If you thought billboards were just for looks, think again. They’re also for licks.

Carvel recently installed an ice cream–dispensing billboard in the West Village in Manhattan, serving up more than 50 gallons of soft serve, or about 1,500 servings, over the course of a seven-hour activation in mid-June. It was, according to the company, the first billboard of its kind.

“Knowing that [Carvel was] born and raised and created in New York, we wanted to find something that was uniquely [and] iconically New York, and the billboard scene definitely is that,” Marissa Sharpless, VP of marketing for Carvel at GoTo Foods, told us. “But we didn’t want to just do a billboard. We wanted to take it another step and really go big.”

And so, the decision to put a soft-serve machine inside of a billboard was born. With a full-team effort, it all came together for what Sharpless described as the “most unique way” Carvel has kicked off ice-cream season to date.

Just add sprinkles: Creating the world’s first soft-serve-dispenser billboard required a “giant team effort” from Carvel’s marketing team, agency partners, operations team, and production and brand vendors, Sharpless told us. The first step, she said, was finding a street-level billboard location that had both power and water hookups. Sharpless said she had seen other brands use 137 Perry Street for indoor pop-ups, and the team determined that the space could work for an outdoor pop-up, too, both logistically and for generating foot traffic.

Then came the question of how to actually dispense the ice cream—and whether the space could hold the amount of product they thought they would need.

“Okay, now how do we make sure we can get a fridge in this space that can hold all of the soft-serve mix that we hope to be able to go through and serve everybody?” she said. “We wanted to make sure that no one would walk away disappointed.”

Continue reading here.—KH

Miley Cyrus, Bryan Cranston, and Billy Idol all made it out to the Tribeca Festival this year. So did the marketers.

Marketers have regularly made appearances at Tribeca Festival’s brand-centric track, TribecaX, since it debuted in 2016 as a way to honor entertainment-adjacent brand marketing, but a lot has changed in both the film and advertising industries since then. The brands and agencies at this year’s festival represented a broad swath of industries, but despite the variety, many of the marketers onstage stressed a similar message: Brands need to stay agile and keep up with cultural moments and make hard choices about what their brands do and don’t stand for—a departure, perhaps, from an earlier era of marketing where many brands openly embraced social causes before facing organized consumer and political backlash.

“Cause marketing is really interesting in that right now, everybody is re-identifying what their cause is,” Tamon George, co-founder and CEO of the Black-owned creative agency Creative Theory, said. “The last decade…society writ large had identified causes that, No. 1, it literally cared about and externally shared that they care about. This moment, and I mean literally since January, that has changed.”

Here are other takeaways from the event.

How to pivot a legacy brand: Modernizing a legacy brand like CPG giant Kraft Heinz requires focusing on brand marketing over marketing individual products that may feel stuck in the past, Todd Kaplan, a former PepsiCo marketer who is now Kraft Heinz’s North America CMO, said.

“Legacy brands are an interesting double-sided coin, because there’s a legacy, which means they’re famous for something,” he said. “The flip side of the legacy brand is you get so captured in time of being famous for something that, as time chugs along and industries change and consumer preferences change, you might be like, ‘Oh, that was a brand that’s stuck in the ’80s.’”

Read more here.—JS

This week, we’re running our favorite summery stories from our archives. This story from Kelsey Sutton, first published in July 2022, looks at the world of aerial advertising, especially ones that target beachgoers during the busy vacation season.

Lounging on the beach this summer? Look up—so are advertisers.

At the Rockaways or Coney Island, you can spot ads for ABC’s The Bachelorette or for the beachwear brand Fair Harbor trailing behind planes. Dunkin’ and Wawa, meanwhile, make sure their ads hover over the Jersey Shore.

It’s no metaverse activation or TikTok trend, but plane-pulled ads, known in the industry as “aerial advertisements,” deliver something brands may find elusive in other formats. Ads in the air are unskippable, un-mutable, and almost impossible for beachgoers to ignore.

“I defy you to sit at a beach or be at a music festival or sit at a concert and have a plane fly overhead and not look up,” said Jeremy Levine, VP of sales for the aerial division of the out-of-home advertising company Van Wagner.

Ready for takeoff: Van Wagner is one of the largest national aerial advertising networks in the US, with operations in New York, California, Florida, beaches up and down the East Coast, and other major markets.

Alcohol brands, streaming platforms, film studios, delivery apps, startups, sports teams, and local retailers all choose aerial advertising for various purposes, and Levine said advertisers are drawn to the fact that aerial ads have a wide range of applications. Among their selling points: they don’t have to fight for attention when backdropped against the sky.

“You’re not competing with a bunch of other things,” Levine said. “It’s a clutter-free environment.”

Continue reading here.—KS