SOCIAL & INFLUENCERS

Morning Brew, Inc., Photos: @chipotle/TikTok

This story is the latest in a series exploring how brands craft standout social media strategies. If you’d like to chat about how your brand is approaching social, Katie Hicks wants to hear about it. Reach out to her at [hidden].

Chipotle prides itself on fresh ingredients—and even fresher social insights.

The fast-casual Tex-Mex chain has more than 6 million followers across TikTok, Instagram, and X, and it keeps those followers engaged through social listening, engaging with UGC, and remaining “chronically online,” Kirby Ann Connell, senior director of social and influencer at Chipotle, told us.

“Our team is constantly in the weeds,” she said. “And then [we look] for ways to shine a light on those really unique fan behaviors and fan insights that we uncover to ultimately drive that community, drive that viral content, and even beyond, looking for ways to drive culture at large through collabs and other cool moments that we curate.”

Behind the scenes, Chipotle’s in-house social team meets daily to discuss the posts the brand has been tagged in, both good and bad. The team works with the social agency Day One and uses the insights it finds to address consumer pain points, be the first to a trend, and come up with larger campaign ideas, Connell said.

Read more from our conversation with Connell, where she shared how Chipotle has built a social presence that’s meant to feel more like “a fan account than brand account.”—KH

      

Sponsored By PwC

Marketers are well aware of sports forecasting’s growing influence. Just look at any billboard in your immediate radius.

But the question of how big an edge AI can give a sports team is met with another question: How much of this could constitute a flag on the play?

Sports games have long been data-driven, with stats fostering decisions both on and off the field. But with such rich datasets, what is the potential for AI models to drive predictive accuracy further into the future, and how could this change sports as we know them—and marketing as it pertains to it?

On this episode of The Intelligence Shift, host Dan Priest speaks with the CEO of Recentive Analytics about how AI can transform sports forecasting. From stadium buildouts to predicting the next talent, a lot can happen when AI enters the field.

Listen in, marketers.

SPORTS MARKETING

SharkNinja

SharkNinja is well known for an array of different products, depending on who you ask. Home cooks (and people with protein goals) covet the product design company’s Ninja Creami. Its blow-dry brushes can be a go-to for anyone interested in styling their hair. And pet owners are likely familiar with its robot vacuums.

But if none of that rings a bell, perhaps the name APXGP sounds familiar. It’s the fictional Formula 1 team that Brad Pitt’s character drives for in F1: The Movie, for which SharkNinja served as an on-screen sponsor.

A year after the film’s release, SharkNinja is taking that fictional deal to the real-life F1 grid by becoming an official partner of McLaren Racing spanning F1, F1 Academy, IndyCar, and the World Endurance Championship.

The five-year partnership is rooted in long-term storytelling efforts, Laura Dyer, SharkNinja’s SVP of global marketing, told Marketing Brew. It’s representative of a strategy that’s become fairly popular among F1 sponsors—including several of McLaren’s—given the difficulty of achieving success in the sport and its reputation for big personalities.

“A lot of these partnerships, in the olden days, were more about hospitality and corporate hospitality,” Dyer said. “That’s not what we’re in this for. We’re in this to ignite our fans and make some really cool content that people are going to be excited about.”

For more about the partnership and on SharkNinja’s entertainment-led partnership strategy, continue reading here.—AM

      

Sponsored By Audacy

Did you hear that? That’s the power of podcasting perking your ears, marketers. Audacy's new State of Audio report explores the trust gap between podcast hosts and social media influencers, how brands are moving beyond the 60-second spot into full creator ecosystems, and the ROI that’s making CMOs rethink their media mix entirely.

BRAND STRATEGY

Beyond Yoga

For Beyond Yoga, the future of activewear retail involves a little less scrolling and a little more “touch grass,” if you ask CMO Katie Babineau.

The activewear brand, which Levi Strauss & Co acquired for ~$400 million in 2021, recently opened a 2,300-square-foot pop-up at 108 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, its most significant retail presence in New York City to date. The location, which will remain open through early January, features much of the brand’s assortment alongside NYC-exclusive merchandise and a slate of fitness and community programming.

Per Babineau, the pop-up is as much an experiment in physical retail as it is another store. In fact, a previous weeklong Flatiron pop-up gave the brand an early idea of New York’s potential, attracting both existing customers and shoppers discovering Beyond Yoga for the first time, she told Retail Brew.

“We knew, based on some of that success that we had seen a couple years ago, that we continue to see strong customer love and engagement in this market, and we wanted to maximize this opportunity that we had to have more of a retail presence longer term,” she said.

This time, Beyond Yoga is sticking around for several months to test what happens when shopping and community programming are happening under the same roof. “We’ll be in this location now through the end of the year to really understand, ‘OK, what could a longer term retail experience mixed with community activation studio space really look like?’” Babineau said.

Whether the experiment ultimately leads to a permanent New York store remains to be seen.

“We’ve got a lot to learn, and obviously there needs to be the opportunity there,” she said. “We definitely want to be in New York City. We want to do it right. We want to be able to have a more permanent home, so when the time comes, we’ll hopefully be ready.”

For more on how Beyond Yoga is looking to engage with consumers at the space, continue reading on Retail Brew.—JS

      

Sponsored By Eney

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IN AND OUT

Executive moves across the industry.

• Arby’s has a new CMO: Jenna Bromberg, previously CMO at Papa Johns.
• Netflix Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria is exiting the company after nearly 10 years, and will be replaced by Peter Rice, a former Disney and Fox exec.
• And the streamer’s film VP, Doug Belgrad, is also exiting the company as part of a broader round of layoffs affecting 6% of Netflix staff.
• Hormel Foods hired Holly LaVallie as VP of marketing excellence.