Marketing and entertainment made 200 beautiful babies in a pandemic 👇

“I laughed; I cried. It was better than Cats”

via GIPHY

That little saying likely comes from the fact that Cats, despite the biggest names behind it, is widely considered to be ‘meh’. That sentence has since become the sort of definition of good entertainment.

After a year of accidentally falling into studying the stories making the news, at the intersection of marketing and entertainment, we’ve made this mother-of-all-round-up-posts for you. 

This post has over 200 instances of brands working entertainment into their content marketing. The hits and the misses, with no holds barred commentary from us. 

Sometimes the brands in questions hit the headlines intentionally, and executed well, making us smile. And sometimes the headline was in faux pas that caused collective facepalming.

But first here’s the origin story. Or really, a use case on the building of a content flywheel. 

If you’d prefer to get right to the stories that made the list, click here 👉

How a consistent little talk show can get you through anything, including a pandemic 👇

Nobody is lying here. Last year was rough. One of the toughest years in our lifetimes, for sure. In May of 2020, we (Susan Diaz and Will Lamont) were finding ways in which we could work in the same space and still be socially distanced. And since outdoors was allowed, we started to record a show from Susan’s backyard. 

It started on IG Live – sometimes both in her backyard and sometimes Will from his condo – depending on what was allowed in Ontario that week 🙄

We called it Thirsty Thursday – The 4 pm Aftershow

In it, we  recapped the episode of the week from our podcast The 4 am Report – why we thought it might be relevant – and we each also talked about a thing that week that was “thirsty” from a marketing/personal perspective.

This led to a legendary love affair with what we love to call ‘the post pandemic million dollar marketing strategy’ ie: newsjacking. (Hint: it’s always worked. It works better now with the speed of the virtual environment.)

We mostly did this just for us. Yes, never forget to enjoy creating content 💌

We enjoyed it. 
It was something new and energizing. 
And we needed something calm and steady to focus on to keep ourselves from losing out sh!t in a pandemic.

Quite quickly we tapped into the entertainment value of it. We enjoyed the research  – reading about something more joyful than doom-and-gloom-headlines related to the death of people and the economy. 

We traded in cocktails for production value. And reach. And ethics. 💫

Because of the ‘thirst’ in the name and the good weather in Canada at the time, our spring and summer episodes featured us making cocktails in Susan’s backyard while talking out the stories. 
We tasted beverages. 
And Will made many cocktails.

When June rolled around, the Black Lives Matter movement started to get heard in the mainstream, following the murder of Geroge Floyd. There was ensuing Facebook fallout. 
And many people, us included, left Facebook. 
Several, like Susan, also ditched Instagram indefinitely, so we had to make a choice on our channel of distribution.

We applied to LinkedIn Live over and over again and they ignored us  

We chose to focus there nonetheless. Why did we focus on one? 

(Well, we do host the videos on YouTube and feed it to our website, but that’s not where our visibility is. Our visibility is on LinkedIn, so we decided to focus on creating WITHIN the constraints they placed on us.) 

That’s a little secret folks. Creativity abounds when tight guardrails are in play.

Choosing Linkedin in meant we had to fit each video into 10 minutes because that’s what their regular feed allows. This meant the cocktails had to go😱 

We still hung on for a bit and made separate segments for cocktails, but it felt Xtra and unnecessarily self-indulgent 😷

Because, meanwhile, people (very few – like 5 besides our friends) started to notice it. Importantly they were our clients. We heard “I’d never have seen that story if you hadn’t covered it. Cool how it xxxxxx”

Score! Feedback like that must not be ignored. Conversation starter and builders of any kind that makes people smile and think is the end goal isn’t it?!

So we hunkered down and started to really enjoy our Wednesday evening research to make each Thursday’s list for 5 stories. Because that’s all we could intelligently fit into 10 minutes with room for a shout out to our own podcast episode.

We found a wonderful audio and video editor and instantly put him on our part-time roster. This is a great early hire (depending on the bandwidth you need) for any content team. And we started to put some production quality into our videos. 

We did not do this by making ourselves look better with lights and mics and that good stuff. Some of that, yes; not consistently. 

Instead we focussed on graphics and GIFs and imagery to break down the messages we were curating. We also started to caption the videos because so many people just mindlessly watch videos on silent while read. 

And it felt like the thing to do to make content accessible, in general.

Soon we found the research took less and less time. 
We’d hear from people. 
First our team. 
Friends. 

Clients in ongoing meetings. 
Even prospects in discoveries and such. 

