Impact.com

 helps you automate your affiliate, influencer, and referral programs with insights + tools. 

Impact_MKott_Oct25

Marketing Brew informs marketing pros of the latest on brand strategy, social media, and ad tech via our weekday newsletter, virtual events, marketing conferences, and digital guides.

Marketing Brew

Ryan Barwick

marketingbrew.com

 X ad costs, engagement continue to fall, per report 

Data from Tracer provided a snapshot of the ad platform ecosystem.

 X ad costs and engagement continue to fall, per report 

Katie Hicks

Influencer at the center of a ring light being scanned

Deepfakes are spreading, putting creator and brand safety at risk

Michel Janse, who said her likeness was recently used without her consent, told Marketing Brew the experience was “violating.” 

How brands are thinking about a possible TikTok ban

Duolingo, Osea Malibu, and Truff are among the brands that tell us they’d turn to alternative short-form video platforms, like Instagram Shorts and YouTube Reels.

An @ symbol denoting social media and influencers

Social & Influencers

Earlier this year, Andrew Downing, director of social media at Cava, tasked his team with coming up with a show for social media after seeing other creators and brands 

 and sensing an opportunity in the unscripted reality space.

“We were seeing some of these [social series] that resemble old TV shows,” he said, noting that series like 

, which tours the dirty and often bizarrely decorated rooms of men in New York, resembles MTV’s 

where single contestants’ rooms were inspected by potential dates. “I told people to go research some old reality shows and see how we can spin that into a social show.”

About 15 ideas later, the Cava team landed on 

, a six-episode, weekly Instagram dating series hosted by creator and stand-up comedian Daniela Mora. In each episode, created with the Very Online Agency, two contestants build each other a Cava bowl while answering questions about each other and ultimately deciding whether or not they are, in fact, “bowlmates.”

Season 1 has now officially wrapped, and Downing says the brand’s bet on love has paid off enough to start planning Season 2.

“This is just an expansion of the Cavaverse and trying to figure out other touch points that we know people are interested in,” Downing said.

 lives on its own Instagram account separate from the official Cava brand account, which has more than 300,000 followers. While 

 1,000+ followers may pale in comparison, Downing said it was a conscious decision to game the Instagram algorithm as it pushes content to non-followers. A separate account also provides an easy way for viewers to watch all the episodes in succession without other, non-

Starting fresh on any new account can make it harder to get eyeballs, but Downing said that the first two videos received more than 300,000 views without any paid media, which“outperformed [his team’s] wildest dreams.” The number of inquiries the brand has received from viewers asking to be on the show as contestants, he said, has been another unexpected indicator of success.

“We can actually tally the amount of DMs we get now asking us to be on the show,” Downing said. “That was something we never even thought of.”

 to take note of the fact that many young people are looking for love off of the dating apps, but being part of people’s potential love stories can have other positive effects. Many of the contestants on the show have noted that they’ve never tried Cava before, which Downing said wasn’t intentional but has shown the brand the potential of reaching new customers through this method.

is designed to encourage word-of-mouth and organic discovery, and Downing said it was important to get the right host to help boost awareness. Mora, a Bronx-born comedian who has more than 320,000 followers on Instagram, was Cava’s first choice.

“We knew that we wanted a comedian to riff between two people, just in case, for whatever reason, the conversation stalled,” he said. “[Mora’s] online presence and the content she shares about dating and real-life, Gen Z stuff definitely factored in.”

The final episode of Season 1 premiered this week, with almost every episode ending in an agreed-upon bowlmance, and Season 2 is now putting out casting calls for New Yorkers.

According to Downing, Cava’s decision to continue with Season 2 was based on the level of engagement in the show’s comments and DMs. He said he’s excited about the potential of using the series to release holiday content or to promote things like new menu items in future seasons. A “Where are they now?” segment with couples from Season 1 is also not out of the question.

“Anything that is a trope in a reality show or in dating content, we’re very well aware of it and we’re always thinking, ‘Oh, could we do that? Could we do this?’” he said. “I think it would be a really fun addition.”

screenshots from Cava's Instagram series, "Bowlmates."

How Cava is building brand love (and real love) on Instagram

Andrew Downing, director of social media at Cava, shared the strategy behind the brand’s newest social series, “Bowlmates.”

Jennimai Nguyen

For the chronically online, one of the most painful parts of flying might be disconnecting from content creators.

