July brought a World Cup, a Tour de France, and a bunch of brand content that made me stop scrolling. Here's what made the swipe file.

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Partiful is already a cultural object. The app, the aesthetic, the whole thing. It would be easy to coast on the product just being really damn helpful, but instead, their video team is putting in the reps. This July, they launched a hiring campaign with in office videos highlighting company culture. My favorite was the one featuring the quality control team, seen going to tons of creative events via the app and coming to the office the next morning hungover and looking a mess.

I’m dying to know how many applications they got from post-grads hoping to keep up their favorite hobby in college.

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Collin and Samir have made careers explaining how YouTube works, from YouTube. So when Lexus cast them in an ad on YouTube, the logic practically finishes its own sentence. Their audience already lives there. Lexus doesn't have to borrow attention from somewhere else. They just show up where the viewers already are, with faces the viewers already trust. I keep thinking about this deal. It's one of the cleanest creator partnerships I've seen because the whole thing is airtight. If you know who they are, it clicks. If you don't, it still works as an ad. That's hard to pull off.

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Every year during the Tour de France, fans paint penises on the road for the cyclists to ride over. Sorry you had to read the word penis in this blog post, but it's a real tradition and this has to do with a real marketing campaign. Škoda, the official car sponsor, saw a way to turn it into more attention for the women’s race (and their logo placements along the course). Rather than having the Tour de France team erase the graffiti like they normally do, they worked with AMV BBDO and illustrators Celine Dormeau and Erin Anike to transform them into giant eye illustrations as argument for parity: #watchthefemmes.

The campaign insight comes from paying close attention to a specific culture and did the brand two favors: more people DID watch the femmes because of the campaign, so their advertising partnership got more eyes on it, and the campaign itself earned them brand affinity from women’s cycling fans.

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We worked with Meg Baniewicz and the Morning Brew team on a episode about if FIFA did a good job or not n and then we invited 100 people to watch it with us after the France v. Sweeden match screening at our office in Chinatown. It was also the hard launch of their team officially becoming Air customers. The episode features some of their Air workflows, so if you’re nosy and love their work, take a look.

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Our social media strategist, Gutes, got invited to go on a Kemps brand trip to Wisconsin hosted by Midwest Holiday to experience the perfect midwest summer. Imagine having the opportunity to convert a hoard of oatmilk matcha latte loving lower east siders with likeminded followers into whole milk evangelists? Ballerina Farms is bright green just thinking about it.

Check out the brand trip gallery →

Want more inspo and creative ephemera? There's more campaigns we watched in our monthly moodboard.

The thing all five of these campaigns have in common: none of them tried to reach everyone. Partiful made a hiring video for one very specific future employee and the internet did the rest. Kemps partnered with the neighborhood least likely to love dairy. Škoda noticed something every other sponsor was quietly erasing from the course.

The creative work that travels right now almost always starts with the same move: go narrow. Find the most specific version of your audience and make something undeniably for them.

See you next month,

Lou

Content + Campaign Manager, Air

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