STEVE SMITH

Articles by Steve All articles by Steve

• The Return of the 19th Hole: Dewar's Rides The Golf Revival in Brand Insider Podcast on 06/27/2025
  

  Golf is back! Prior to the great lockdowns of 2020, interest in the sport appeared waning. But the hunger for safe outdoor spaces and then the rise of golf-adjacent platforms like Top Golf, reinvigorated interest. Dewar's has always had a natural affinity to the sport, but even the brand's steward, Global VP of Bacardi's Scotch Whiskey division admits that the brand has to overcome its identification as your grandfather's whiskey. On this week's Brand Insider, Brian Cox explores his deep integration with golf sponsorships as well as the challenge of marketing a legacy to younger demos. Both jobs are a bit like making fine whiskey, it turns out. They take time and patience.

• Vodka Is Fun: Tito's Seriously Unserious Brand Approach in Brand Insider Podcast on 06/20/2025
  

  As the ad community gathers in Cannes this week to celebrate their institutionalized mediocrity, let's counterprogram a bit with a brand that insists on not taking itself too seriously. There are only a handful of spirits ads that consistently rise above the usual tropes. With its novel "spokescart" concept and "The Good Gets Great" tagline Tito's Handmade Vodka always gets us to stop and take notice.

• Sneaker Washing 101: Dove Men+Care Goes Weird Meme Surfing in Brand Insider Podcast on 06/13/2025
  

  Culture is the dominant theme in marketing for now. Drafting off of, plugging into, photobombing pop culture trends and social memes has become a hedge against the white noise of media clutter. As with all marketing trends, this smart move casts off a lot of social crapvertising and gratuitous meme surfing that drips inauthenticity. So DOVE men's care's recent campaign caught my eye as a way to do culture adjacent work in a way that actually speaks to the brand. Unilever plugged into an unlikely social media trend - men posting images of their dirty sneakers and complaining about the challenge of cleaning dirty rubber.

• Hey, Archie and Jughead!: Fiiz Wants to Scale Pops' Soda Shop in Brand Insider Podcast on 05/16/2025
  

  In mid-century America, the local soda and sweet shop was a fixture of small town life. Here is where Archie, Jughead, Betty and Veronica met to gossip, fall in and out of love and plan the next pep rally. The Fiiz Drinks chain is trying to modernize that tradition. Started in Utah in 2014 around the personalized "Your Drink, Your Way" soda concept, it has expanded the menu to snacks and desserts, and grown its footprint, to 70 locations. But can that local meeting-place appeal scale to the 500 locations that company President Scott Ball has planned over the next decade?

• Lesser Evil's Low and Slow Model for Air Popping Its Brand in Brand Insider Podcast on 05/09/2025
  

  While healthy popcorn and snacks brand Lesser Evil launched almost two decades ago, it really burst from its organic shell and onto mainstream grocery shelves in just the last few years. Now at 40,000 stores, Lesser Evil has taken the same approach to growth that it does to popping corn - low and slow. As VP of Marketing Caitlin Mack tell us this week, the art and science of the product touches all aspects of the company culture. Get ready to learn about the importance of "butterfly wings" on your handful of popcorn.

• 'We Brought a Butchery': Fogo de Chao Slow-Cooks the Experience in Brand Insider Podcast on 05/02/2025
  

  There are meat-lovers' brands and then there are meat-lovers' brands. Barry McGowan, CEO of Brazilian-style eatery Fogo de Chao assures me that there are many veggie offerings on the menu and the buffet table for my vegan palate. But let's face it. The heart of this fast-growing chain is the slow-turning spits and deep carnivore vibes. As he explains this week, Fogo is all about on-premise experience - flames, meat juice, friends.

• Gem Studios Puts Philanthropy In a Silversmith's Setting in Brand Insider Podcast on 04/11/2025
  

  Most retailers enhance the "IRL experience" with engaging store design, CX and occasional events. Gem Studio puts solder and a blowtorch in your hands. Created by Matt James in order to finance a Ugandan schoolhouse he had founded, this high concept retailer sells silver and turquoise jewelry, but only after the customer makes it herself. Matt and his co-founder (and wife) Lauren explored the lessons learned - about marketing, staffing and scaling - extreme experiential retail.

• Barry's Bold Brand Bedfellows in Brand Insider Podcast on 04/04/2025
  

  Why is a high-intensity workout gym chain partnering with a tequila brand, let alone Dyson, Netflix, lululemon or Christina Aguilera? Barry's has gone all in on the art of strange brand bedfellows. It is a deliberate effort to weave the company identity into customers' everyday lives. And to that end, the 90 Barry's locations have also become social centers, even party zones. Vicky Land, SVP of Brand & Comms explains how global brand initiatives and local activations reinforce one another.

• Playboy Is Back: No, Really This Time in Brand Insider Podcast on 03/21/2025
  

  I think I have written this story ten times before. Playboy was one of the first magazines to go "Dotcom" on the "World Wide Web" in 1994, which is when I started covering Internet media. Since then, I have written about so many Playboy relaunches, pivots, near-deaths and mis-fired salvage operations in the past 30 years, it is a miracle the brand persists at all. And here we go again.

