Digital Millennial Opps: Sweetwater Sound hires CMO (Score 52)
Sales lead: This hire will affect the company's marketing strategy & agency roster. 
- Sweetwater Sound hired Jeanine Gaffke as CMO, effective April 2023.
- Gaffke most recently served as CMO of Halo Investing.
- Sweetwater's incumbent CMO, David Stewart, is retiring after 31 years.
Target demographic: Millennials
The company will likely:
- Ramp digital spend back up
- Diversify ad placement
- Build out the agency roster
Digital and social insights (digital ad spend, effectiveness, impressions, and performance)
- YTD spend: Sweetwater spent nearly $4.1m on digital display ads YTD, down 20% from $5.1m spent in this channel during the same time period of 2022.
- YTD data: 581m impressions via Facebook (66%), Instagram (16%), YouTube (10%), and desktop display (7%).
- 2021-2022 spend: Full-year spend increased by 43% from $10.2m in 2021 to $14.6m in 2022.
- Ad location: It placed 95% of these ads directly onto sites such as facebook.com, instagram.com, youtube.com, yahoo.com, and soundonsound.com. It placed 5% of these ads indirectly through Google AdX+AdSense and Criteo onto sites such as yahoo.com, nexusmods.com, finance.yahoo.com, usatoday.com, and kohls.com.
Agency analysis:
- Opportunity: CMO hires are the number one sign of possible agency changes.
- Current roster:
- North 6th Agency: PR AOR
Insight Sources: Digital spend insights estimated by Pathmatics.
