☕ Kind of a big dill
The secret brine behind Grillo’s online success.
Marketing Brew <[email protected]>
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Morning Brew promotes Grillo's Pickles as a successful example of a brand building a strong online presence through a humanistic approach to social media marketing. The brand has gained nearly 2 million followers across TikTok and Instagram with its irreverent and relatable content. Morning Brew shares Grillo's story of pivoting to a video-focused social strategy.
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532 words · about 2 min to read
September 15, 2026
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Sponsor Logo: StackAdapt
It’s Tuesday. With the US Open having come to a close and New York Fashion Week wrapping up this week, marketers might finally soon hear back from their influencer partners.
In today’s edition:
Spear you go 🥒
The right outcomes 🎟️
—Katie Hicks, Jasmine Sheena
SOCIAL & INFLUENCERS
Brine time
Various screenshots from Grillo's Pickles on TikTok doing pickle giveaways
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
That’s the ticket
a pile of colorful tickets
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.
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