Many people started to shoot us notes. Some regular ‘reporters’; others with one-off things they discovered in their evening news browsing. It is awesome 👏

What else did we use to find stories?

1. Buzzsumo.com – this is great to uncover what’s trending. We search by a few industries; we look at entertainment news, and we look at the general news.
2. Good ole Google – what’s news in your  geography from the mainstream publications is always a good idea to keep in mind.
3. Social media – many people spotlight news and have intelligent comments. Curating a set of voices you like to hear from is always a good idea.
4. Notice we did not say alerts. That’s a choice that can make for overwhelming clutter by the way of push-notification, which no one needs. And it can create blindness that might make you miss something important anyway. Not alert fans around here! 

If you have a video, why wouldn’t you have more?

We’d always felt like we failed our email list

We’ve had a ‘tiny but mighty’ email list that has a very low unsubscribe and a few people regularly added for year. We had plateaued. We did a monthly digest, and it was feeling dull despite decent open metrics. No one ever clicked to any of the deeper stories. We added a few weekly things, but it all felt meh and like we were hitting up people with stuff on our podcast that might not always interest them.

Enter the transcripts from ThirstyThursday!! We channeled an avatar of ‘The Hustle’ for marketing meets entertainment news. Firmly holding on to our deep belief that it is our job as marketers not just to inform but also to entertain in our content.

This led to a weekly email called The ThirstList. It curated the news we talked about with clever headlines and puns in the spirit of the video that recapped our perspective. We linked to the source stories from ungated publications (of which there are many).

The clicks came through for us. The open rates dropped because not everyone has the time or the headspace to think about entertaining marketing when their bandwidth is stretched on just running on the reactive content hamster wheel. But those who opened often clicked on one/several stories.

Here’s our entertaining content flywheel 👇

From it has also come the holy grail for most ‘shy writers’ we’re publishing a book  “The Other EQ: How to find, keep and use an Entertainment Quotient in your content. 

That comes out in Q4 of 2021.

And it has all fed into a strong business model that switched our content abilities from writing/strategy-based only, into multiformat execution that helps people fully utilize the extensive amount of content we are all creating.

All this because we were fed up with writing one day a couple of years ago! And though it felt like it was 10 years too late to the podcasting party, Susan let Will talk her into making a podcast just ahead of wave 2 of the podcasting gold rush.

That folx, is the making of a content marketing flywheel that focuses not just on education but also on entertainment. Because we believed in our little hearts that a smile is the need of the pandemic hour.

Here are 200 stories of brands, individuals and governments who hit the news because they made us smile (or grimace)

This is in backwards order, from April 2021.

Entertaining Stories from April 2021

April saw a battle between Apple, who made app tracking more transparent, and Facebook, who would prefer to listen to every word you say and send you ads about ear wax. 

Vaccine Hunters Canada stepped up to help out and Clio and Clearco became Canadian unicorns. 

A Taco Bell Moon rose and Nike stock fell. 

Pelosi acted grossie, people booed executive bonuses, Caterpillar cakes went to war in the UK, and Netflix faced a Colton backlash . As if that wasn’t enough, the unrest in the US led to an extended conversation around brands taking a stand in marketing. 

Tesco supported UK pubs; and naked parliamentarians made the news. Speaking of politics, Georgia lashed out against restrictive voting laws. 

Awesome names ruled as Slutty Vegan moved into Shake Shack. Further friends, further, Fernando Machado – everyone’s favourite marketer (of Burger King fame) moved to a gaming company. 

Oh, and Wix and WordPress fought a little bit. But perhaps what took the cake was the week of April fool’s when brands outdid themselves. Honourable mention to Duolingo Roll, “Voltswagen”, the Satanic Panic, Spotify’s Clubhouse and The Ship that broke global maritime trade and spawned a million memes.

Entertaining Stories from March 2021

March started off filling our bellies with Cinnamon Toast Shrimp, Pizza Hut Pacman, and Krispy Kreme vaccine bribes. Yikes. 

Prince Harry joined the workforce, and Susan’s brand new podcast with Rohini Mukherji, ABCDEI, was born a Pisces. Yay to inclusion.

Farrow got revenge on Allen, while travel-hungry people got revenge on Covid by pre-booking up a storm for imaginary future travel. 

Charmin introduced us to NFTs, and we didn’t quite understand them, and we talked about audio influencers – which we DID understand that – because, um, that’s what we are apparently!

Mid month revved up with royal regrets, the Raptors rocking, reality-style layoffs, and BK getting grilled. 

Also getting grilled? Susan, by some bridge-dwelling internet trolls she riled up with a popular LinkedIn post. 

