Somewhere right now, a parent is dumping a handful of spinach into a Ninja Creami. It’s not a recipe SharkNinja’s engineers dreamed up. It’s a hack cooked up by the brand’s own customers — the kind of unscripted ingenuity that turned a countertop ice cream machine into one of TikTok’s most reliable viral hits during the pandemic.
But that success came with a limit. By the time Kaitlyn Hebert, global CMO of SharkNinja, sat down to plan the Creami’s next act, the machine had already won over the two audiences most inclined to buy it: gym-goers chasing high-protein, low-cal treats, and parents looking for a five-minute fix for the kids. Everyone else had heard of the Creami. Almost none of them had bought one.
The same problem was playing out one aisle over. Ninja’s Auto Barista products sat in a category built on heritage and price tags that ran $5 to $7 a cup — a market that had never bothered to talk to anyone outside its existing customer base.
Hebert’s answer to both problems turned out to be the same: stop chasing the obvious audience, and let comedy do the work seriousness couldn’t.
For that to happen, SharkNinja needed the right programming — the social-first comedy formats already dominating feeds to be precise. Working with content and creator-focused media company IF7, the brand matched its two priority products to publishers already working in that space: the Auto Barista went to the Brooklyn Coffee Shop satirical series, while Creami landed with the ick, which was simply “having a moment” at the time.
For both streams, SharkNinja’s brief to the agency came with only three rules: it had to be funny, it had to be relevant, and the product had to be woven into the storytelling itself rather than sitting in a spot any competitor’s product could fill.
In each case, SharkNinja’s product sits inside somebody else’s story instead of fronting its own. Nobody’s pitching a Creami or an espresso machine. Rather, somebody’s having a bad date, or ordering from a snarky barista, and the product just happens to be there. What’s different is how the publishers get there. Brooklyn Coffee Shop is fully scripted, written by its founder, actor Pooja Tripathi, and her writers. The ick runs on real dating-horror stories submitted by fans, with SharkNinja and the agency picking whichever one fits Creami best.
The humour, in other words, comes from the publisher’s own world, not from SharkNinja asking someone else to perform inside its ad.
That’s what let SharkNinja solve its actual problem.
“Because these are recognisable worlds with recurring formats, characters and ultimately audience loyalty, whatever constraints creatively that brings are ultimately welcomed by marketers, said James Drake, chief revenue officer at IF7. “It allows them to picture how their product comes to life faster than they would be able to if they had to come up with one themselves.”
A sign of the times
None of this was really a leap for the brand. SharkNinja had already been leaning into comedy and creators before this campaign, which is part of why it moved so decisively once these two publisher pitches landed. What’s changed is the scale of that bet. Social publishers like the ick and Brooklyn Coffee Shop are increasingly becoming staples on SharkNinja’s media plan, subverting the traditional template by putting social media at its fulcrum rather than its edge. In turn, more of the brand’s marketing efforts are grounded in entertainment first, product second programming.
“We are super focused on content and creators telling our story,” said Hebert.
It’s early, but the numbers so far back her up. Two weeks in, the campaign has racked up more than 100,000 engagements and 5.5 million views. . SharkNinja is tracking more than the top-line stuff too: engagement quality, comment sentiment, shares, brand lift and purchase intent.
“Social is how we tell the best stories, and it’s how we have such diversity of stories,” said Hebert.
Strip away the campaign specifics and what Hebert describes is less a media strategy than how SharkNinja is set up to work. The company runs what she calls “pods” — small teams of creative, social and marketing people who stay together on a product from the concept stage through to watching how it actually performs once it’s live. In this process, social doesn’t just post out what everyone else has already made. It sits upstream of it where social teams listen for trends and pass what they find straight to brand marketing, and that shapes positioning and even product decisions, not just campaign ideas.
That’s the organizational answer to a media hierarchy Hebert says has “flipped upside down”. TV still gets a budget line, mostly for ambassador work and broad reach. But it’s a top-up now, not the base. Social sits underneath everything as the primary channel, with affiliates and creators feeding the “wide and micro” layer beneath that. The old model — one 30-second infomercial cut for one audience — gets replaced by dozens of small, specific stories running across as many audiences as SharkNinja can find a story for.
“We started off being an infomercial brand where we’d spend 28 minutes and 30 seconds educating you on a vacuum or a blender and that worked, bit now as formats have changed we have to figure out how to take what used to be a 28 minute story for you and turn it into six seconds, 10 seconds, 30 seconds,” said Herbert. “We want to go out and start to use social as our primary channel to continue to use for storytelling.”
She’s not alone in that thinking. More marketers are going through the same reappraisal of social, viewing it as less a place to interrupt someone’s scroll, more a place to fund branded content that blends into it and then boost it with paid. Creators are the main vector for that shift. And it’s fueling one of the livelier debates in marketing right now. Is the best way to sell to a million people still to talk to all of them at once? Or to find the thousand people they already listen to?
“What makes creators aspirational goes beyond the products they sell,” said Thomas Markland, founder of the global creator agency HYDP. ‘No one pauses a Bond film because 007 checks his Omega, yet the association does more for the watch than any ad could. The best product placement on social now works the same way: high-quality and cleverly executed, without being overly pitched.”
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