Collaborations as an economic multiplier

As marketers and agencies, we’re constantly vying for consumers’ attention. It’s easy to get so wrapped up in competing with the category set, that you forget that every brand, app, TV show, actor, athlete, influencer and beyond are constantly vying for consumers’ attention too. Especially in this chronically online era, where the average adult scrolls the equivalent of three marathons a year on their phone (Source: Saucony/HarrisX; https://www.londondaily.news/the-average-adult-scrolls-the-equivalent-of-three-marathons-a-year-on-their-phone/), constantly being targeted and intercepted on their journey. With so much content at everyone’s fingertips, each with its own media budget, it’s that much harder to break through and stay relevant.

While some brands have massive budgets, most across the media landscape don’t. Collaborating with other brands in unique, attention-winning ways allows for them to win in ways that drive conversation beyond traditional media. Two “brands” (including artists and influencers) working together to create a new product, service, or cultural moment unlocks the ability to grow share of market by gaining more share of life by leveraging their collective equity and values to drive an unfair share of attention. It’s not just the 1+1=3 economic multiplier, it’s the idea of pushing your brand to operate as an entertainment brand to create new news and get earned media impressions that work harder for your brand.

In many cases, these collaborations have proven to generate a higher ROI than traditional marketing tactics due to the novelty, increased visibility, and cost efficiencies created via shared resources and responsibilities. From CES to SXSW, brand collaborations have been the talk of the town among CMOs and brand managers, dominating panel discussions and award stages due to their creative effectiveness. Below are a few prime examples of the way brands have been able to achieve outsized impact by working together and thinking outside the box:

Examples

Pizza Hut and Airrack’s collaboration prior to Super Bowl LVII in February 2023 was a massive win that was birthed from the very audience that Pizza Hut sought to connect with – Gen Z.

Pizza Hut wanted to find a way to re-launch one of their pizzas from the past among a generation that was barely (if at all) around for its heyday – the 1990s. Luckily, popular Gen Z influencer was a big fan of Pizza Hut and promised to throw the world’s largest pizza party with them if and when he reached 10 million YouTube subscribers. The catch – it was all a lie. He had no existing relationship with the brand, but by keeping their ear to trends and cultural conversations, Pizza Hut was able to identify this as the perfect opportunity to highlight the rebirth of The Big New Yorker pizza. 

In a two-day event hosted with Airrack in the Los Angeles Convention Center, Pizza Hut made Big New Yorker pizza spanning over 132 feet with 13,653 lbs of dough, 8,800 lbs of cheese, and 630,496 slices of pepperoni for 68,000 slices winning Guinness Book of World Records recognition as the biggest pizza ever made. All of which was captured by hundreds of influencers invited to the event and later donated to local charities.

The incontinence category carries a lot of baggage. 1 in 2 women have bladder leaks but due to shame they are desparate to avoid the category, but online women are less afraid to share their leak experience. So Poise met women in the online spaces they most often express and receive vulnerability.

Poise charmed and disarmed the conversation around bladder leaks by developing a 5-part social series with outspoken reality TV icon who’s never afraid to keep it real – Nene Leakes. As the authority on all things leaks, Nene starred in woman-on-the-street content that entertained, empowered, and made women more comfortable by breaking down the stigma around bladder leaks while highlighting the brand’s ultra-absorbent 7-drop pad. The occasion was so monumental that Nene even hard launched her personal TikTok as part of the campaign and inspired others to talk about it themselves.

As the official cat litter partner of Best Friends Animal Society, Frest Step supports the mission of ending the homelessness of pets and united more cates in need with forever families. The issue: 40% of adult cats in shelters never get adopted. With 47% of videogame streamers already owning a cat and 46% of them considering adoption, the gaming space was the perfect place for Fresh Step to extend its reach outside the litter box.

Enter Adopt-a-Stray, an in-game adoption event that took the game, Stray, and used it to drive cat adoptions in real-time on Twitch. In Stray, gamers experience a futuristic world through the eyes of a cat—but you can only play as a ginger Tabby. We saw an opportunity to bring more cats into the game for a good cause. Leveraging our partnership with Best Friends Animal Society, we put real, adoptable cats into Stray and had animal loving streamers play as them.

Our 3D designers reverse-engineered models from the game and rebuilt them into exact replicas of 40 adoptable cats. They captured every characteristic of these cats, from their fur pattern to their eye color down to the exact movement of their tails. Once our cats were built, they were exported to a gaming engine and converted to mod packs that could be played in the game, which was built using the Unreal Engine. Our adoption event was live-streamed on Twitch to raise awareness of homeless pets in need and put viewers in touch with adorable cats.

Collaboration as brand strategy

Some brands have even gone as far to make creating these collaborative moments of culture creation a core part of their identity. Take Hidden Valley Ranch and Liquid Death, for example. These brands continuously drive news cycle worthy events and fan love by keeping their eyes and ears open for fresh ways to bring the brand to life in culture via collaborations.

