Marketing Brew

Design trends move pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around every once in a while, you could miss it.

Retro: Over the last few years, brands like Vacation, New Balance, Aimé Leon Dore, Amélie Pichard, and Seth Rogen’s Houseplant have released ads that Ferris Bueller himself could have seen in a magazine. Marked by a simple background and a serif font (typically Garamond), the look is reminiscent of the ads Apple made popular in the 1980s.

So why the resurgence? Serif fonts and simple graphics could be a response to years of sans-serif “startup” fonts and millennial pink. It could also be part of the broader nostalgia marketing trend that’s happening as people cope with the issues of today.

We all need a vacation

Perhaps no brand has leaned into that mantra—or the look and feel of the 80s—more than Vacation, a sunscreen brand started a year ago by Lach Hall, Dakota Green, and Marty Bell. Bell is also the creator of online radio station Poolsuite, which could be the most old-school-looking site on the internet today.

• His design and branding work has made him known as someone who knows “how to make shit go viral.” Since debuting last year, Vacation has experienced 500% YoY growth in monthly DTC revenues, according to the company.
• “I think you have to package things up in a very specific way across copy, imagery, talking points, product—like, everything needs to be exceptional across the whole board for something to be an excellent brand,” Bell told Marketing Brew.
• That means leaving no detail spared. According to Bell, the 80s aesthetic goes beyond Vacation’s ads. Invoices are sent on dot-matrix printer paper, pop-ups on the site look like old coupons, and the company follows only one account on Instagram: Jimmy Buffett.

The goal is to capture the beach-party vibe made popular during the 80s, while also poking a bit of fun. Vacation has tiki-boat charters and a fondue set on its web store, but Bell confirmed those aren’t actually for sale. “We really want to sell a really cool lifeguard seat…so we’re trying to see if we can get a deal with a supplier of those,” he said.

Merch is one aspect of building the brand, Bell said, but sunscreen is the focus. To market the product, he and his team ensured the ads were as authentic as possible by licensing images from Club Med and sourcing 80s pictures from sites like Flickr. One of its top-performing ads is a picture of a woman standing by a pool, overlaid with a serif font. “We love that because it looks so different in the feed and the style of the poster [is] really fun,” he said.

Keep reading here.—KH

Influencers: Love ’em or hate ’em, they’re in your feed, they’ve got their own “airline,” and they’re collectively raking in billions of dollars from brands.

“Influencer marketing is not a fad, and it’s not something that’s coming. It’s here and it’s here to stay,” Logitech Global CMO Najoh Tita-Reid told Marketing Brew’s Phoebe Bain at this month’s CTA event, where she shared everything from how the company goes about compensating influencers to why it chose Lil Nas X to star in its first Super Bowl commercial.

Pay up: Platforms like FYPM and Clara are trying to bring pay transparency (and equity) to a space that traditionally hasn’t had much. At Logitech, Tita-Reid said she tries to view influencers as their own “form of media,” a view which she hopes will lead to fair compensation.

• “I try to pay for the value that [influencers] have, but we all know that this world is a little bit of the wild, wild West,” she said. “I try to think about this world the way I think about media to the best of our ability. We’re trying to get an art down to a science, which is going to take a while.”
• She said compensation for influencers as it stands today is “not fair at all, because everyone is paying everybody just depending on what you want and the timing that you need them, how often you need them…The sliding scale is huge.”

Read more highlights from the discussion here.—MS

Each Tuesday, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.

Tyler Rochwerg is senior manager, digital experience and creative content lead at Neutrogena Studios. He’s spent the past eight years at Johnson & Johnson Consumer Health in various roles. Currently, he leads digital experience for the Neutrogena, Rogaine, and Clean & Clear brands.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? I executive produced a 37-minute documentary called “In the Sun” to help combat rising skin-cancer rates in the United States. Most people don’t realize it, but skin cancer is the most common yet preventable cancer. The film was executive produced with Kerry Washington and placed at 14 film festivals. Best of all, it drove real change, leading to the highest-selling, fastest-growing quarter for the sunscreen category in the last five years.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile? I’m an escape-room aficionado. I’ve done over 50 of them and love the creativity of the puzzles, the immersion of the sets, and the adrenaline rush you get when you first take off your blindfold.

What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least? Hot: Livestreaming and social commerce. I’m bullish that we’ll see this evolve to the same level of engagement it sees in China. Not: Virtual reality. It’s far too early for marketers to be focused here given VR headsets sit at only 4% household penetration in the US. Do it for the press, not for the business results.

What’s one marketing-related podcast, social account, or series you’d recommend? I’m a big fan of The Colin and Samir Show. They do a fantastic job of breaking down the latest news in the creator economy that no one else is talking about. I learn so much from them. It’s a YouTube show and also a podcast.

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

Do it live: Here’s all you need to know about going live on the ’Gram and when you should do it.

Pixel this: Brush up on your understanding of the Facebook pixel and how you can use it to create better campaigns.

Keep it real: TikTok put together this stat-heavy deck that shows how keeping creator content authentic can help metrics like brand perception and favorability.

Let’s address the burnout in the room. Figuring out the root causes of and ways to prevent burnout can feel like a crapshoot. That’s why Asana put together a report to understand how the workplace has changed, what’s working, and what isn’t. Get the deets here.*

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Slowly but steadily, streaming viewership continues to climb in the US. In April 2022, total time spent watching over-the-top video programming exceeded what percentage?

1. 37%
2. 30%
3. 43%
4. 25%

Keep scrolling for the answer.