Through a new partnership with YouTube, the airline is introducing ad-free content from certain creators to seatback screens and other in-flight entertainment accessible via personal devices. As part of the deal, podcasts, music, and videos from creators including Kinigra Deon, MrBeast, Michelle Khare, and Mother Goose Club will be available for Delta customers to tune into during flights.

YouTube is the most-watched streaming service in the US, per 

, and offering it on seatback screens will keep Delta’s programming up to speed with modern media habits, according to Julieta McCurry, VP of in-flight entertainment and connectivity at Delta.

“Our data was actually telling us that customers want personalization and they want choice,” McCurry told Marketing Brew. “We saw that there was an increasing turn to creator-driven content and podcasts that really reflects the interests of the customers.”

Like the TV, film, and streaming brands that 

, creators who are part of the program stand to get a boost from being part of airlines’ seat-back entertainment options and find new audiences mid-flight, representing just the 

Delta’s YouTube partnership, first announced at CES earlier this year, was a year in the making, according to McCurry, and is designed to reflect the company’s vision of the future of travel and entertainment. One major difference? YouTube content will be ad-free in order to align with other viewing experiences on Delta.

“This is a premium experience,” McCurry said.

Creator Kinigra Deon, whose content is part of the partnership, said creating a premium experience was also important to her. While her typical viewers may be accustomed to ad breaks unless they pay for YouTube Premium, she said, she hopes that viewing her content in this seat-back context might lead to increased interest later on.

“I’m hoping that once the passenger lands, it allows them to [think], ‘Who was that? I want to watch more,’” Deon told Marketing Brew. “Go watch 1,000 more once [they] figure out that I have 1,000 other videos.”

To choose the creator content featured on planes, McCurry said Delta worked closely with YouTube and placed a priority on diversity. “We have a very diverse customer base by the nature of being a global airline, and so we wanted to make sure that there was a cultural relevance with these creators across the board,” she said.

The current creator content selection will remain available for the next few months, a timeframe that will allow the team to glean audience insights, McCurry said.Content performance will eventually be evaluated on a monthly basis, like the rest of the programming available on Delta Studio, the airline’s in-flight entertainment platforms.

“It’s important to stay current, and important that we are delivering the type of content that customers are looking for,” McCurry said. “We’ve got a lot of frequent travelers as well, so we want to make sure that we keep the content fresh and relevant for them.”

For Deon, the opportunity to distribute her content on Delta was a dream, since she considers herself to be a “Delta girl” through and through, she said.

Deon sees her content as fitting in on Delta’s in-flight experience because of how the platform mirrors the home watching environment. About 70% of her content’s watch time already comes from CTVs, she said, and she hopes her long-form, scripted content will feel at home next to the feature-length films and traditional TV shows that plane audiences might already expect.

The seatback and in-flight experience is ad-free, and Delta isn’t paying creators to make their YouTube content available on its planes. But for creators like Deon, the promise of exposure and potential new audiences—plus the opportunity to revel in a new milestone with her existing audience—is more than enough, she said.

According to McCurry, the plane audience is uniquely positioned to pay deeper attention to programs while flying and to seek to continue their entertainment journeys after their flights. In this sense, creators on planes are set up to build connections with audiences in a whole new way.

“The aircraft is really a very unique environment,” McCurry said. “It’s offering creators and YouTube an opportunity unlike anywhere else where you have this uninterrupted, guaranteed engagement in an age that is really defined by fragmented, hyper-short attention spans everywhere else.”

Glowing seatback screen collaged next to a Delta plane

 Creators prepare for takeoff as YouTube content comes to Delta planes 

YouTube creators like MrBeast, Kinigra Deon, and Michelle Khare have landed on a new way to find audiences. 

A cartoon image of Kristina Monllos created by Morning Brew

Kristina Monllos

The staff at Dunder Mifflin Paper, the fictional company at the center of 

, aren’t exactly known for being star employees. For the B2B expense management platform Ramp, that was the point.

This past Wednesday, Ramp put Brian Baumgartner, best known for playing the lovable, bumbling accountant Kevin Malone in the hit sitcom, in a transparent box in Manhattan’s Flatiron Plaza for seven hours. Inside, Baumgartner processed expense receipts in real time—an entertaining commentary both on the drudgery of the work and how the platform can help companies streamline those efforts.

