The things that pass for marketing milestones these days would have seemed almost quaint to an earlier generation of advertising executives, who measured success in gross rating points and Nielsen households. Now the metrics involve family vacations, sleepwear and store openings — all filtered through the accounts of people who did not exist, professionally speaking, a decade ago.
This week brought a small anthology of such efforts. Uno, the card game owned by Mattel, joined with Vrbo, the vacation rental platform that is part of Expedia Group, to send the creator Mei Mei Deuanxayasane and her family on what the industry has taken to calling a "brand trip." The premise — that a card game and a rental house have something to say to each other — is the kind of logic that makes perfect sense once you stop expecting it to make any sense at all.
Domino's, the pizza chain based in Ann Arbor, Mich., hosted what was described as a "creator pajama party," a phrase that would have required some explaining to the account executives of 1985. (One imagines the media buy: "We'll take two influencers in flannel, a large pepperoni, and whatever engagement rate you can promise.")
And Pink, the younger sibling of the Victoria's Secret brand, held an influencer event to promote the opening of a store in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan. The lingerie-adjacent brand has been part of Victoria's Secret since 2002, and the company, which was spun off from L Brands in 2021, has been working to redefine its voice in an era when its earlier one became, shall we say, less welcome.
What connects these efforts is not strategy so much as ritual: the understanding, now widespread, that the most efficient path to a certain kind of consumer runs through someone else's social feed. Whether the pajamas were comfortable was not disclosed.
Original story published in adage.com: "Creator and influencer trends: Uno, Vrbo, Domino's, Pink - Ad Age"