Female Millennial Opps: Glossier adds brand VP amid spike in digital spend (Score 42)

Marking its latest growth effort, D2C company Glossier selected Kleo Mack as its first-ever brand VP. Mack will begin on April 19, and her responsibilities will include brand marketing and strategy, along with the oversight of consumer insights and social media teams. She previously served as L'Oréal's corporate strategic marketing VP, leading the company's company-wide marketing strategies. Since Mack will handle the social media team at Glossier, I expect its paid social spend to increase under her leadership.

**Note: Mack did not officially join the company before the time of publication, but I expect we will be able to provide her email address in our next Glossier update!**

2020 was reportedly a shaky year for this company. In August, it had to let go of all its retail employees due to the decision to keep stores closed for most of the year because of the coronavirus. These physical locations once created a lot of hype for Glossier with testing stations and Instagram-friendly design features. However, the demand for online goods such as Glossier's has risen.

iSpot reports the company made its foray into national TV in late March 2021; since then, it has spent approximately $233k this channel. Its 2021 commercials have targeted millennial women viewing programs such as The Real Housewives of New Jersey, Modern Family, Keeping Up With the Kardashians, Married to Medicine and Summer House.

So far this year, according to Pathmatics, Glossier has allocated roughly $3.8m toward digital ads. This amount has already reached more than half of the roughly $6.1m that the company allocated in all of 2020, signaling that its 2021 spend will also end up higher YOY; it's also around 5x the roughly $722.8k that Glossier had allocated by this point last year. The company's estimated full-year spend of 2020 ($6.1m) was up by % compared to that of $4m in 2019. It has earned ~525.2m digital impressions YTD via desktop display (40%), desktop video (20%), Instagram (16%), mobile display (11%), mobile video (8%), Facebook (4%) and Twitter (1%) ads. 57% of this year's digital display ads have been placed site direct, primarily onto sites such as medicalnewstoday.com (12%), drugs.com, people.com, healthline.com and psychcentral.com; most (68%) of this year's desktop video ads have been placed site direct onto youtube.com.

Additionally, Magellan reveals Glossier has aired 50 podcast ads within the past 12 months, almost double the 29 podcast ads it aired within the 12 months prior.

As you can see, Glossier's digital ad spend is skyrocketing; this upward momentum will continue under its new brand VP considering the company's pursuing growth. I also expect it to continue using TV throughout the year. Right now, Glossier's traditional female target demographic consists mostly of millennials. Per Kantar data, it also invests in radio, print (local and national newspapers) and OOH media.

Agency & martech readers - Get on the radars of this company's DMs for potential work as it continues pursuing growth, especially now that its leadership team is growing. Glossier seems to handle creative in-house, not yet working with outside agency partners.