Inside brands’ ‘demure’ collaborations with TikTok trend’s creator

Many brands have described themselves or their products as some variation of “demure,” “mindful” or “cutesy” over the past week, whether in marketing email subject lines, the comments sections of TikTok videos or social media posts following beauty creator Jools Lebron’s viral TikTok on “how to be demure and modest and respectful at the workplace.” As of this writing, Lebron’s video has amassed 43 million views and more than 4.2 million likes, and has generated a 53% engagement rate—roughly 50 times the average industry benchmark of 1.37%—per Sprout Social data. And she’s racked up tens of millions of additional views and thousands of new followers since that initial video thrust her into the internet spotlight, with her videos now each drawing an average of 1 million views and an engagement rate of over 10%, according to data from influencer marketing platform Captiv8. Now, major brands including Verizon, Netflix, Zillow and Lyft are rushing to capitalize on Lebron’s soaring online fame and taking their “demurity” a step further through collaborations with “Miss Demure” herself. Smaller brands such as Patrick Ta Beauty and GT’s Living Foods have also partnered with Lebron, though they’ve opted for influencer events and gifted products over more formal paid partnerships. Read more about the TikTok trend here Verizon was the first to ink a brand deal with Lebron involving sponsored social content, collaborating with her on a video of Lebron trading in her “musty” and “crusty” phone for a new (and more demure) model. The video came together in just four days, progressing quickly from Verizon’s initial outreach to Lebron on Aug. 16, to a content shoot at a Los Angeles Verizon store the following day and finally to Lebron’s sponsored TikTok video posted on Monday, Verizon Chief Marketing Officer Leslie Berland said in an email. @joolieannie #VerizonPartner divas trade in your crusty old phone for a shiny new one with @Verizon ♬ original sound - Jools Lebron “As part of our recent brand refresh, creator marketing is a central part of our marketing strategy,” Berland continued. Verizon teamed up with influencer agency Poster Child, a shop within the Brownstein Group’s agency network, to broker the partnership with Lebron, marking “the first of many collaborations for Verizon and Poster Child,” she said. “Collabing with Verizon was an amazing experience—very classy, very demure,” Lebron said in an emailed statement. “My first sponsored demure! … It was extremely mindful of Verizon to help the diva out.” Also read: TikTok’s ‘underconsumption’ trend goes viral Lebron’s Verizon-sponsored video garnered over 1 million views and more than 120,000 engagements within the first 24 hours of her posting it—all without any paid media behind it, Berland said. It’s now been viewed more than 12.4 million times, and Verizon’s comment on the video, “Diva got her bag and a new phone,” has racked up over 34,000 likes. Lyft’s partnership with Lebron followed the next day. On Aug. 20, Lebron and the rideshare app teamed up on an Instagram Reel of her describing how to be not only “demure” but “Lyftsey” when riding in a Lyft vehicle. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Lyft (@lyft) “I’m very mindful of why I got the Lyft,” Lebron says in the video. “I don’t disrespect the drivers. I get in, I act cute, I get to my destination, I get out, I tip—and that’s why I have five stars,” The brand’s collaboration with Lebron was an in-house effort, said Anya Schulman, social media manager, culture at Lyft, in an email. She and her team first reached out to Lebron on Aug. 6, one day after Lebron posted her now-viral TikTok, “and our collab came together quickly over the next week,” Schulman said. Lyft’s video with Lebron currently has 641,000 views and just under 35,000 likes, making it “one of our top three most-engaged organic posts of all time,” Schulman said. “Allowing creators to own the content in their own unique style helps us move quickly––our motto is ‘work with talented people and get out of their way,’” she added. Lyft was especially eager to work with Lebron, who is transgender, as part of the brand’s broader efforts to “uplift and support” queer and transgender creators, as demonstrated by previous partnerships such as its “Lucky Lyft” YouTube series with Bob the Drag Queen. Zillow, like Verizon, pulled together a collaboration with Lebron in just a few days, said Ben Levine, Zillow’s senior director of social & channel marketing. The real estate platform worked with social media and talent agency Viral Nation to contact Lebron’s manager on Aug. 15, and Lebron posted the resulting sponsored video of her strolling through a Los Angeles neighborhood and determining which houses she encountered were “demure” or “cutesy” on both Instagram and TikTok on Wednesday. @joolieannie Los Angeles has a very demure vibe- Where should I go next? @Zillow #zillowpartner ♬ original sound - Jools Lebron “Broadly, we’re seeing really strong organic reach with this,” Levine said. “But it’s not surprising—Jools really has captured, I think, the imagination of a wide range of the social ecosystem at this point.” As of late last week, Lebron’s video for the brand had amassed a total of 706,000 views across Instagram and TikTok and spawned a slew of comments equally celebrating Lebron leveraging her sudden virality to “get her bag” (slang for making money) and praising Zillow for the move, such as “She worked hard and waited for her moment. Now she’s making vids for Zillow. V demure, v