Almost as much flack as the right gave out upon the “cancellation” of Dr Seuss and Potato Head’s gender. 

Finally Dolly Parton got that “Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine!” in style, and we talked a little livestream shopping.

Entertaining Stories from February 2021

The month of love began with “Hexit”, Prince Harry falling out of love with his royal lifestyle. 

Hudson Bay hopped into the world of technology with its Marketplace, CTV had a blackface blunder, and we saw the LinkedIn crash of 2021.

Frontier Airlines failed with a ridiculous #FreeBritney campaign, McD’s got a makeover, BK India made headlines and we cancelled cancel culture and created consequences. 

Our favourite new friend “Bruce” was the most memorable thing to come from the Super Bowl, and Weetabix with beans became what we hoped would become the least memorable thing we had to hear about at least for a month. 

Pearl Milling company rose from the ashes of a racist past and Bell burned their peeps with some heavy cuts. 

Finishing off strong, we tossed on some hands-free Nikes and recited some broetry while cooking up the trendy TikTok pasta and sent a like to BK France for supporting local potato farmers. 

(Quick question: How many mentions of Burger King can you get into one post about entertaining content. Anwer: A lot. They are a brand to study when it comes to consistently nailing entertainment value in their content globally)

Entertaining Stories from January 2021

Intentional Inclusivity at the inauguration inspired us, as did the Maya Angelou Barbie and the great people at Not UberEats. 

We hopped onto the new audio trend, Clubhouse, and sang a few sea shanties along the way. 

Budweiser opted out of Super Bowl adverts, while Madonna’s daughter Lola went hilariously social filter-free on Insta and we tired of oh-so-stale Bernie memes. 

Dionne Warwick tickled us on Twitter and Kamala Vogued her way into the vice-presidency while Cadbury’s Golden GOO-billee gave us hearts in our eyes while we also somewhat sadly contemplated a future without Samantha in Sex in the City. 

We ate Courage Cookies while alternating between raging over the catastrophe at the capital and giggling as the Instagram account @GaysOverCovid publicly shamed naughty people breaking rules of pandemic. 

Entertaining Stories from December 2020

The holiday season brought us a thirst for more than just a cup of eggnog by a roaring fire. Burger King encouraged people to support local restaurants, Will discovered TikTok and newsjacking became the norm. The two way conversation model of marketing and sales melted our frozen Grinch hearts and a sexy Colonel Sanders warmed us in other places. The uber-memeable Monolith made an appearance…then disappeared…then reappeared…and so on until we got distracted by Cher saving elephants and AOC battling Jagmeet Singh in Among Us. The star on the top of our xmas tree this year? Elliot Page stepping into his true self. 

Entertaining Stories from November 2020

The holiday season began with Burt’s Bees being told to buzz off with their racist ad, Norwegian Santa got pissed at the postal service and we mourned the loss of the great Diego Maradona. Meals on Heels and Twitter disclaimers boosted us out of the blues, as did Kamala Harris and Dan Levy, our favourite sexy sweater-wearing Schitt’s Creeker. We truly believed in Harry Styles rocking a gown, then discovered via Nora Young of CBC why nobody believes anything anymore. Amazon’s holiday ad made us tear up with all the feelings, and the Four Seasons Total Landscaping debacle also had us crying, but with tears of laughter. SNL proved why they’ve lasted so long with some serious last minute wardrobe magic and we found out even AI can be bias.

Entertaining Stories from October, September, August, July, June and May of 2020

If you’ve got 3 hours to binge watch YouTube, here’s an endlessly entertaining play list of about 50 more stories covering all kinds of entertaining communication surrounding everything from Kardashian tone deafness to record-breaking F! Wins and what we can learn about communicating wins 🚘

One golden nugget was the accidental post by Captain America on his instagram stories, and how he turned a self-leaked 🍆 pic into a plea to get Americans to go out and vote!

There’s stuff about how you can use cameo.com where Snoop will record you a video for 750 bucks

🎶 🌂 Cardi B made naughty power statement song

🛑 Endless coverage of The #freebritney movement 

Kayne. Britney. Kylie. Other Kylie. Kim.

Many, many celeb influencers come up that you can learn to entertain from.

😷 Uncomfortable conversations, mental health into entertainment

Facebook’s continuing saga 

The ‘cancel culture’ and ‘trolling’. 

Tokenism, veganism, liking your own posts on social, and so much more.

Ah! And that time we coined the term “Flaccid news!” 🥀 for the non hard hitting journalism you need in your life.

If you’re still here, you’re a champ. A true lover of learning. Well done.

This is the end.