrected our Mood Board series to speak with Eric Helin and Stuart Jennings, creative directors at W+K who’ve worked on Ford’s creative since the agency got the account in 2018.

 “Humans love to scare themselves on purpose, right? Whether it’s roller-coasters or horror movies, there’s something incredible about that. This vehicle is kind of a $110,000 version of that idea,” Jennings told Marketing Brew. It helped that Ford was also looking for something a little different than what they were used to.

 fast. Ultimately, though, the spot doesn’t entirely avoid the cliches of your average 

But, at least it does so in a way that would make Alice Cooper blush.

, the team relied on the well-worn aesthetic of horror films from the late ’70s and early ’80s, a time when “Americans were a little more obsessed with vehicles,” Jennings said. That was combined with a contemporary, oversaturated 

At one point, there appears to be a wolf in the truck, a ghoul palming the driver-side mirror, and what we would describe as a “being” standing in the mist. Is it…an alien??? “I don’t think we want that to be defined,” Jennings said.

Like any self-respecting horror flick, it’s best enjoyed in theaters—the ad is playing nationally in theaters ahead of Jordan Peele’s widely hyped film 

 That wasn’t planned until after the idea was sold, but it was “kind of a happy accident,” Jennings joked.

 Alright, maybe this one is self-explanatory, but the warning at the start that “persons under 16 not admitted without a learner’s permit” is pretty cute.

imagery from new F-150 Raptor R commercial

Wieden+Kennedy went all in on #spookyszn to promote the new F-150 Raptor R.

Mood Board: The creepy inspiration for Ford’s frightening new car commercial

Women only want two things, and they’re disgusting: guys’ boxers and lots and lots of stuffed animals—at least according to underwear company Culprit’s tongue-in-cheek social video ad for its “LadyBoxers,” aka boxers made for women so they can stop stealing from their significant others’.

, its star and narrator, Paige Elkington, tries to pour herself (and all of her stuffed animals) rosé, tells the audience not to take her word for it because, in her words, she’s drunk and plays tennis in her underwear.

As you could probably guess, there’s an interesting backstory behind many of these scenes. Marketing Brew chatted with Culprit underwear co-founders David Dinetz and Dylan Trussell (who directed and wrote the ad together), as well as Elkington, about how a cacophony of messy gal references came together into an ad that’s more than two minutes long.

Apparently, these little guys make appearances in 

 Culprit ads. “If you watch our bathing-suit commercial with Paige, she’s got a bunch of stuffed animals around her that she pulls into a hot tub with her,” Dinetz explained. But the reason why is more practical than whimsical. “We were shooting in this beautiful house that we got to use for free, but it was completely empty,” Dinetz continued. “We needed to fill it with something, and stuffed animals were super cheap to get, so that’s why we did that.”

Turns out, the actor playing him started as Culprit’s head of customer service. “We found out he was a really talented actor. He has since worked his way up to COO of our company,” Trussell said.

 No creative agencies were involved in the making of this ad…well, kind of. “Before we started our underwear brand, we ran a creative agency,” Trussell told us. “So all the creative was done in-house.”

imagery from Lady Boxers spot for Culprit

We talked to the apparel brand’s co-founders about its tongue-in-cheek spot.

Mood Board: The not-so-subtle references in Culprit’s ad for ‘LadyBoxers’ 

 for Waka Kotahi, New Zealand’s transportation agency, might not seem like an ad. It almost looks like a trailer for an indie thriller—think reversed images, aerial shots of the countryside, and haunting string music.

The mood is fitting for its subject matter—last year, 

 died on New Zealand roads. Leisa Wall, executive creative director at FCB New Zealand, said the agency wanted to break New Zealand’s PSA norms of the last 10 or 15 years, which focused more on personal fault, and instead show the human impact of the problem.

We spoke with Wall about the artistic choices behind the ad, how Covid disrupted their shoot, and New Zealand’s hope to eliminate road deaths entirely by 2050.

In Australia and New Zealand, the term “road toll” is used to describe the number of deaths caused by accidents on the road. That’s what inspired the concept for the ad, in which an actual tollbooth operator asks the father driving the car to pay with his daughter’s life. “We needed to put a stake in the ground and just say, enough’s enough, you know, this number that we’re so used to hearing on the news and over long weekends is actually human lives,” Wall said.

 The direction and artistic vision for the ad came from director Steve Ayson, who has worked with companies like 

. At one point during the shoot, New Zealand’s Covid restrictions prevented Ayson from re-entering the country while in LA, so the team had to scramble to figure out a solution. Wall said Ayson “basically traveled around the show on this little iPad on a stick,” which they called the “Steve-sickle.” On the plus side, she said that being a floating head allowed him to fit into small spaces and work in between shots rather than get caught up in the day-to-day of the shoot.

: Wall joked that Kiwis “literally have a talent pool of about five or six people in this country to pick from, and so everyone’s kind of recognizable,” including the woman who played the tollbooth operator, Alison Quigan. Because of the shutdown, Wall said the team had to go through a series of recasts for actors who could no longer fly in to shoot, but luckily Quigan was around from start to finish.

: When it came to designing the look of the tollbooth operator, everything from her wig down to her demeanor was carefully considered. Wall said it was important to make sure it didn’t seem like she was enjoying her job. “She was for us, this person that has been sitting there doing this job for years and years and years and it’s almost just become second nature to her. But she still needed a slight little bit of a little bit of darkness to her.”

 Ultimately, this campaign is part of the larger “Road to Zero” effort to eliminate road deaths in New Zealand by 2050. FCB’s follow-up, “

” has a notably lighter tone. Wall said that’s because while the first ad was about the the problem, the second is about potential solutions: “I love this idea that if you’re driving a safe car, you’ve got the right tires on, the barriers are in place, the speed limits are correct, [or] if you sneeze while driving and make a mistake, there’s all the things in place to keep you safe.”

an image from Waka Kotahi's latest "Road to Zero" campaign