STOP TRYING TO GET IN THE CONVERSATION.
By Hilla Narov, Brand Strategist, Partnerships and Celebrity Talent and Communications Expert
Every Thursday, THE BOARD brings you industry insights from our Members to your inbox.
HOW BRANDS GET NOTICED, NOW.
When I started in marketing and communications, there was something close to a formula. Get a brand on The Today Show. Land Vogue. Get into the New York Times Style section. Make
Oprah’s Favorite Things. A handful of media outlets commanded enormous audiences, and one great placement could genuinely change the trajectory of a brand.
The rules have changed.
Media still matters, but the audience is fragmented.
Consumers are getting information from everywhere: traditional media, Instagram, TikTok,
YouTube, podcasts, newsletters, creators, gaming—the list goes on. The Page Six item that once had everyone talking can now come and go without making a dent.
So, what is a brand supposed to do when there is no longer one place to find its audience? Increasingly, the answer is: create something worthy of the group chat.
THAT’S WHY EVERY BRAND IS SUDDENLY ASKING ABOUT PARTNERSHIPS.
A great partnership can do something media coverage alone can’t always do: put a brand directly into culture. It can create the story, generate the media, and fuel the social content, all at once.
But there’s a catch. We’re now inundated with collaborations. Putting two logos next to each other isn’t a strategy.
The best partnerships live somewhere between the obvious and the absurd. They can be unexpected, but not random.
Sometimes it’s high meets low— no one had a $150 Popeyes chicken tender tower at the Surf
Lodge on their summer-in-Montauk bingo card. Which was sort of the point.
People might love it, hate it, or wonder what Popeyes is doing there, but they were talking about it. The pop-up spawned a wave of memes across social media, and guests happily traded bottle service for tenders, snapping up the limited-edition merch just to prove they’d been there.
And sometimes it’s intentionally absurd: e.l.f. x Liquid Death is another great example. They created “Corpse Paint,” a makeup kit packaged in a coffin. It sounds absurd until you understand the brands: both have built their identities around irreverence and a refusal to take the conventions of their categories too seriously. According to Fast Company, the collection sold out in 45 minutes and generated 12 billion earned-media impressions.
Sometimes it’s a mash-up that simply makes sense. Two things that belong together.
One of our agency’s most successful partnerships was bringing LeBron James into the Barbie universe as a Ken doll.
It wasn’t simply two icons coming together. It brought together sports, fashion, entertainment, and collecting—and connected the enormous cultural worlds surrounding both Barbie and basketball.
You understood it immediately. And people wanted it.
The doll sold out almost instantly. Fans lined up for it. People posted it. Media covered it. The collaboration traveled across audiences.
The partnership itself became the media story.
That, to me, is the real shift.
The best partnerships should feel authentic to both sides. They should create something people actually want. They should give people a reason to participate or share. And ideally, they should connect to a cultural conversation bigger than either brand.
The job today isn’t just figuring out how to get your brand into the conversation.
It’s creating something people want to have a conversation about.
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