When it comes to the age-old question, “Is this chicken or is this fish?” the answer for Becca Millstein’s brand, Fishwife, is clear. (At least, it should be.)

By the numbers: Released in December 2020, the tinned-fish company has since blown up online, in part by changing the look and feel of canned fish. The brand has experienced “100% organic growth,” Millstein told us, now with more than 27,000 Instagram followers and revenue six times higher in December 2021 than in its first month.

We sat down with Millstein to talk about Fishwife’s “unconventional” debut, how its marketing strategy has grown, and its first brand partnership with Fly by Jing, which rolled out March 28.

Fish out of water

Millstein calls the Fishwife launch an “interesting case study,” beginning with the choice to go live in 2020 during the pandemic and also develop the brand’s look before sourcing the fish. But she said it felt natural given her marketing and branding experience.

“The last thing that I was doing in my career as a music-industry professional was basically working with musicians to devise their brand, voice, visuals, etc., so it was a very, very translatable skill to starting a [consumer packaged good] brand,” she said.

Illustrator Danny Miller brought the colorful vision for Fishwife to life, the only part of the operation that Millstein said has remained “locked” since 2020 (supply chains, man).

• “Between the name and the visual of what it was going to be, it just kind of struck a chord with consumers very, very quickly,” she said.
• Part of the brand’s ethos has always been sustainability—it works with small-scale fishers, for instance—but Millstein didn’t want to rely on that for Fishwife’s brand image.
• “I believe people are often primarily driven to buy food products because they think they’re delicious, or innovative, or cool,” she said. “So, we make responsible sourcing decisions—because that’s table stakes these days—but our primary branding strategy is much more about messaging deliciousness, humor, exuberance, artfulness—which has never existed in the seafood category.”

Millstein credits a lot of the initial growth to her co-founder, Caroline Goldfarb, who has since left the company and is better known to her 400,000 Instagram followers as @officialseanpenn. Millstein said Goldfarb’s followers “helped things move really, really fast,” drawing attention from outlets like Vogue and Refinery29. Vice also featured Fishwife in an article on tinned fish being “hot girl” food, after Nylon culture editor Layla Halabian made a similar claim on Twitter.

To date, Millstein said Fishwife has not done any paid marketing, instead relying on partnerships and influencers. But that’s about to change—read the full story here.—KH

Would you believe us if we told you that the subreddits r/cryptocurrency and r/bitcoin were created nine years ago? Since then, Reddit’s become home to more than 500 cryptocurrency communities, with over 335 million views per month.

But that doesn’t mean every crypto advertiser is bullish—or even welcome—on the platform.

“We’re not trying to work with every single new startup that’s out there in the crypto space,” Neal Hubman, Reddit’s head of mid-market and SMB growth for North America, who leads its crypto ads team, told Marketing Brew.

The platform is careful about which companies it allows to advertise:

• Businesses related to decentralized finance and cryptocurrencies—such as crypto wallets, crypto debit and credit cards, crypto exchanges, NFTs, and NFT marketplaces—are allowed to advertise as long as they have “proper licensing and registration from applicable government agencies and regulators,” according to Reddit’s ad policy.
• For example, American crypto exchanges seeking to run US ads need to either be registered with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) or rely on an exemption from FinCEN’s regulations.
• Some crypto-related ads are completely off-limits. Ads for crypto loans, for example, are never allowed on Reddit.

Plus, the crypto set isn’t able to use Reddit’s self-serve advertising service, Hubman told us. Instead, every crypto advertiser must have a dedicated rep to help them run ads—the platform even built a sales team entirely dedicated to them.

Big picture: For the most part, three crypto marketers we spoke with found Reddit’s advertising policies simple to navigate. But some aren’t necessarily spending a lot of money on the platform, relying on organic efforts and other platforms instead. Read what they had to say here.—PB

On Wednesday, Pinterest announced that it would very much like to be excluded from the climate-change-denial narrative.

Under new policies developed with the Climate Disinformation Coalition and the Conscious Advertising Network (CAN), ads and content promoting climate misinformation or conspiracy theories will now be banned from the platform.

The move follows CAN’s open letter from the fall, which asked Pinterest and other Big Tech companies to crack down on climate misinformation and disinformation. Signees included Havas Media, Ben & Jerry’s, and Virgin Media O2.

What’s banned? According to the announcement, Pinterest will now prohibit content that:

• Denies climate change or its impacts are real.
• Denies that it’s man-made and backed by science.
• Goes against solutions backed by “well-established scientific consensus.”
• Misrepresents data via “omission or cherry-picking, in order to erode trust in climate science and experts.”
• Misleads people on public-safety emergencies, like natural disasters.

To implement the new policies, Sarah Bromma, head of policy at Pinterest, told us in an email that Pinterest will use “automated systems and moderator investigations to proactively take action on content that violates our community guidelines and/or advertising guidelines,” in addition to its Trust & Safety team reviewing reported content.

What’s allowed? Oil and gas companies, it seems, so long as they don’t explicitly misinform the public about climate change. According to Bromma, no companies or industries will be banned outright, but “all advertisers and companies must also follow [their] community guidelines, terms, and overall advertising guidelines.”

Put a filter on it: Tech companies have faced recent pressure to do more to curb climate misinformation–and that probably won’t let up anytime soon, given this week’s UN climate report.

• Google announced in October that it would stop running ads on YouTube videos and content promoting false claims about climate change, although research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) found it wasn’t exactly following through.
• Facebook said last year it would start to label some posts about climate change with links to its “Climate Science Information Center.” In February, CCDH said that the tech giant fell short of its promise, only labeling “half of posts promoting articles from the world’s leading publishers of climate denial,” per its analysis.—KH

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Views: How to get more of them on TikTok using tricks like trending sounds.

Relationships: Three tactics to help you better connect with potential clients.

Demos: Check out this breakdown of 114 social media demographics across platforms to up your social strategy.

Creative collabs: We visited SXSW and learned all about how creativity and collaboration are the keys to making truly impactful work. Check out what we learned here.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}

Marketing intelligence platform Pathmatics recently released a report outlining some of the top trends in over-the-top advertising in the US from Q4 last year into this year.

$$$: US advertisers spend an average of more than $1 billion a month on OTT, for an average of about 40 billion monthly impressions, according to the report.

Companies in the financial services sector dominate that spending, representing the largest percentage of spend on Hulu, PlutoTV, Tubi, Peacock, and Paramount+. Roughly one-quarter (26%) of all digital ad spending from financial services brands went toward OTT, and their streaming ads tend to be longer than average.

Hulu is hip: The Hulu app, at least, is the most popular ad-supported streaming service among the under-35 demo, according to Pathmatics. Almost 60% of its mobile downloaders are 35 or younger.

CPG: Meanwhile, in CPG land, Coca-Cola spent more than $15 million on OTT ads in the past four months, surpassing all other food and beverage advertisers.

It’s the final days of registration! On April 12 at 5:45pm ET in NYC, Marketing Brew is convening director-level and above marketers IRL. You’ll get a chance to see some of your favorite Marketing Brew reporters beyond your computer screens AND you’ll get to learn from some of the brightest stars in sports marketing from PepsiCo and Faze Clan. Register here.*

*Note this event has limited capacity.

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

• Why Ruggable is going all in on Bachelor Nation influencers
• Mood Board: How Alaska Airlines put its quirky “Care Coalition” together
• Repurposing radio ads for podcasts might not be a great idea