The activation, which was in the works for five months, drew a rough estimate of 10,000 in-person attendees, Kendall Tucker, head of creative experimentation at Ramp, told Marketing Brew; a livestream on X garnered 380,000 viewers over the course of about a week. Across platforms, Ramp estimates the activation has had “at least 85 million views,” Tucker said.

The effort came about shortly after the company’s first foray into Super Bowl advertising earlier this year, where Ramp executives were itching for their next big push to pitch businesses on Ramp, especially when there can be hesitancy to switch software.

“Once a company switches to our software and our corporate card, they love it, but helping them to understand that they have a problem, that their current expense management solution is not great, is actually really hard,” Tucker said. “Accountants have been using the same software for 30 years, they’re not looking for alternatives. So we’re like, ‘How do we make that pain feel visceral?’”

And putting Baumgartner, arguably the most famous accountant in pop culture, in a glass box for hours processing receipts was one way to highlight those pain points front and center.

Before landing on the idea for the activation, Tucker spoke with Rohan Kumar, a “professional internet surfer” and the former head of vertical platforms for MrBeast who brought on the co-founders of production shop Coming of Age. Kumar and Coming of Age co-founders Lewis Atallah and Mattias Russo-Larsson joined the Ramp offices for a week of brainstorming, at which point they came up with the idea.

But it wasn’t as simple as just making a deal with Baumgartner and calling it a day. Throughout the course of the seven-hour stunt, Ramp added different bits to break up the monotony and keep things interesting. Internet personality Christian Joseph, aka The Rizzler, comedian Zarna Garg, and 

costar Andy Buckley all popped up at different times throughout the day. Even more unexpectedly, Baumgartner officiated a real wedding of a Ramp employee in the box. (Tucker said she sent out a message to the company a week before the stunt and got three couples to volunteer to be married by Baumgartner.)

The day wasn’t scripted, but it wasn’t entirely off-the-cuff, either. The team worked with Baumgartner to identify the right moments to play up throughout the day. The stunt itself was “broken up into 15-minute segments,” Tucker said, which helped structure improvisation.

“[Baumgartner] had an in-ear [piece], so we would say, ‘Hey, the private equity guy is coming in right now. Just seem kind of annoyed by him,’” she said. “And he knew from his 30 pages of beat sheets that this guy was just going to come in and railroad him.”

To document the day, Ramp had five cameras inside the glass box and one outside the box to show the reactions of the crowd. The company set up a livestream, which Tucker said was designed to “impress upon the audience that this is for real”; camera operators could switch between the different angles for the livestream throughout the day.

For the stunt, Ramp signed two contracts with SAG-AFTRA, Tucker said, including a new media agreement covering the livestream of the event, as well as a commercial agreement covering the ads and social video content created out of the event.

It’s possible that the livestream helped the brand get more eyeballs on the stunt, encouraging people to tune in and 

unexpected nature of the activation is really what made it stand out, Eunice Shin, CEO and founder of brand strategy consultancy The Elume Group, said.

“With so many brands getting canceled for their marketing moves, people are playing it safe, marketers are playing it safe,” Shin told Marketing Brew. “And to me, that equates to boring in a sea of sameness, of a lot of marketing that just doesn’t get people’s attention. So whenever anything feels a little bit interesting or fun, I think, everyone’s like, ‘Hey, look at that.’”

Tucker is optimistic that the response to the stunt so far encourages other brands to say yes to strange ideas, even if it’s not duplicating the activation exactly.

“I hope the takeaway is that companies and individuals should just try wild things,” Tucker said. “I know we’re gonna continue just doing really interesting things that are physical and real, and I hope other companies take that away, more so than like, ‘Yeah, you lock a guy in a box, or do a livestream.’”

two photos of actor Brian Baumgartner for a recent marketing effort for the brand Ramp

Inside the making of Ramp’s viral livestream with Brian Baumgartner

The B2B expense management platform planned an experiential activation that drew some 10,000 in-person attendees. 

Kelsey Sutton

Each week, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself 

Michael Lamp is chief digital and social officer at the agency Hunter, where he has been for nearly two decades.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in marketing?

 I help brands figure out how to make their (often) old business models feel native to a digital audience, blending traditional methods with emerging technologies to meet people where they are online, engage them (first), and sell to them (second).

 The first project that pivoted my career from traditional PR to digital was back in 2009. I’d been with Hunter for one year and was an account executive on the food/bev team working on the Grey Poupon biz at Kraft. Fox News was making news out of President Obama’s burger order (adding Dijon mustard), calling him an elitist and not “of the people.” So we wrote an open letter, riffing on our brand heritage, urging Obama to “pardon” those who believe in free choice when choosing condiments. This was during the primitive days of social and digital, so we developed a microsite and pitched it to the media. The results were great and ranged from 

,” from the 3G rollout of Apple’s iPhone. I love anything that successfully blends utility with entertainment. This built off that tension perfectly, positioning these then-new devices as more than just phones but keys to solving daily problems and on-demand entertainment. The concept of time-shifted anything was still a very premium novelty (like TiVo!), so all of this in one’s pocket was game-changing. And apps propelled this further, showing how they’d easily sustain innovation over time.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile:

 My first “internship” in college was actually the College Program at Walt Disney World. I was very good friends with Pluto and Eeyore (IYKYK), and that’s where I learned the art of IRL animation and honed my early presentation chops.

What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least?

 Funny enough, both are tied to AI. I’m most optimistic about LLMs and their impact on communications, specifically our ability to drive better discovery of non-paid content (notably earned coverage and earned-on-owned social content). I’m least optimistic about where we are with the generative creative side of AI. The rapid innovation has not been dually met with rapid regulation, and I think creative is the longer-term threat to disinformation than the written word.

What’s one marketing-related podcast/social account/series you’d recommend?

Coworking with Michael Lamp 

He’s chief digital and social officer at Hunter.

In 2023, Instagram unveiled broadcast channels, a feature for creators to “engage directly with their followers at scale” through what is essentially a one-sided group chat, offering channel owners the chance to take polls, gather photo responses, and share updates with those who opt in. In the last two years, brands have also begun using the feature, but many are still exploring the most effective ways to do so.

, and Béis, have operated broadcast channels for a while, while others, like 818 Spirits and Tony’s Chocolonely, began using them more recently. Marketers say the channels are a powerful way to reach engaged customers, solicit feedback, and offer exclusive insights and deals, but the feature could still use some improvements—and some brand channels have gone dark in the meantime.

“When we went into it, we were like, ‘This is very much a test,’” Amanda Tedesco, director of social media at Shake Shack, said. “We’re still kind of in that place.”

Shake Shack created its broadcast channel a year ago to draw attention to its Innovation Kitchen, where it tests and develops new menu items, and to connect with fans, Tedesco told us.

“[The culinary team is] always ideating and coming up with these cool culinary innovations,” she said. “We thought, ‘Maybe there’s something there for the broadcast channel.’”

The channel now has nearly 4,000 members, and Shake Shack’s social team often collaborates with its consumer insights team and uses the Poll feature to gather input on decisions like what to name the restaurant chain’s next burger or which cheese-fry innovation looks most appetizing. The brand has even offered some channel members the chance to come to the Innovation Kitchen to try new menu items and share feedback.

Cava launched its broadcast channel, Tzatziki Town Hall, last year and now has about 2,400 members. Andy Rebhun, Cava’s chief marketing and experience officer, told us the brand most recently used the broadcast channel to help collect customer photos of the 

 it released in August. It has also used the channel to generate social content, like asking members to build the social team’s 

, solicit input on new chip flavors, and offer exclusive access to new menu items.

The channel, Rebhun said, “allows secret information and news to get to [members] first.”

Abby Davison, communications manager, North America, at Tony’s Chocolonely, told us the brand has used its broadcast channel, which it launched last month, to get feedback on its products. After the brand planned to rename its Dark Milk Chocolate Pretzel Toffee bar (a decision made because US-based consumers “did not understand what dark milk chocolate” meant, Davison said), the brand headed to its broadcast channel to ask followers what they might rename it if it were up to them.

“It was a great place to get that feedback, and that’s something that we’re bringing to the product and innovation team, like, ‘Hey, this is what our deep fans and community would call it,’” she said.

Kathleen Braine, CMO of 818 Spirits, said the brand created its broadcast channel last month in an effort to reach both superfans and more passive consumers. She likes the ability to interact with customers, which can be missing in traditional SMS and email marketing, and plans to use the channel to assess demand for certain products and variations.

“We’re constantly getting DMs and comments about, ‘When does this launch?’ ‘How can I find this hat?’ ‘How can I get tickets to Outpost next year?’” Braine said. “We thought it made a ton of sense to just put our community all in one place.”

Beyond communicating directly with customers, marketers are using broadcast channels to reward them. So far, 818 has used its broadcast channel to give away a YSL bag with a 

 and share RSVP info for a tailgate event in Dallas for last Saturday’s Texas vs. Oklahoma game.

Tedesco said the broadcast channel allows Shake Shack to increase the value of its giveaways compared to those on its main Instagram page. “We can afford to give a bigger prize because it’s a smaller group, but also they appreciate it more,” she said.

For Tony’s Chocolonely, Davis said the broadcast channel can create “digital VIP opportunities” for fans through giveaways and in-person events where they can meet other fans and company executives.

There’s still room for improvement, marketers said, and Tedesco hopes Meta will add more analytics to broadcast channels. “Right now, it’s very manual to go through and see our top-performing posts,” she said. “Getting to see a little bit more of our followers and the breakdown of where they are would be super helpful for us.”

As brands experiment with new ways of engaging with customers on Instagram, Tedesco said finding the right channel comes down to finding what works best for a brand’s niche.

“Those are big considerations when there’s already so many social channels to stay abreast on,” she said. “It’s the lift and what you want to get out of it and what you want to give your community in return.”

four mobile phones with multicolored speech balloons coming out of them are held by four arms, reaching from outide of the frame

How brands are maximizing Instagram’s broadcast channels

Brands like Shake Shack and Tony’s Chocolonely continue to experiment with the feature, where marketers can engage with and collect feedback from brand superfans.

It’s hard to make people happy. But in today’s attention economy, some brands are getting good at making people very, very mad.

, have faced accusations of ragebaiting, or the practice of generating anger-fueled online engagement, in various marketing campaigns and product announcements that seemed tailor-made to evoke a response. At the same time, creators like 

 have built followings in the hundreds of thousands on social platforms by riling up audiences with fake stories and scenarios. Some creators have even found success in fanning the flames of brand campaign dramas as a way to drive their own growth.

In the attention economy, views are currency, and marketers told us that many brands are feeling the pressure to stand out and go viral at just about any cost. But all press may not be good press, and controversy, whether intentional or not, doesn’t necessarily lend itself well to long-term marketing success for brands, experts told us.

“The short-term bump in attention is not really worth the trade-off of damaging brand equity,” Lia Haberman, a social and influencer marketing consultant and author of the ICYMI newsletter, said.

Some marketers may realize the risks of riling up various corners of the internet, but in a time of 

 online, social experts said keeping brands out of any heated discourse requires diligence and awareness of bad-faith campaign interpretations that could pull them in.

“We are in a sloppy era,” Haberman said. “I think it’s less about ragebait or outrage marketing, and really [about] carelessness or sloppiness in not thinking about who your audience is, how your messages have come across, [or] the choices of the creators or the talent that you’re using.”

American Eagle’s controversial Sydney Sweeney campaign is just one recent example that got plenty of people talking. Company executives have defended the campaign, which 

 over the summer for its references to genetics, and CMO Craig Brommers 

 last month that the campaign wasn’t designed as intentional ragebait, but instead aimed at sparking “a conversation about optimism, confidence, and self-expression”; so far, the company has reported initially positive results.

Megan Morass, co-founder and CEO of the creative agency Full Fat, told us that even a single controversial brand post can make consumers feel anxious, which can be damaging to brand equity, trust, and value in the long term. “It’s quite a risky tactic as a marketer to use,” she said. “You’re putting something out into the world that is, on purpose, trying to incite rage or frustration from your audience.”

In the case of American Eagle, Morass said she’s interested to see if the brand sees long-term success beyond the short-term sales results. In contrast, Morass pointed to Gap’s feel-good denim ad with girl group KATSEYE released around the same time, which has proved to be the brand’s 

 to date, and which she believes will drive greater brand love in the long run.

If a brand is intent on courting controversy, Morass pointed to a Doritos campaign from earlier this year, in which the brand implied it might change its signature triangle chip shape into a 

 and plenty of online chatter, but all in good fun.

“That is really nicely done ragebait, if there is such a thing,” Morass said. “It’s nothing serious. It’s not going to create any emotional [or] behavioral triggers.”

