SOCIAL & INFLUENCERS

Morning Brew Inc, Photos: @grillospickles/TikTok

In the last 20 years, Grillo’s Pickles’s online presence has become kind of a big dill.

The brand started as a pickle cart in downtown Boston in 2008, Eddie Andre, Grillo’s co-founder and VP of branding, told us, and at the time, its social strategy centered on Twitter, where information about where customers could find the Grillo’s cart and secure two-for-a-dollar spears lived alongside the occasional joke.

Today, Grillo’s has gone national, and it has pivoted to a largely video-focused social strategy, counting nearly 2 million followers across TikTok and Instagram. While the medium has changed, Andre said, the brand’s irreverent and slightly unhinged tone has remained the same.

“We don’t want you to feel like you’re following a brand,” he said. “We want you to feel like you’re following your best friend who happens to be obsessed with pickles.”

We spoke with Andre about how Grillo’s in-house marketing team of about a dozen people has built its following, and how the brand has repeatedly racked up millions of organic views on its posts by leaning into a more humanistic approach.

“Our goal is not to go viral every time,” he said. “Our goal is to create real, relatable, organic content that can resonate with anybody, not just pickle people.”

Continue reading here.—KH

      

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DATA & TECH

Baona/Getty Images

Entertainment marketers are getting a new outcomes measurement tool for their toolbox.

Ad-tech platform Samba and X are teaming up to provide entertainment marketers with a measurement offering geared toward their vertical, the latest outcomes measurement offering being rolled out for entertainment marketers. The partnership allows advertisers on X, which began rolling out a rebuilt ad platform in April, to use Samba’s data signals and measurement tools, the companies exclusively told Marketing Brew.

The new option will allow advertisers to see how their campaigns may have led X users to take actions such as buying a movie ticket or streaming a TV show. That data can be used by advertisers to make campaign improvements to boost impact and help them deduplicate their media buys. The new offering is already being used by certain advertisers in the streaming vertical, and, according to the companies, it has driven a 55% lift in six measured streaming initiatives.

“X is the global town square, acting as a real-time forum where cultural trends are shaped by posts of influence and amplified by public discourse and paid promotion,” Ashwin Navin, Samba’s CEO and founder, said in a press release. “Advertisers increasingly want to understand not only who saw or engaged with their campaigns, but whether those campaigns ultimately motivated audiences to behave differently than they otherwise would. Through our partnership, X and Samba will collaborate to inform entertainment marketers how to optimize their investments on X.”

Read more here.—JS

      

COWORKING

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photo: Erin Hutchinson

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

Erin Hutchinson is CMO of Trilliad, a growth services provider for B2B companies. She was previously CMO of Insights by Kantar, and she was also global CMO at the business consultancy Merkle.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? I’m a baseball fan, so one that immediately comes to mind is Coors Light’s “Hits the Spot” campaign. Shohei Ohtani hit a home run that literally knocked out a panel on a Coors Light digital billboard in New York, and instead of treating it like a maintenance issue, their team instantly recognized it for what it was: a gift. They turned the broken, blacked-out ad into commemorative cans, launched creative around the moment in real time, and made the whole thing feel completely organic. The instinct to recognize a moment and the infrastructure to act on it before it’s gone is what separates great marketing from good marketing. It wasn’t a big-budget idea. It was a sharp team moving fast with a clear point of view on their brand. That kind of creative agility shows real organizational strength, tight alignment, and a genuine pulse on what’s happening in the world.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: I can walk into almost any city in the world and find an amazing meal within 20 minutes. It’s not a skill I planned to develop, but it’s become a superpower of mine over the years.

Continue reading here.

      

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EVENTS

Morning Brew Inc.

The Marketing Brew Summit is two weeks out, and seats are going faster than they were a month ago. If it’s been sitting in your open tabs, this is the nudge: Grab your ticket now before “I’ll get to it” turns into “I missed it.”

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Morning Brew

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

So mainstream: YouTube’s latest Culture & Trends Report examines the meaning of “mainstream” in today’s fragmented social media environment.

Time to Tok: The best times of day to post on TikTok, according to analysis of more than 7 million posts.

Look it up: A marketer’s guide to AI search tools, including how they work and which to use.

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Jobs

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JOINING FORCES

Mergers and acquisitions, company partnerships, and more.

• Amazon Ads became the biggest ad-tech partner of ChatGPT under a new deal that will let buyers reserve ChatGPT inventory through Amazon.
• The Farmer’s Dog kicked off its first season as an official NFL partner with an ad starring New York Giants running back Cam Skattebo.
• Chime, the fintech company, teamed up with dessert brand Milk Bar to make a limited-edition sweet treat that comes with rewards for Chime members.
• Bonobos tapped The Boys actor Jack Quaid for its fall campaign.
• Aflac and Ben Affleck partnered up—finally.