Joe Robinson: Bald Guy, Marketer, Self-Improver.

My first bit of “on-trend” content. What have I become.

Snoop’s Smokeless Stunt; Genius Or A Total Waste?

We’ve all seen the Snoop Dogg fire pit commercial. If not, it’s only 30 seconds long (along with the bait tweet from Snoop that he was “giving up smoke” a few days before). Get up to speed in a new tab then come back.

First it was “wow, that Snoop Dogg ad is genius, it generated so much hype”. It was hailed as one of the top brand collabs of all time, an amazing example of how you can leverage a personal brand for massive exposure.

Then, once the CEO was fired after a lacklustre sales lift from the marketing stunt, it was “the perfect example that exposure doesn’t pay” and that “viral moments don’t equal viral sales”. There were calls for “a reckoning in marketing” and a greater emphasis on sales made rather than brand awareness. Like an over-reliance on ROAS-based performance channels isn’t equally notorious for killing brands as the opposite approach.

I’m sure these takes are from different groups of people rather than the same individuals flip-flopping (save for the usual suspects, be they LinkedIn prima donnas or that dickhead from your work), but it seems both sides of the discussion have some fairly reactionary… well, reactions. After all, it can be hard to fit critical thought into the little text box on LinkedIn.

I’ve got a third take.

The Snoop Dogg Firepit Ad Was Bad… Because It Drove Awareness

Okay, that’s not very nuanced. The ad was fucking great in some ways, but if I was in charge of reporting its success I’d be shitting myself. Often, and a lot. It would be quicker to list the times I had not been shitting myself.

The buzz generated by the ad was enormous, and on a high-priced, high consideration product (the tie-in Snoop edition stove was 300 quid) you can’t expect sales to roll in overnight. Especially when you launched just before Black Friday, with most people’s big Christmas purchases already picked out or even secured in early deals. Awareness is no bad thing, especially at this scale. With the right follow-up, you can easily win sales later. Summer is fire pit season, so the best sales months may well be yet to come.

In that sense, Solo Stove’s firing of their CEO after 8 weeks was shortsighted. Their expectations for an overnight sales boost were all wrong. Or they know something we don’t. But I’d say it’s a mix of those factors at best.

Why was the marketing stunt bad, then? Because it didn’t drive brand awareness, despite what the LinkedIn preachers would tell you. It drove plain old awareness. Category awareness. Very expensive category awareness. Which is bad for gaining market share.

“Did you see that fire pit ad with Snoop Dogg?”

The one thing that’s been commonly missing from this discussion has been the brand name in question- Solo Stoves. Everything is “the fire pit ad” and “the Snoop Dogg video”. Don’t take my word for it, here are the top 4 organic search results for “snoop dogg fire commercial”:

Admittedly a couple of videos at the top of the SERP mentioned Solo Stoves, but this is about the discussion being had in the media. Nobody is really mentioning Solo. There’s even a People Also Ask for “what smokeless fire pit did Snoop Dogg advertise?”, just to twist the knife. Don’t be surprised; it’s more than 40 years now since Ogilvy On Advertising warned that customers remember the celebrity, not the product they’re endorsing.

Despite that, the campaign has driven significant awareness of fire pits- I nearly started to want one even though my rented flat’s garden is pretty horrible- but that’s about all. Here’s 90 days worth of Google Trends data (my chosen proxy for awareness) for your enjoyment:

‘snoop dogg fire pit’ is nowhere, so at least Solo didn’t totally get cut out.
‘smokeless fire pit’ saw a reasonable spike but it didn’t last- even Snoop couldn’t lessen a clear seasonal drop in interest.
‘solo stove’ spent a couple of days in the stratosphere before falling back below category-level search volume.

From this angle, the campaign looks redeemable; outpacing the category search term? Fantastic. But wait- ‘fire pit’ also saw a big spike. That search volume doesn’t belong to Solo Stoves, but they funded its increase with their marketing.

Now for the reason why I’d be shitting myself (I know you’re dying to hear). The other big player in the fire pit game is Pit Boss. Let’s see how their search volume performed over the same period:

Fucking hellllll. They did nearly as well as Solo Stoves! And for the low, low price of free. In fact, it’s better than free. It was the sky high price of “Snoop Dogg’s endorsement fee” from their biggest competitor’s budget.

A rising tide lifts all boats- in the case of brand awareness, spiking your own search volume might mean the same for the competition if your brand isn’t central to your ad. Which in this case, it wasn’t. Snoop Dogg was. The marshmallow he toasted spent roughly as long on screen as the Solo Stoves logo.

If Solo Stoves wanted a sales increase, by their own admission they didn’t get it. If they wanted to gain market share, that seems unlikely too. They grew the whole market, and their competition benefitted just the same as them. Amazon (the third largest search engine, lest we forget) has a bunch of no-name wood burners and stoves who’ll have had a very good Q4 on Solo’s dime. That’s a big investment for a same-sized piece of a slightly larger pie.

“Is Pepsi Okay?”

Brand awareness is complicated. More is better, but everything is relative to the market you’re in. Everyone has heard of Pepsi, but has a waiter ever asked “is Coke okay?”. If everyone is acutely aware that you’re second-best, that’s where you’ll stay (works of genius like that Avis campaign notwithstanding). Even if Solo Stoves are number 1, they lifted their #2 competitor just as high in terms of awareness. For free.

Not to mention Solo Stoves have been cutting their marketing spend consistently since 2021 as they targeted wholesale success post-pandemic, putting them on the back foot for existing awareness. Rather than acting as the crescendo for previous marketing campaigns, the response to the Snoop campaign can largely be summed up as “who the fuck are these guys, oh that fire pit looks cool”. Fuel for the category-level fire (pun not intended but too fitting to take out).

In short, then?

Solo Stoves drove a shitload of awareness, which is surely a good thing; But they did it for the whole category including their competitors. They’ve admitted their sales uplift was weak, and likely haven’t gained any market share because the short-term buzz was category-wide and didn’t last anyway. As a one-off campaign, this ad missed all its targets. Which is a shame, because it could have been great. So anyone saying “it worked because we’re talking about it” is massively oversimplifying it; so are the “awareness is a scam” crowd.

At least there won’t have been any smoke when they were lighting all that money on fire.