classy,” and “Yes Zillow we love this partnership—very demure and very mindful.” Though Zillow dubbed Lebron its new “chief demure officer” in the caption of its Instagram collab post with her, the brand has no immediate plans for future collaborations with Lebron, Levine said. But the sponsored video alone has broadened Zillow’s online audience—particularly on Instagram, where the collaboration with Lebron expanded the video’s reach to her followers in addition to Zillow’s existing audience, he said. “This is a hugely important brand halo for us,” Levine said of Zillow’s overarching creator strategy and ongoing efforts to “scale and diversify” its social content. “Like, if folks are going to trust Zillow to help them ‘get home,’ they better believe that we’re out in the world understanding how it works, understanding how people are talking and sort of where people's heads are at, because otherwise they're never going to trust us when it comes to the serious stuff.” Netflix enlisted Lebron for a sponsored video to promote the launch of a “Very Demure, Very Mindful” collection of TV shows and movies on the platform curated by Lebron. The same day the partnership went live, Netflix changed its TikTok bio to highlight the collaboration, writing, “See how I made a row curated by @Jools Lebron? Very demure. Very mindful.” @joolieannie Feeling fierce feeling demure feeling netflixy #fyp #demure #netflixpartner @Netflix ♬ original sound - Jools Lebron The ‘belle of the ball’ Several days before Verizon partnered with Lebron, Patrick Ta Beauty (founded by fellow beauty influencer Patrick Ta) shared five TikTok videos documenting her experience at an Aug. 13 New York influencer event celebrating the brand’s launch of a new foundation product, including a video guide on “how to get your foundation engraved in a demure manner” and one revealing a bottle of foundation engraved with the word “demure” in an elegant cursive font. The series of TikToks have since collectively garnered over 3.4 million views. @joolieannie #fyp #demure ♬ original sound - Jools Lebron Lebron also joined Ta in two videos on his TikTok channel, where she modeled the beauty brand’s foundation and bronzer products and described their “demure” and “cutesy” qualities as Ta, a makeup artist, applied them to her face. Those videos together netted the brand an additional 4.2 million views. And later that week, Los Angeles-based GT’s Living Foods, maker of kombucha brand Synergy, paid for Lebron and a friend to fly to the West Coast and attend an influencer event of its own, said Sam Ayers, director of social media at GT’s Living Foods. Lebron filmed just under a dozen pieces of content laden with her “demure” vocab with the brand at the Aug. 17 event, including a TikTok of her drinking a bottle of the brand’s kombucha in a segment she dubbed “Taste Test with the Diva” Ayers said. @synergykombucha TAST TEST with THE DIVA @Jools Lebron ♬ original sound - SYNERGY Kombucha Synergy didn’t require Lebron to post any sponsored content to her own social channels as part of the partnership, instead compensating her by covering the cost of her flight and accommodations (including a mini fridge full of kombucha) and paying her an attendance fee, Ayers said. He drew from a designated “virality budget” that the Synergy team reserves for situations like Lebron’s, where the brand wants to quickly capitalize on an extremely buzzy creator who emerges seemingly overnight, to pay her, he said. “Allowing people like her to kind of have creative freedom over their content always plays better, and that's why I wanted to do a more non-traditional approach than a paid partnership,” he said. “I feel like people can tell that [sponsored posts] aren’t as fun to create … And a lot of the time, influencers like her don't necessarily get the VIP treatment that people like Alix Earle or the heavy-hitters get. I wanted to do something special for her.” Because Synergy brought Lebron to its influencer event as her popularity and the “demure” trend were starting to take off on social media, Lebron was the “belle of the ball” at Synergy’s event, Ayers said. Dozens of the influencers and celebrities in attendance flocked to her to collaborate on social content for their own channels, including singer and actress Noah Cyrus and Ayana Sprowl, a video producer and micro-influencer. @synergykombucha who else is ready for a demure fall?! #feelthesynergy @Jools Lebron ♬ Very Demure Jools House of Evo Remix - CasaDi “Literally as soon as she walked in, everyone was like, ‘Oh my God, she’s here,” Ayers said. “I think that’s what's so strategic about it, because we got so many more posts out of the event just because she attended … And ever since the party, not only has our content been performing well, but people are taking some of the soundbites that she made from the event and recreating their own videos with that. It’s this super tremendous ripple effect.” With “demure” still firmly in the internet lexicon and social media users gearing up for a “Demure Fall,” the brand collaborations are all but guaranteed to keep coming for Lebron. At the end of last week, Fenty Beauty cheekily responded to one of Lebron’s unsponsored videos where she discussed one of the brand’s lip mask products and jokingly asked Fenty to “give [her] one that’s like the size of like a five-gallon paint bucket” by doing exactly that. @joolieannie #stitch with @Jools Lebron @Fenty Skin ♬ original sound - Jools Lebron

Inside brands’ ‘demure’ collaborations with TikTok trend’s creator

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