• Hot Sauce With That Bubble Tea?: Gong Cha's Strange Bedfellows in Brand Insider Podcast on 03/14/2025
  

  What is a chain of bubble tea shops doing partnering with Frank's Red Hots, let alone Charles Schulz's Peanuts or the Final Fantasy game series? Those unlikely combinations have paid off for the Gong Cha beverage store chain. Brand partnerships have become a popular marketing hedge against the fragmented attention economy and brand invisibility. Gong Cha's Missy Maio, VP of Marketing, explains how hot sauce and tea made a surprising brand win.

Comments by Steve All comments by Steve

• 'B2B Marketing Is Dead': NI Rebrands In D2C Style by Steve Smith (Brand Insider Podcast on 09/09/2020)
  

  So true, Bart. I would love to heare about more b2b brands that are taking a b2c approach. 

• 'Mad' Magazine's Famed Cartoonist Mort Drucker Dies At 91 by Melynda Fuller (Publishers Daily on 04/09/2020)
  

  Drucker's style was our childhood entryway to American TV and film for many of us. Everyone both at MAD and at all of its imitators tried to imitate Drucker. But even as a kid I could tell the real thing from the copycats. No one tutored us more effectively in how not to take these media industries too seriously. Like Jack Davis, Wally Wood, John Severin, Drucker's pemcil and brush had an outsized power in our lives and culture. Thanks Mort.

• Obit: Pioneering Magazine Publisher Hugh Hefner, Dead At 91 by Joe Mandese (Publishers Daily on 09/28/2017)
  

  Malcolm X, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, Jimmy Carter, Alex Haley (who originally interviewed Malcolm X for Playboy), Erica Jong, Germaine Greer, Bella Abzug, David Bowie - just a few of the interviews that still resonate for me decades later becasue they went deeper.and got closer to the figure's voice than anything else available. All of it sat within a package that was also irredeemably sexist and unapologetically wedded to the shallowest material pleasures of consumer culture. Somehow they were all of a frightening, contradictory, delusional, brilliant, craven, dazzling, piece that was America itself in the last half of the 20th Century.       

• GenerationVexed by Bob Garfield (Garfield at Large on 04/10/2017)
  

  This is the fake news we need more of.

• The Trump-ification Of 2016: The Super Bowl Implodes by Steve Smith (Mobile Insider on 02/08/2016)
  

  Luke. Thanks for that. Nice evolution of the argument. Although post-mass culture is more manageable than post-mass politics. Democracy still demands majorities to move forward. Mutli-party systems worldwide have long had to rely on coalition-building among varied three and four parties. One argument goes that the American two party system is already now based on coalitions of unlike-minded segments, and have been since the late 60s and the original Nixon Southern Strategy. Reagan's coalition of the blue collars, evangelixals and country club has always been an uncomfortable marriage. We are now seeing the seams show.  

• The Trump-ification Of 2016: The Super Bowl Implodes by Steve Smith (Mobile Insider on 02/08/2016)
  

  Thanks Jon, Peter and both Georges for your comments. But take heart. I may sound depresssed, and this may all seem very depressing. But I think there is a real hunger for creative thinking in both commercial and political fields. History shows (American Renaissance, Civil War, Progressive Era, Great Depression, Modernism, post-WWII pop and high art in America) that it takes a loss of faith in old institutions to make us receptive to new ideas.  

• Remembering A Legend We Lost In 2015: Joe Franklin by Adam Buckman (TVBlog on 12/15/2015)
  

  The WOR TV show was integral to my own passion for pop culture and respect for the troupers who hoofed, crooned, astonished and touched us from the stage. Joe had a humbling envy/respect of performers. His hospitality to performers of all stripes was an object lesson for budding media critics like myself that the people we wrote about were putting themselves out there in ways we never would. 

• A Mass Medium Without Mass Media: Live TV Losing Default Status by Steve Smith (Data and Targeting Insider on 07/27/2015)
  

  Hi all. I agree with your reticence over trusting self-reported data, which is why I mentioned that caveat. The research is a tracking study of 1200 US TV viewers with broadband access, so there is a skew built into the sample. But what I found most interesting in this research was the attitudinal implications - the ways in which users admitted to watching TV with different levels of engagement and attention according to situation and source. This part of the research I find very recognizable in my and my household's own behavior has to do wil how and why we choose different sources. OTT video is chosen much more deliberately I think and is my default source for content I am ready to pay attention to. On the other hand, most live TV is on because I have made a choice not to pay close attention while I peruse books or a second screen. 

• Verizon's 'No Cord Required' Mobile Video Service Launching Soon? by Steve Smith (MoBlog on 07/26/2015)
  

  @JS Oops. Missing work. The phrase should read "an OTT video market that will not lack players." Corrected. 

• A Modest Proposal: Truly 'Native' Mobile Advertising by Steve Smith (MoBlog on 07/16/2015)
  

  DanielYes some vendors tried on their own to do this, which is why I am suggesting it needs to be done at the OS level or as a common standard within the infrastructure. Single players trying to make it happen won't 

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