SOCIAL & INFLUENCERS

Walmart

The phrase “Get that bag” is not usually a reference to the plastic vessel that holds a rotisserie chicken. But sometimes it is.

In the last year, Walmart’s marketing team discovered through social listening that its rotisserie chicken had amassed a fandom, with 15,000 organic social mentions, Kim Tunick, group director and head of brand experiences and partnerships at Walmart, told us. It included posts of people holding the bag as a purse—which led the brand’s social team to go to the merchandising side of the house with a proposition.

“Our teams came together and kind of had a silly moment that was really just a break in an average day,” Tunick told us. “[We] said, ‘People talk about how the rotisserie chicken that they love comes in this bag, and that they joke that it’s their purse, and they bring it around, and they just eat it straight from the bag. What if we made one?’”

The resulting product, a fabric purse shaped and printed to look like it contains a chicken, was priced at $5.97, the same as an actual rotisserie chicken at the retailer, to help make it “sticky and memorable,” Tunick said; it sold out in 90 minutes online on September 1. According to Tunick, people were lined up at the brand’s campus store before 7am on the day of the drop to get their hands on the limited-edition bag.

The rotisserie-themed merch marked a new strategy for the retailer that so far, seems to have paid off.

“We certainly seem to take ourselves quite seriously when it comes to our traditional marketing,” Tunick said. “But hopefully you can see that we don’t believe we always need to be so serious.”

For more on the story behind the purse and how Walmart looked to encourage UGC around the drop, continue reading here.—KH

      

Sponsored By SurveyMonkey

AI can generate an answer to any question, but it can’t tell you what people actually think—that still requires the human touch. AI synthesis needs real insights to pull from, not just generated content. That’s where SurveyMonkey comes in.

SurveyMonkey’s new LaunchPad is a suite of ready-to-run, automated market research solutions designed with marketing and product teams in mind. Say goodbye to one-off surveys: With SurveyMonkey, you can launch sustained campaigns with built-in KPI trackers.

The magic is in the balance between automation and human decision-making. With SurveyMonkey, AI handles the manual tasks like drafting, analysis, and extraction. Then, humans can focus on the big decisions.

Check it out.

AI

Cheng Xin/Getty Images

There are plenty of splashy marketing product launches to sift through timed to Advertising Week. This year, OpenAI, which is in the midst of building out ChatGPT’s advertising business, was responsible for some of them.

The company, which first began testing ads in the US in February, is rolling out a new visual ad format, new measurement tools, and new brand suitability capabilities for ChatGPT Ads. We’ve summed up some of the details below:

📷 Picture this: The visual ad format will allow advertisers to insert images that show product inspiration or illustrate how it’s used. It will initially be tested when users generate images through ChatGPT’s Free and Go plans, although visual ads will be labeled and remain distinct from the images being generated, the company said.

📐 Measure up: Whatever ad format advertisers leverage in ChatGPT, OpenAI’s measurement offerings are designed to allow advertisers to gauge conversions and click attribution. The company is also testing the ability to measure ChatGPT ads’ influence on brand resonance. OpenAI is also working on incrementality measurement tools for ChatGPT ads, but these are still in early stages, the company said.

📋 Belongs here: OpenAI is also in the early stages of building out brand suitability measurement pilots. In the meantime, it’s making Negative Phrases, a tool that prevents ads from showing up in response to user queries with words or terms brands deem inappropriate, more widely available.

For more on the announcements and the involved ad-tech platforms, read more here.—JS

      

Sponsored By Hightouch

Prompting more powerful paths. Most prompting advice usually ends at “be specific.” But communicating with AI models and platforms well enough to embed them into your creative strategy can be key to maintaining brand quality. Join Hightouch’s discussion with the chief digital officer at Salt & Stone and get five tips for expert LLM prompting with ready-to-run prompts.

COWORKING

Satoru Wakeshima

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

Satoru Wakeshima is a partner at the brand strategy and design agency CBX. He was previously EVP, general manager at Sterling Brands.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? I’ve had the good fortune of working on some of the world’s most-loved brands, so it’s hard to pick just one. When we did a brand restage of M&M’s, I was really proud of not only the work but also the process we went through to get to the answer. Brands like M&M’s have equity that needs to be handled carefully and responsibly, but also creatively. It’s not easy to make something new for a brand that everyone knows so well. But we did, and it worked.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign has done a wonderful job making people feel human and connected. They did an amazing ad where a forensic artist drew women based on their descriptions of themselves and then drew those same individuals based on how others described them. The difference in how we see ourselves versus how others perceive us was astounding. It was moving, honest, and completely supported their brand strategy. Beautifully done.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: I write songs constantly. Everything from punk rock, rock, indie, blues, country, to utter nonsense. I don’t do it because I have aspirations of being famous for it. I do it to create. LinkedIn is so formal and everyone is on their best behavior to make a good impression to the professional community, but it’s not a reflection of who people really are as humans.

For more from our interview with Wakeshima, keep reading here.

      

From Express Checkout

CPG newsflash. Get curated CPG industry news, insider perspectives, trend analysis, and more in Express Checkout, the newest member of Morning Brew Inc. Founders Nate Rosen and Jenna Movsowitz cover the why and how behind what we’re buying next in their twice-weekly newsletter.

Unpack the stories behind your stuff when you subscribe here.

french press

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

Picture this: Nearly a dozen AI image generators to test.

Persona grata: How to create and build social media personas to help define target audiences.

Principles office: Tips for B2B campaigns on LinkedIn.

^{*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.

• Starbucks has reportedly explored an acquisition of Chipotle, according to the Financial Times.
• Degree was named the official deodorant partner of the NHL.
• And Athletic Brewing became the league’s first non-alcoholic beer partner.
• Nespresso inked a deal with fitness app Strava ahead of the New York City Marathon.
• Chemistry, an agency based in Atlanta, acquired the Boston-based creative and design agency Colossus.