Hidden Valley Ranch

Hidden Valley Ranch is the nation's original and leading ranch dressing brand. They’re so widely-used, not only at home, but in restaurants that people may not even realize that the great-tasting topping and dip they encounter on any given day is provided by Hidden Valley. As such, HVR is constantly inserting themselves into culture to stay top of mind and top of preference for consumers’ ranch needs.

Van Leeuwen’s

Hidden Valley Ranch fused their savory flavors with Van Leeuwen’s ice cream expertise to create a limited-edition flavor available only at Walmart packed with flavorful herbs, buttermilk, and just the right amount of sweetness. This unexpected flavor drove a host of different reactions videos across social media as friends and family members tried a pint of the special flavor together.

Burt’s Bees

Fans responded so well to a 2022 April Fools social post teasing ranch-flavored lip balm that the two brands teamed up before last year’s Super Bowl – a moment when lips are dry, and wings are the traditional game-day fare.

HVR x HVR

Hidden Valley Ranch’s double ranch execution flipped collaborations and hype culture completely on their head. At the center of this subculture, brands collaborate with other brands to create drops that people feverishly attempt to purchase that are all taken far too seriously.

Through social listening and cultural audits, we identified the world of hype culture as an excellent canvas for subversion and to highlight that Hidden Valley Ranch is only serious about flavor.

Instead of doing a stereotypical brand collaboration, we enlisted the only other brand in the world as serious about flavor as Hidden Valley Ranch — Hidden Valley Ranch. Using the world’s first self-collaboration, we subverted hype culture and proved to Gen Z that no other brand is as serious about flavor as Hidden Valley.

We developed a limited-edition bottle comprising two Hidden Valley Ranch Bottles to create an ‘X’ that poked fun at the very symbol of hype culture — the ‘X’ found at the center of every other brand collab out there and released it at the mecca of hype culture and brand collabs, ComplexCon.

Liquid Death

Liquid Death is one of the fastest growing non-alcoholic beverages of all time. In early 2024, the business was valued at $1.4 billion and it’s the third-most followed beverage brand in the world on Instagram and TikTok combined, largely because of the way they engage with culture. Instead of making marketing, they aim to make entertainment first, with the idea to out-fun the most fun brands on earth.

In the words of their VP of Creative, Andy Pearson: “We simply put entertainment over marketing. We hate corporate marketing as much as anyone else, so our goal is to make something that’s going to be the best thing someone sees in their feed that day. …And then we partner with celebrities and brands who want to have fun too.”

Tony Hawk Blood Board

Liquid Death’s collaboration with pro skater Tony Hawk was a perfect example of partnering with others who are driven by fun. In a silly, attention-grabbing storyline, Tony Hawk didn’t read the fine print in his contract and signed away the rights to his immortal soul and blood. Liquid Death then created a spot in which they drew his blood and mixed it with paint to decorate 100 limited-edition skateboards which sold out in under 20 minutes with proceeds going towards fighting plastic pollution and building skateparks for underserved communities.

Greatest Hates, Vol. 3

Liquid Death collaborated with its biggest haters, making an entire album out of hate comments. They scraped their social media posts and compiled the best hate into lyrics, then we worked with musician Bloodboy to turn them into catchy hit, packed with tons of guest appearances, and netting over 108 million press impressions in the process.

e.l.f. Cosmetics Corpse Paint

In one of their biggest (and seemingly silliest) brand collaborations, Liquid Death partnered with another brand well-known for collaborations – e.l.f. Cosmetics – to release a limited edition makeup kit that became the most successful piece of content both brands have ever released.

They teased the collaboration the day before launch with a post then dropped the launch video across both brand’s social channels and CRM and enlisted leading beauty influencers to blitz TikTok with “Get Ready With Me” Corpse Paint tutorials. Finally, they extended the moment to the real world by having it-girl Julia Fox get captured out in the New York City streets wear her own Corpse Paint look.

Collaboration best practices

There examples are just a glimpse into the fast-paced world of brand collaborations. Regardless of your brand or the industry you occupy, there’s positive news and momentum for you to generate with the right partnership. We’re here to help you ideate and build relationships and executions that help you win in today’s media landscape, but as you think about the space you could own with a brand collaboration keep these 3 best practices in mind:

1.     Evaluate brand fit

• Although your brands might share similar values, develop a shared strategy for the specific collaboration project that allows for evaluation of the creative output.

2.    Leverage fandom

• Stay on top of social listening and cultural trends – opportunities for unique collaborations can be sourced and amplified by fans.

3.    Establish relevant metrics

• New spaces require new metrics – align your KPIs to the specific channels of your co-branding opportunity.

Key takeaways

•        Don’t be afraid to step outside of your comfort zone

•        Keep your eyes open for overlapping audience needs/values

•        Stay up to date on emerging cultural trends and conversations

•        Employ quantifiable examples/insights to validate the idea and the potential ROI

•        Leverage our Digital Platforms and FCB-X expertise to extend the collaboration across physical and digital channels