The Key to Social Media Buzz May Lie in Cookies, Kardashians and Programmatic Billboards
Crumbl goes new school and very old school
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It’s the classic Madison Avenue playbook.
Tap the Kardashian-Jenner Family, have them weigh in on a special menu of cookies, maximize your presence on TikTok, while leaning on a programmatic platform that specializes in digital billboards - and then hope that organic selfies in Times Square ensue.
Ok so maybe not. But a recent campaign from the bakery chain Crumbl is an example of disparate factions within the ad world colliding - as the brand looked to blend together the power of influencers with previously highly analog media like out-of-home - to generate higher levels of exposure that go beyond paid media, along with trackable outcomes.
It’s also the kind of multi-pronged strategy that many traditional marketers may struggle to replicate, given their size and siloed nature.
But it may be just where the industry is headed - and thus, advantage upstarts.
“A foundation of our business is because of influencers, but we’ve never paid them,” said Nicole Mackelprang, Director of Paid Media, Crumbl. It helps that people love posting about cookies. “Now we are kind of diving into it. A lot of our collaborations with partners entail special desserts.” Like Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts cookies.
In this particular case, it was the Kardashians (are they influencers? Creators? Celebrities?), including Khloé’s Cookies & Cream Skillet Cookie. You might think a few social mentions from that famed family would be all a brand like Crumbl needs - but per Mackelprang the idea was to treat this collab as a “tentpole” event back in April by pushing out a series of strategically placed digital out-of-home ads in New York and Los Angeles, including Times Square.
“We wanted to make a big splash,” Mackelprang said. “I know the importance of these bigger moments. This one we didn’t tell [leadership about it] about until it came to fruition.”
Mackelprang and her team tapped Place Exchange, which essentially operates a supply side platform for digital out-of-home inventory across the US, to put the ads in highly-trafficked and ideally Crumbl-adjacent locales.
“This was about really merging the physical and digital world together,” said Tara Cancellieri, Group Programmatic Sales Director, Place Exchange. “For us, we’ve watched CTV, display, etc. all these other sectors have their own SSPs. This is the final piece [to bring OOH into that world], including unifying that workflow. That’s the core of that vision.”
Even as much of legacy media has struggled mightily in recent years, out of home has enjoyed healthy growth, in part because it’s become more dynamic and programmatic. As a result, more and more brands are looking to turn old school billboards into ‘interactive’ vehicles by driving people to QR codes and social media platforms.
Still, the team behind the Crumbl effort wasn’t sure that people would start posting images of the campaign across TikTok and Instagram.
Overall, Place Exchange delivered 6 million billboard impressions, while consumers produced another 2.7 million impressions across TikTok, Instagram, and X.
“You can’t always engineer that,” she said. But it helped that Crumbl employed bright, colorful creative, and kept swapping out the cookies featured in the ads. That, and the power of the Kardashian-Jenner following.
So, what’s the lesson here, other than, get a big creator to promote your brand, and have excellent creative? Well, increasingly, it seems that the best way to spark earned media from a creator/brand tie up may be through driving more awareness through traditional channels. Yet that kind of OOH-meets-creators-meets-programmatic integration is yet another example of how siloing at big brands and agencies make these sorts of executions challenging.
How many different departments (the social team, the programmatic team, the out-of-home specialists, the creative leads, the analytics folks) would have to be pulled together to get something like this off the ground at a holding company, for example?
“We try to embrace collaboration,” said Mackelprang. “We don’t have a lot of red tape. There’s only four of us, so we can capitalize on these kinds of things.”
“It’s less about channels versus people. So we start from a place of, ‘let’s think about our audience vs. budgets.’”
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