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Body Scrub, Concealer and Shoe Trinkets Star in Brands’ ‘Microdramas’
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Good morning. Today, brands hope brevity is also the soul of sales.
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Maybelline’s ‘Maybe This Christmas’ microdrama included a pivotal role for its Instant Eraser Concealer. Maybelline
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Crocs tried its hand last month with a five-episode series called “Charmed to Meet You” on ReelShort, the top U.S. app for microdramas. The shoe brand’s signature Jibbitz charms become a key plot device when the protagonist, a painfully single young professional named Lex, places them on her handsome neighbor’s Crocs to show her interest.
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I asked Patrick what’s going on here, starting with why this idea is any different than Quibi.
Patrick: Past attempts at short-form entertainment missed the fact that viewers aren’t looking for highfalutin material in that format.
Every episode of a microdrama series needs an “OMG did they seriously just do that” moment to keep people plugged in, and these brands and platforms then share the craziest clips all over social media to push viewers back to the site or app.
What do marketers hope to get out of their microdramas?
Patrick: Maybelline USA President Yasmin Dastmalchi told me that their goal is to be the first mover, or the first beauty brand in what has become a hot space for their target audience. So a lot of this is brand halo and experimentation, especially because the price of entry is low enough that marketers can play around and see what works.
Sales is a concern, though, and Dentsu said they push brands to monetize by letting viewers unlock more episodes when they buy stuff. So maybe that’s the future.
You sampled a lot of these over-the-top mini soaps as part of your reporting. What’s your favorite?
Patrick: It’s worth taking two and a half minutes to watch the Maybelline series. Ryan Reynolds’ Maximum Effort handled production, and the show sticks to that firm’s “look how hard we’re winking at you” style.
Our star is a single woman who’s unlucky in love and hiding a secret that even Maybelline’s Eraser can’t conceal. I don’t want to spoil it, so I’ll just say it involves lawn ornaments and it was so intentionally dumb that I had to laugh. The top YouTube comment on the finale reads, “I had to know, their marketing worked,” which speaks for itself.
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang brought out an animatronic Olaf, the snowman from ‘Frozen,’ during the company's annual GTC developers conference. Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images
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Nvidia’s recently named (and first) CMO has some tough historical comps to beat, if you want to take a riff by Jensen Huang this week literally.
The chip-maker’s CEO used its annual GTC conference to promote both the company’s commanding place in the AI industry and advances in the technology’s application, for example interacting with Disney’s new robotic version of Olaf from “Frozen.” (Olaf didn’t have great chat, but he was really there to spotlight physical AI.)
Huang also reached back, however, to highlight an Nvidia graphics processing unit that debuted in 1999 and went on to become a key part of home gaming rigs running titles like “Quake III Arena,” “Half-Life 2” and “Doom 3.”
“GeForce is Nvidia’s greatest marketing campaign,” Huang said:
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We attract future customers starting long before you could afford to pay for it yourself. Your parents paid.... Your parents paid for you to be Nvidia customers. And every single year, they paid up year after year after year until someday you became an amazing computer scientist and became a proper customer, a proper developer. But this is, this is the house that GeForce made.
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That’s the kind of long game not many actual marketers get to play—but maybe it can serve as inspiration.
More: Nvidia’s next act will be its biggest—and toughest. [WSJ]
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“We are dealing with enough at the moment. It is a tough time for restaurants. We don’t want to have to ask people if they are allergic to molluscs when they order a gin.”
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— A restaurant manager on Margot Robbie’s gin brand Papa Salt, which is dropping oyster shells from its distillation process after getting rejected by London bars and restaurants over allergen concerns
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$390
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Price of a two-ounce jar of Crème de la Mer face cream,
which Estée Lauder’s La Mer makes through a process that includes pumping ocean sounds into giant kettles of kelp. How much of the product’s success is science and how much is manufactured mystique is open to debate.
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The community where marketing leaders drop the corporate speak and share what’s actually happening. The WSJ CMO Council unites leaders from the world’s most influential brands including Adobe, Audi, Google, IBM, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, Meta, Taco Bell, P&G and Verizon.
Tap into the connections and WSJ intelligence that move careers forward and separate the prepared from the scrambling.
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Cinnabon last week announced ‘Bachelorette’-themed packaging and sodas inspired by ‘The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.’ Cinnabon
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Cinnabon abruptly ended its just-announced marketing collaboration with “The Bachelorette” and “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” citing “recent developments and allegations” surrounding lead Taylor Frankie Paul. [People]
Unilever is considering a possible separation of its food brands to focus on its beauty, wellness and personal care products. [Bloomberg]
Publicis Groupe has stopped recommending the Trade Desk to its clients after an audit. [Ad Age]
It’s NIL marketing season for brands as March Madness arrives. [Modern Retail]
How Jeffrey Epstein tried to cleanse his online reputation with “search engine optimization experts, self-described hackers and crews of content writers.” [NYT]
Applebee’s this year for the first time will spend more of its marketing budget on digital and social media than on television. [Nation’s Restaurant News]
The new “sonic logo” for the World Wildlife Fund features the voice of singer-songwriter Ellie Goulding. [Creative Bloq]
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