PARTNERSHIPS

A Small Biz Valentine’s Day Story

“A partnership’s a partnership, no matter how small.”—Dr. Seuss, probably.

Williamsburg Pizza’s recent partnership with Prestige Beverage Group wine brand Yes Way Rosé offers about a million hidden lessons for small business partnership marketing. 

• The major vino vendor and Brooklyn-based pizza shop are teaming up to bring New Yorkers a V-Day from home kit this year. 
• The kit—which includes an exclusive heart-shaped pizza, a bottle of Yes Way Rosé Bubbles, and a limited-edition wine tote in Yes Way Rosé’s signature pink hue—is only available on February 14.

So—how’d a niche pizza parlor ink a partnership with a significant lifestyle brand? Marketing Brew chatted with Yes Way Rosé founders Erica Blumenthal and Nikki Huganir to find out. Responses have been edited for brevity. 

How the partnership came about 

YWR: “Ashwin Deshmukh from Williamsburg Pizza reached out to us several years ago as a fan of the brand! We became friends and have done various collaborations. For the Valentine's Day partnership, we proposed the idea to him.” 

The lesson: Creating genuine relationships with bigger brands can’t hurt—and it could lead to future opportunities down the road.

What’s in it for the bigger brand

YWR: “We are a nationally distributed French wine brand, but have always done smaller partnerships with local businesses in addition to those on a national scale. Our roots are in New York, and pizza is our favorite food pairing for rosé, so this is a match made in heaven. It's proved to be a good decision to do it in a manageable way, and we love doing our part in supporting local businesses.” 

The lesson: Partnering with smaller brands can provide a CSR angle to companies with wider reach, especially if the brands have a lot in common already.

On strategy

YWR: “We’ll be amplifying awareness of this special offering through pre-influencer and celebrity seeding to help with promotion. From a national perspective, we will also be cross-promoting on our social platforms in order to encourage consumers at home to sip Yes Way for Valentine’s Day, or even pair with their favorite local pizza.”

The lesson: Access to influencers and a national network are just a few perks of partnering with a larger brand for a small biz. 

BRANDING

Tree Day or V-Day?

These days, you don’t have to be a barefoot tree-hugger to be into environmentalism. Perhaps that’s why global reforestation nonprofit One Tree Planted took an edgy approach to its Valentine’s Day campaign.

• One Tree Planted wants you to give the gift of ~wood~ for V-Day—for a small fee, it’ll plant a tree in your loved one’s name.
• Other than the wood innuendos, the campaign’s assets include slogans like “Stop trunk texting your crush,” bold lettering, and Pantone’s color of the year, illuminating yellow, as an accent color.  

Big picture: It makes sense that even a brand explicitly advertising nature like One Tree Planted is straying away from greenwashing in favor of DTC-style branding. The fresher take is growing in popularity among sustainable brands looking to target Gen Z in particular, such as ThredUp and Native.

Nobody’s perfect: While the hip branding edge should appeal to Gen Z, the sexual innuendos might not. “Sex doesn’t sell to [the Gen Z audience]. They are about female empowerment,” Lerer Hippeau principal Caitlin Strandberg recently told WWD. 

SPONSORED BY STACKADAPT

CTV Can Be the MVP of Your Next Campaign

Connected TV (or CTV) advertising is a key channel for digital marketing campaigns these days. And StackAdapt did you the favor of spinning up a guide answering all your questions about this growing part of the glorious ad ecosystem. 

(In case you’re afraid to ask: CTV = a TV set that offers content through an internet connection.) 

As StackAdapt’s guide explains, CTV is programmatically transacted, so it’s easy-peasy to 1) launch your campaign 2) access real-time data and 3) make quick adjustments. 

We know what you’re thinking. That’s all well and good, Marketing Brew, but what metrics does CTV offer? How about impressions served, CPM, video views completed, CPCV, video completion rate, and view-through conversions—all available in real time. 

With CTV, you get the targeting and measurement of digital ads, but in the living room instead of the office. Learn how in StackAdapt’s guide here. 

HOLIDAYS

Your Target Audience is Eating Discount Candy from Home

Good news for anti-Valentine’s Day marketers: Your target consumer is unlikely to go on a cheesy trip with their significant other this year, or gather with her favorite girlfriends at a bar. 

For those still trying to figure out how to adapt their messaging for these hibernating times, read on.

Covid-19: 46% of consumers will pretend not to care about Valentine’s Day from home this year, and 53% of V-Day enthusiasts plan to buy their gifts online, per Numerator survey data cited by Ad Age. 

Twitter: With use of the ‍‍ emoji up 131% on Twitter this week, Twitter is publicizing its Mute feature, encouraging users to remove Valentine’s Day-related words, phrases, emoji or hashtags such as “#bae,” “#relationshipgoals,” “” and other terms of endearment. So instead of heart emoji, maybe try something a little more ironic. 

Tight budgets: Between pandemic-era job losses and general economic hardship, consumers are going with the discount box of chocolate strawberries this year—they’re expected to spend 16% less on the holiday ($164.76, on average) than they did last year, based on National Retail Federation info cited in Ad Age. 

WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• R/GA tapped former global communications leader at Publicis Sapient and formerly incarcerated justice reform activist Ashish Prashar as its new global CMO. 
• Jeep pulled its Springsteen “The Middle” Super Bowl ad from YouTube after The Boss’s recent DUI arrest.
• Facebook could build an audio chat product similar to Clubhouse.
• TikTok is safe in the US, as the Biden administration will not force its sell-off. 

SPONSORED BY ADOBE

Prove your worth, and that you’re worth it. Marketing attribution is super important to secure your team’s rep as cash cows, and no one makes it easier than Marketo to prove your marketing spend is growing the all-important bottom line. They wrote up an e-book with all their proven strategies for proving your team’s worth. Soak up Marketo’s knowledge here.

FRENCH PRESS

Marketing tips to make you fancy.

Catching flights: Get ready to learn all about airplane advertising—enough said. 

Catching feelings: From keyword trends to product drops, here are 12 V-Day marketing tips with data to back them up. 

Batching content: If you’ve never heard of batching content for social before—or if you just want to get better at it—look no further than this piece.

Productivity: Why has getting work done gotten so dang hard? For instance, 87% of knowledge workers are working late now that they're WFH. Discover all the stats in Asana’s Anatomy of Work Index report.*

*This is sponsored advertising content

METRICS & MEDIA

Stat: Super Bowl LV saw the lowest viewership of any Big Game since 2006, falling 15% from 2020, per Adweek.

Quote: “Comms and marketing has traditionally been focused externally. Going forward, it must start inside and work its way out—meaning—the story gets built first internally with employees. Only then can the narrative take shape externally.”—Katie Dreke, strategy and innovation consultant and former Nike executive.

Listen: In honor of Ashish Prashar’s appointment as R/GA CMO, listen to his Business Casual podcast episode in which he talks with Morning Brew’s Kinsey Grant about all things prison-industrial reform. 

ICYMI

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• A conversation with 600 & Rising’s Nathan Young about Black Super Bowl ad talent
• Can marketers get the Super Bowl social bump without buying a TV spot?
• The top ten celebrity ad appearances that drove the most online searches