Dulma Altan, a TikTok creator who posts about business strategy, said ragebait can be risky for creators and brands alike, even if it can deliver results. While she pointed to the Kardashians and Gwyneth Paltrow as celebrities who have seemingly figured out how to 

 outrage into tangible brand outcomes, she considers them to be exceptions to the rule.

“I’m convinced that brands and prominent public figures might accidentally stir up controversy, but then they realize that either that controversy can be beneficial for brand awareness and can be harnessed in some way, or they realize they can never really avoid it, so [they think], ‘Why not just use it and try to keep it contained?’” Altan said.

If ragebait becomes a widely adopted strategy, Morass said she anticipates that audiences might unfollow brands to avoid seeing it.

“We need to make the marketing industry take responsibility for the impact that it has on audience mental health,” she said. “As marketeers, we’re responsible for uplifting and empowering our consumers, not bringing them down.”

While some brands may ragebait intentionally, Haberman said she suspects that for many brands, it’s likely accidental.

“In retrospect, a lot of these companies probably wish that they were strategic and savvy enough to have orchestrated this as ragebait or outrage marketing to increase conversation and awareness around their product or product launch,” she said.

Lola Bakare, a CMO advisor, inclusive marketing strategist, and owner of marketing consultancy be/co, said she believes it’s a marketer’s responsibility to understand how a campaign could be received across audiences before it goes live.

“Marketers are being held responsible for the importance of having a high level of cultural literacy, which has always and should always have been part of the job,” Bakare said. “A lot of people have not nurtured and invested in that education, so they’re falling short.”

Take, for instance, e.l.f.’s recent campaign featuring comedian Matt Rife. The company reportedly focused on Rife’s TikTok audience when signing him, e.l.f. CMO Kory Marchisotto told 

 but the brand seems to have overlooked Rife’s 

 making light of domestic violence in a Netflix special, which outraged some consumers. Marchisotto acknowledged that the campaign missed the mark in the interview, explaining that the brand doesn’t “[look] in the rearview mirror when operating the real-time marketing machine.”

Haberman pointed to the e.l.f. campaign as “a really great example of not spending maybe an extra half-hour manually scrolling through somebody’s feed, looking on Reddit, and seeing how people are talking about this creator.”

Increasingly, experts said, marketers should be prepared for backlash even when a business decision may seem innocuous. That’s because there may be broader forces at play: the negative reactions to Cracker Barrel’s recent minimalistic rebrand, which prompted the brand to reverse course, were reportedly 

, while social intelligence platform Open Measures reported that backlash to American Eagle’s campaign was 

 by “conservative political personalities.”

Altan noted that social platforms can benefit from this type of engagement, whether orchestrated or organic, which she suspects means this practice will only continue.

“We have to remember that the smartest engineers in the entire world are all being paid millions of dollars to figure out how to get us constantly enraged,” Altan said. “The odds are stacked against us.”

As the political divide deepens and people look for signs from brands to see what they stand for, Haberman advised marketers to be forthright about brand values to minimize confusion.

“If you don’t put your stance and your beliefs and your values out there,” she said, “somebody is going to ascribe those values to you.”

A desktop computer monitor that is displaying a red angry face emoji.

Ragebait is everywhere. Should marketers lean in? 

Whether brands intentionally rile up audiences or unintentionally get caught up in the culture wars, experts say they should be prepared for the consequences of short-term, bad-faith engagement.

TikTok creator Jake Schroeder tries to post at least two ballads a day.

They’re entirely original songs, usually performed by the singer-songwriter as he plays piano, and they can be about anything from the 

. There’s almost no way to predict what subject he will take on in musical form next—unless you’re a brand partner.

Schroeder has been posting on TikTok since he was in high school, but he only began “taking it seriously” this May, he told Marketing Brew. The recent University of Chicago grad wanted to be more creative and had begun using a journaling technique called “morning pages,” a method from author Julia Cameron’s book 

 that requires a stream-of-consciousness, 30-minute writing practice every day. This practice led to what he calls his “dumb songs” written as musical comedy, which he posted to TikTok. He now has more than 360,000 followers.

After Schroeder’s songs began going viral, brands started reaching out to commission their own ballads, drawn to his platform-specific humor and his ability to stand out on the app without the typical barriers around copyrighted music trends.

