Each week, we'll bring you select insights from our newsletter, How to Build Brands and Influence People (HBBIP). To have all of these insights delivered directly to your inbox, subscribe today!
When you think about influencer marketing content geared toward enterprise brands, your mind might go toward important yet somewhat dry topics, like brand safety or affiliate marketing. As the hyperlinks show, we’ve got content on those topics (and it’s not too dry, thank you very much). But one other cool part of writing about enterprise brands is that all their money and power tends to make for some pretty sweet brand campaigns.
In honor of that sweetness, I wanted to take a closer look at some of the standout creator-driven campaigns we’ve seen from enterprise brands in 2024 so far.
As evidenced by its recent record-setting haul of Emmy nominations, FX series The Bear is on a lot of minds lately. I’m not saying that this omnipresence—and even critical success—is all due to Jeremy Allen White’s campaign with Calvin Klein, but I’m also not not saying it. Because that campaign was truly everywhere.
See if you can identify the month where Calvin Klein debuted Mr. White as its latest model in a long and storied history of men posing in their underwear:
No points for guessing January.
Fueled by this crossover hype, Calvin Klein enjoyed a remarkable start to the new year, boasting a 265% month-over-month EMV increase. Jeremy Allen White’s photo series wearing Calvin Klein boxer briefs atop a New York City high-rise caught the attention of major fashion outlets like Vogue and GQ, which became Calvin Klein's top EMV-drivers that month. Meanwhile, White's collaboration post on Instagram, his most successful to date, garnered 1.8M likes and 23.4k comments, further amplifying the campaign's impact. In all, Calvin Klein closed the month with $16.9M EMV.
The campaign’s impact can be further gauged by looking at the brand’s top EMV-driving hashtags from January:
You know it’s an effective campaign when you have three separate affiliated hashtags in your monthly top five. Just a general rule of thumb.
I probably don’t have to remind you about either of these campaigns, but just in case you didn’t get Super Bowl coverage under that rock you’re living under, these two enterprise brand campaigns were arguably the biggest to debut at the Super Bowl, which is sort of like the Super Bowl of enterprise brand campaigns.
(All of that is one sentence! I’m like James Joyce, if James Joyce wrote about enterprise brand campaigns.)
Anyway, literary digressions aside, Verizon teamed up with Beyoncé, who was on the verge of dropping both a new album (Cowboy Carter) and a whole new brand (Cécred). My advice to brands—and you’re only going to hear it in this very blog post, so listen up—is this: if your brand can afford to work with Beyoncé, you should by all means work with Beyoncé. After all, it paid off big-time for Verizon:
After pulling just shy of $5.0M EMV in all of January, Verizon collected a roughly equal total ($4.7M EMV) from February 1 to February 12, with $2.5M EMV of that total coming the day after the Super Bowl. The brand closed the month with almost $12.5M EMV in all, with Beyoncé and the Super Bowl playing a critical role in that success:
Meanwhile, Dunkin’ teamed up with pretty much everybody who was hanging around Boston that afternoon: power couple Ben Affleck and/or Jennifer Lopez/Matt Damon, plus Tom Brady, who took a break from appearing in Super Bowls to…appear in yet another Super Bowl. Even in retirement, the man haunts me.
All these celebrities teamed up for a musical “Dunkings” number, which was admittedly pretty funny. Apparently the internet agreed:
On February 12, the day after the Super Bowl, Dunkin’ collected $3.3M EMV, outpacing in a single day the $3.1M EMV that the brand pulled in from February 1 to February 11. Which means that from February 1 to February 12, Dunkin’ Donuts’ $6.3M EMV total (no, this isn’t an error, it’s just how the $3.3M and $3.1M figures end up rounding out) was on par with the brand’s $7.2M EMV total in all of January.
As far as hashtags went, people loved their Dunkings, though as in the way of these things, Ben Affleck got a little more shine than Matt Damon. It’s not your fault, Matt.
You don’t need me to tell you that the combined power of Disney and Taylor Swift, two of the largest cultural phenomena on planet earth, is going to make a splash. But you do need me to tell you just how big that splash was. So here ya go:
That is a splash alright. Here we have the first true sign of competition in these line graphs, because May brought May 4th, aka Star Wars Day, which was a real force in driving Star Wars Disney+’s Star Wars programming. But while Star Wars is indeed a cultural phenomenon on par with Taylor Swift, ‘on par’ doesn’t mean “greater than.”
What was the cause of all that fuss in March? Well, Taylor Swift announced that her concert film, Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour (My Version), would be available for streaming on Disney+, complete with several bonus songs and features. As a result of this titanic news, fan page Taylor Nation (@taylornation) ranked as Disney+’s No. 1 earner, outranking even Taylor Swift herself. The two creators generated a respective $2.3M EMV and $1.6M EMV across 26 and seven posts. Smash-hit hashtags duly followed:
That tag that gets cut off, by the way, is #TSTheErasTourTaylorsVersion, which is a bit of a mouthful, but it outranked even #DisneyPlus, so it had to be doing something right.
This one sounds pretty classy—and sure enough, it was.
In April, Rolex sponsored the Monte-Carlo Masters, an annual tennis tournament held in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France. (What, have you not been?) Thanks to a steady stream of tennis content—a continually potent source of EMV!—Rolex experienced a remarkable surge in April, achieving $21.3M EMV—a 141% month-over-month increase. Check it out:
The tournament's organizer, APT Tour (@apttour on Instagram), emerged as the brand’s most impactful contributor, generating a substantial $4.0M EMV. Additionally, #RolexMonteCarloMasters ranked as Rolex’s top-performing hashtag, accumulating $7.3M EMV.
The success of the tournament in sparking digital content underscores the degree to which events, especially sporting events, help power momentum for brands of all verticals—even in counter-intuitive industries like luxury.
We love a power thruple!
The iconic fashion brand struck gold in May when it partnered with K-Pop group Stray Kids. Tommy Hilfiger—both the man and the brand—styled the boy band for the Met Gala in winning, elegant suits with a subtle colored outline. In a Vogue YouTube video, Hilfiger lauded the band for its global stardom and modernity. And the band rewarded Tommy Hilfiger right back:
Here we have our first combo-breaker: May was not the highest-grossing month for Tommy Hilfiger in this analysis. However, when you consider that February was Fashion Week, to find May going toe-to-toe with the biggest event in the industry is pretty impressive.
#StrayKids was Tommy Hilfiger's No. 2 tag in May, accruing $1.4M EMV—even more than #TommyHilfiger ($1.1M EMV). Additionally, Tommy Hilfiger secured an impressive potency of $17.2k EMV per creator, up 210% from April, thanks to Met Gala posts from additional celebrities like Kendall Jenner ($800.2k EMV via six posts), Madelyn Cline ($452.3k EMV via four posts), and Sofia Richie ($211.1k EMV via four posts).
It’s not just that brands do well when they work with Beyoncé: it’s that time and again, the world’s largest and most powerful brands turn to creators to drive needle-shifting momentum. From fashion to tech, from food and beverage to entertainment, from Taylor Swift to K-Pop to Matt Damon, enterprise brands are recognizing the transformative power of creators. And all that just came from the first half of 2024—who knows what we’ll see during the rest of the year, and all the years to come?
To get all of these stories, plus much more, delivered to your inbox weekly, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter.