Inside Olipop's growth strategy with Chad Wilson, head of marketing

04/02/24 • 34 min

Prebiotic soda brand Olipop is in growth mode, coming off $200 million in annual sales and its first national campaign with pop star Camila Cabello last year.

A lot of the six-year-old brand’s initial popularity tracks back to TikTok. However, the last year has been transformational for Olipop, positioning itself as a true competitor to the likes of legacy brands like Pepsi or Coca Cola.

“We’re such a different company today than we were 12 months ago largely because of that growth,” said Chad Wilson, head of marketing for Olipop, on a recent episode of the Digiday Podcast. “From a marketing perspective, we have seen huge success in social and influencers. We jumped on social early on in the company’s growth and it was like rocket fuel almost.”

On this episode of the Digiday Podcast, we caught up with Wilson to talk about maintain Olipop’s momentum, its in-house agency and what testing and learning looks like on TikTok.

Prebiotic soda brand Olipop is in growth mode, coming off $200 million in annual sales and its first national campaign with pop star Camila Cabello last year.

On this episode of the Digiday Podcast, we caught up with Wilson to talk about maintain Olipop’s momentum, its in-house agency and what testing and learning looks like on TikTok.

Previous Episode

How Janice Min is selling entertainment advertisers on The Ankler

Earlier this year, Janice Min, CEO of The Ankler, said that she’s expecting to hit $10 million in annual revenue in 2025. During a podcast recording with Digiday, Min revised that statement to say, “We have a shot of getting to that number this year.”

To do that, Min’s team is taking a three-pronged, straightforward approach: Make good content to attract audiences, quality audiences that are attractive to advertisers, and combine those things in-person through events.

“I wish we had some AI-generated something that was going to be the thing that rains down millions of dollars on us, but it's really boring,” said Min.

“Boring” — or not, it's notable that a media company that launched in January 2022 and covers Hollywood is charting revenue growth at all amid two major film industry strikes as well as a tumultuous period for advertising revenue.

On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Min shares how “tune-in” advertising and “for your consideration” advertising have persisted despite the strikes and how The Ankler, born on Substack, has expanded across platforms to become a full-fledged digital media outlet.

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Next Episode

How Linktree vp Lara Cohen is championing for creators to get a bigger piece of the pie

The creator economy is bursting at the seams as brands tap into social media stars, both big and small, hoping to recreate word of mouth-style marketing online.

In fact, agency clients and brands invested more in influencer marketing in 2023 than they did in 2022, according to Digiday+ research. In Q1 of 2022, 69% of agency professionals said their clients spent at least a very small portion of their marketing budgets on influencers. By Q1 of 2023, that figure jumped to 76%. Goldman Sachs predicts that the creator economy could approach half of a trillion dollars by 2027.

As more money flows into the creator economy, creators are looking for two things: their fair share of that money and more sovereignty over their online presences. And Linktree, a link-in-bio tool, is positioning itself to be an intermediary, facilitating the growth, per Lara Cohen, vp of partners and business development at Linktree.

“There's a shift happening right now and I think the financial shift has really yet to catch up directionally [with] where the market is right now, in some ways,” Cohen said on the most recent episode of the Digiday Podcast. “The real shift that we haven't seen yet that we're really advocating for on the front lines of Linktree is that these creators should be paid more.”

On this episode, we caught up with Cohen to talk about the growing creator economy, monetization at Linktree and what maturation looks like in this space.