Tree Hut CMO Luis Garcia featured their creator community in their Super Bowl ad, not traditional celebrities. For a brand built on social media, these creators are the real stars to their audience. This approach maintains authenticity, energizes the core community, and generates powerful organic amplification.

For grocers, the primary value of in-store media isn't just selling ads to brands. It's a strategic lever for inventory management. By using targeted digital messages to accelerate the sale of slow-moving products, grocers can improve inventory turnover, which in turn strengthens their negotiating position with CPG suppliers.

Instead of using retail to build awareness, Manscaped waited until they had massive marketing spend. This ensured customers would specifically seek them out in stores, guaranteeing high sell-through for partners like Target and de-risking the move from D2C to physical retail.

To drive sell-through for a new CPG product in retail, run hyper-local video ads featuring the founders telling their story. Directly address shoppers in a small (e.g., 5-mile) radius of each specific store, calling out the city by name. This personal, targeted approach creates an emotional connection and drives immediate foot traffic.

Against typical advice, Dad Gang spent its initial ad budget boosting Instagram posts for "profile visits," not website clicks. This built a large, engaged community that was ready to buy when products dropped, proving the value of prioritizing audience growth over immediate sales for community-driven brands.

Malk's Erewhon smoothie partnership is a dual-purpose initiative. It generates direct revenue from product sales within Erewhon stores, providing a tangible ROI floor. This sales component de-risks the harder-to-measure brand awareness benefit from social media fame, making "gut feel" marketing decisions easier to justify and assess.

Ramp abandoned using paid social ads for broad ABM brand awareness campaigns, finding them ineffective and too easily diluted into generic demand gen. Their focus has shifted to higher-impact in-person and physical marketing tactics for engaging target accounts in a saturated digital landscape.

For CPG brands, a physical retail presence, even with lower margins, should be viewed as a customer acquisition strategy. It provides crucial visibility and trial, driving customers to your higher-margin direct-to-consumer website for subsequent purchases and retention.

For new food brands with a great product, the highest ROI comes from getting people to taste it. Self-funded companies can leverage their longer timeline to build a loyal customer base through a robust sampling program, delaying expensive and less effective paid media buys.