SOCIAL & INFLUENCERS

Cakes Body

When you build your brand’s marketing around the experience of building the brand itself, where do you go once the construction’s complete?

Founder-led marketing has captivated audiences on social media, particularly on short-form platforms, where personal business stories can drive engagement. According to research from Evolve Media Agency, founder-led content can result in engagement rates 2x–4x higher than other brand content; compared to UGC, it can also lead to increased brand trust and conversion, per an analysis from Conbersa, an agentic hardware infrastructure for social media.

Perhaps no company knows this better than Cakes Body, an undergarment brand started in 2022 by twin sisters and co-founders Taylor Capuano and Casey Sarai.

The brand, which primarily sells nonadhesive nipple covers but has branched into adhesive tapes and training bras, initially had no budge for marketing, so Capuano became the face of the brand on social media.

It’s been about four years since Cakes entered the scene, and the company now has seen $100 million in gross revenue per year for the last two years and is in the top 1% of sellers on TikTok Shop, per Capuano and the company’s internal data.

So what now? Letting the audience into the day-to-day of building a company is part of Cakes’s brand DNA, but the brand is now squarely beyond the scrappy start-up phase—and its founders have storytelling ambitions beyond the average TikTok user’s attention span.

“The thesis is people follow people, not brands,” Capuano said. “Top-of-funnel growth, that’s all about awareness, and that’s all about connecting with people. You don’t need a Super Bowl ad or a big billboard campaign necessarily to do that. I actually think you can do that in a more effective way if it’s through authentic content.”

Continue reading here.—JN

      

Sponsored By Frontify

AI can help brands move faster. But speed isn’t the hard part anymore—control is.

Scaling with AI doesn’t mean you have to lower your standards to “good enough.” Just look at some of the world’s leading brands that have figured out how to make scale and craft go hand-in-hand.

At Frontify’s There’s no “almost on-brand” event in NYC on Oct. 6, they bring together leaders from Google DeepMind, MANN+HUMMEL, and Peloton to share what they’ve learned about using AI to build brands at scale.

Save your seat now for practical lessons, real-world approaches, and tons of insights on what’s actually working when it comes to integrating AI into your brand workflows.

Join them in person on Oct. 6 or catch the webcast of the live event on Oct. 8.

BRAND STRATEGY

Amelia Kinsinger

The information in this article is not legal advice—do we still have to say that if we’re just quoting lawyers?

At a Climate Week NYC event hosted by law firm Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz, advertising lawyers discussed the contradictory, ever-changing legal landscape of environmental marketing. Though the Federal Trade Commission’s Green Guides for environmental advertising still stand, they haven’t been updated since 2012, making them outdated. Plus, they’re being outpaced by state laws and case law across the country.

Without clear guidance on what eco-related claims can be made when advertising in specific states, it can be confusing for marketers to know if they’re able to use terms like “recyclable,” “sustainable,” or even “environmentally friendly” without serious consequences.

La Toya Sutton, the director of legal for business and product marketing at the Clorox Company, said at the event that she always convinces her colleagues to not use the word “sustainable” when marketing products. That’s because multiple instances of case law and court challenges to advertisements that employ the term show that it’s “just going to get you into trouble.”

“I often just have to interrogate my marketers to be like, ‘Well, what do you mean by that? What are you trying to say? What benefit is there here? What are you trying to tell consumers?’” she said. “Then just make that claim. You don’t need to dumb it down—consumers are getting more and more sophisticated.”

Read more here.—TC

      

Sponsored By Elevate from monday.com

AI is already changing how you work. Elevate can help you figure out what to do about it. Connect with marketing leaders, build skills in sessions designed for your role, and find your people in peer roundtables and small-group meetups. Oct. 28–29 at the Javits Center in NYC. Get 30% off general admission tickets with code MarketingBrew30.

COWORKING

Daale Carter

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

Daale Carter is chief client experience officer of BBDO Worldwide. She was previously president of BBDO Chicago.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in marketing? I help brands understand what they need to do to help their business grow. This can be through helping them better understand the people they need to reach, it can be giving them perspectives outside of their industry and what they know to help them think more broadly. I also help our teams do a better job of being strategic partners to our clients.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? EA Sports, across the board. They were thinking about influencer marketing and creators two decades before anyone else was—at that point it was called grassroots marketing—and as a result they’ve been able to claim and retain their place in culture despite how much has changed in the gaming industry.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: I was going to be a professional dancer before I became a lawyer.

Continue reading here.

      

Sponsored By Profound

What AI still gets wrong. AI gave marketers more tools and more work. The Profound Blueprint covers why AI still struggles with the work marketers actually need help with and what an AI marketer has to know about your business to be useful. See it live tomorrow. Save your seat.

french press

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

In demand: Google rolled out some updates to its Demand Gen ad suite.

Not getting younger: Millennial consumer behavior that could help inform social strategy.

Relationship status: What marketers need to know about social CRM, aka customer relationship management.

^{*A message from our sponsor.}

Jobs

Real jobs, shared through real communities. CollabWORK brings opportunities directly to Marketing Brew readers—no mass postings, no clutter, just roles worth seeing. Click here to view the full job board.

JOINING FORCES

Mergers and acquisitions, company partnerships, and more.

• Peloton tapped Miley Cyrus to be its latest celebrity partner.
• Michelob Ultra was named as the first US beer partner of the NHL since the 2021-22 season.
• Adidas is replacing Under Armour as the official uniform and performance apparel partner of Unrivaled.
• Adidas also added WNBA Rookie of the Year Olivia Miles to its athlete roster.
• Sun Cruiser inked a multiyear deal with MetLife Stadium, including the New York Jets and New York Giants.
• Abercrombie & Fitch expanded its partnership with the Dallas Cowboys, adding work with the team’s iconic cheerleaders to the agreement.
• Abercrombie’s YPB brand teamed up with Barry’s for a new line of activewear.
• USA Fencing signed a deal with media and e-commerce company Togethxr through LA28.
• Graza and Athletic Brewing are working together on an EVOO-infused pilsner.
• Beats partnered with Kendall Jenner for its latest campaign.