In just three months, he’s completed around 60 wide-ranging brand deals, including work with AI writing assistant Grammarly, deodorant brand Degree, and a Swedish music library brand called Epidemic Sound. And he’s only seeking to do more. The topics Schroeder features in his songs are wide-ranging and often random-seeming, which he sees as an asset in creating funny and feel-good posts about just about anything.

“Things that are as simple as the Caesar salad can be exciting and fun,” Schroeder said. “Working with [so many brands]...sort of represents what I’m trying to say in my other songs too, which is like, life can be enjoyed.”

Schroeder said he doesn’t seek out brand partnerships so much as they have come to him, and brands of all kinds have come calling. The first brand to approach him was personal hygiene company Good Wipes, he told us. The second? Luxury designer brand Jimmy Choo.

“Gag of the world,” Schroeder said of the dichotomous duo. “If I can do butt wipes and Jimmy Choo…what’s in between that?”

Schroeder credits the brand outreach to his decision to make a series of ballads featuring brands that he already loved, including Diet Coke and Costco; those posts, he said, led to more brand attention. (He didn’t sing about those brands because he thought it would attract sponsorships, he told us, instead choosing them simply because he thought they were funny to sing about.) As he continued recording his songs, Schroeder recognized that his particular approach could be brand-safe while still offering a comedic sensibility that so many social media managers chase.

“Comedy could be really good for brands, but a lot of people are either like, really hypersexual or kind of take the comedy over the top in a way that’s inaccessible,” Schroeder said. “I am really conscious about what is brand-safe in my content.”

Maggie Khoury, social media manager at Grammarly, told Marketing Brew that Schroeder’s Diet Coke ballad helped pique her interest, and she bookmarked him as a creator to watch for potential future collaborations. When it came time to work on Grammarly’s back-to-school campaign, she said she reached out to compare Schroeder’s audience demographics to the campaign’s target college-aged audience, finding that there was a great deal of overlap.

“He’s not just a great creator who’s really taking off. He is so specifically himself,” Khoury said. “We wanted to basically say, ‘You’re the expert of your audience and this corner of the internet that you’ve carved out for yourself.’”

Khoury said that she wanted to give Schroeder as much creative liberty as possible in order to not “dilute” his work with “brand brain.” The resulting 

 riffs on the use of the word “period” as both a punctuation mark and a slang term, and it nabbed more than 100,000 views.

This hands-off approach Grammarly took isn’t always what brands are comfortable with, though, which Schroeder said can sometimes be detrimental to engagement.

“The ones that don’t perform well are the really rigid ones,” he said.

For brands looking to get in on trends on TikTok, singer-songwriters like Schroeder can offer up a unique opportunity. Instead of jumping on a trending audio, which can be complicated by 

, a brand can essentially create its own audio-based piece of internet culture.

“Partnering with Jake gave Degree a unique opportunity to lean into a musically driven platform while also making the creative execution feel distinct, ownable, and fun to watch,” Christopher Symmes, head of marketing at Degree US, said in an email. “Honestly, his song has been stuck in my head for weeks now, so he’s definitely doing it right!”

As brand requests continue to roll in, Schroeder said he isn’t agreeing to every single one. He describes his approach to selecting partnerships as a way to build his universe, and he goes off a gut reaction of whether, ultimately, the brands feel “cute.”

That’s not to say he doesn’t also do his research. When a doorbell security brand (whose name he declined to share) approached him, Schroeder chose to look a little deeper into the company, which ultimately led to him turning down the partnership.

“I found that they give all of their data to ICE,” he said. “They offered me a really big, fancy, crazy deal, and I was like, hell no, because why would I support and raise the voice of this company that is doing evil things?”

Schroeder does often choose to weigh in on political subjects or current events in his non-branded ballads, which he said can affect how his brand partnerships operate; sometimes, he told us, existing brand partners request that he delay posting branded content to avoid being too close in proximity to hot-button topics. Still, Schroeder said he doesn’t plan to stop making this kind of content, and his commitment has opened up opportunities to work with organizations that align with his beliefs, like the 

“I think it’s obviously so important to show my humanity beyond my thoughts on food, or my thoughts on TV shows, or my thoughts on countries in my songs, especially because I am putting out something every day,” he said. “I think it’d be strange if I didn’t share my opinions on this dying world around us. But it’s dope when a brand is like, we’ll pay you to do this.”

Creator Jake Schroeder surrounded by text bubbles featuring words "Sauvignon Blanc," "Grammarly," and "rotisserie chicken."