Dollar Shave Club is trying to stop being known only for value. The new campaign shows how a brand repositions with humor and a single idea.
Dollar Shave Club Bets That "Perfectly Good" Beats Looksmaxxing
Dollar Shave Club launched "Perfectly Good Is Perfect," an omnichannel campaign anchored by a 30-second hero video that satirizes self-optimization and looksmaxxing culture. It runs across connected TV, YouTube, Meta and TikTok, and a "Red-ish Carpet" stunt gave regular people celebrity-style interviews in cities including Cincinnati and Knoxville, Tennessee. Chief Brand and Innovation Officer Laura Higgins wrote the brief. She told Marketing Dive, "I don't want people thinking of us as just the value brand."
The work was created in-house with real people, and agency partner Humanaut helped cut production to about two and a half months. Higgins said of AI, "We didn't need [AI] for the concept, but it helped us push on different areas." The campaign follows what she described as six months of campaigns that were not necessarily connected, and a second phase will fold in the women's line and extend the "Hairbernation" social campaign. Private equity firm Nexus Capital Management acquired the brand in 2023, and it bought body care brand Truly Beauty last month.
A brand that has been known as the cheap option for a decade just picked a fight with the whole self-improvement economy, and it did it with humor instead of a price tag. Smart. The part to copy is the admission that campaigns were disconnected for six months. One idea across every channel beats five good ideas that never meet. The part to watch is whether "perfectly good" lands as confidence or as a shrug.
Integrated marketing communications and positioning. A brand with a value reputation is trying to reposition without abandoning it, which is a classic problem of moving up the perceived-quality ladder. Ask students what a unified message is worth when each channel reaches a different audience, and how they would measure whether the repositioning worked.
The creator economy keeps consolidating. Today the move is toward B2B and LinkedIn.
Billion Dollar Boy Group Buys a LinkedIn-First Agency to Chase B2B Creator Budgets
London-based Billion Dollar Boy Group completed its acquisition of Creator Authority, a roughly three-year-old B2B creator and influencer marketing agency based in Santa Monica, California. Financial terms were not disclosed. Creator Authority is an official LinkedIn marketing partner, and clients that BDB Group will integrate include Amazon, Adobe, AT&T, IBM, Dropbox, HubSpot, Mastercard and Notion. Co-founder and CEO Brendan Gahan becomes senior vice president of B2B, and co-founder Cassie Jackson becomes group account director for B2B, working from Austin, Texas.
The case for the deal rests on figures from the buyer and from LinkedIn, so treat them as vendor-reported. BDB Group says one-fifth of the 1,000 U.S. and U.K. marketing decision-makers it surveyed invested in B2B creator marketing this year, making it the second most popular creator investment, and that it delivers better ROI than other tactics it assessed. Findings LinkedIn cited in the announcement say 59% of B2B buyers pay attention to creator content on LinkedIn. BDB Group plans to top $100 million in global revenue next year.
B2B has been sitting on the sidelines of the creator boom, and the buyers just showed up. If you sell to other businesses, the credible voice in your category is probably a practitioner with 20,000 followers, not your CEO. Start by finding them. The caution: these ROI claims come from the people selling the service. Ask for results you can test in your own pipeline.
Source credibility theory. Buyers in complex purchases lean on peers whose expertise they trust more than on brand messaging. Ask students how credibility transfers from a creator to a product, and what is lost when a brand pays for the relationship.
The AI conversation is shifting from what the tools can make to who is responsible for the quality of what they make.
Brand Marketers Say "Good Enough, Go" Is Creeping Into AI Work
Digiday reported on a town hall held under the Chatham House Rule at its AI Marketing Strategies event on Sept. 24, co-hosted with Glossy and Modern Retail. Brand-side marketers discussed holding standards across digital supply chains as companies default to automated workflows amid AI-driven job cuts. A participant from a premium beauty brand described a "10/80/10" workflow: about 10% of time prompting AI, AI producing the middle 80%, and 10% of time refining the output. The same participant said, "The quality control is so bad."
Several marketers said agency partners are less motivated to protect brand standards and often rely on junior employees to oversee AI platforms, and one said they had to insist on human oversight before executions could run. DEPT's Isabel Perry argued, "We are drowning in measurement," and that marketers should measure gaps rather than just numbers. This is a roundtable of anonymous voices, not a survey, so it shows what practitioners are saying and not how widespread it is. The story is a month old, and it is the clearest account we found this week of the quality problem behind the AI push.
Speed was the pitch for AI, and speed is exactly how quality slips. If your AI workflow ends at the first usable draft, you built a content mill, not a brand. Put a named human on sign-off, write down the standard, and check the agency has done the same. The 10/80/10 split is a good audit question: who owns the last 10%?
Quality management and the speed-quality tradeoff. Automation shifts control from production to review, so quality now depends on the review step being resourced. Ask students where in a content workflow the human checkpoint should sit, and who in the chain has the incentive to enforce it.
Not an AI name today. It is the streamer whose ad business missed its own target, with live figures from the Oct. 21 close.
Netflix (NFLX): The Ad Tier Missed Its Own Target
NFLX closed at $65.04 on Oct. 21, down $3.65 or 5.31%, near the bottom of a 52-week range of $64.10 to $124.86. StockAnalysis shows a market cap of $270.82 billion, a P/E of 18.83 and no dividend. Fifty-two analysts rate it Buy with an average target of $91.39, about 40.5% above the latest price. Trailing twelve-month revenue is $49.73 billion, up 14.7%, with net income of $14.77 billion, up 41.6%.
The news behind the move, per Marketing Dive: Netflix's Q3 revenue rose 12% to $12.9 billion, it cut 2026 revenue guidance to $51.1 billion, and it now expects about $2.7 billion in ad revenue, down from $3 billion. Co-CEO Greg Peters said the ad business is growing over 80% this year but is "a bit behind our aggressive target." Netflix is adding its ads plan in 15 new countries, launched a Netflix Pixel and enhanced Conversion API on Oct. 20, and plans to open The Trade Desk audiences next month. For marketers, the question is whether the ad suite closes the measurement gap.
A guidance cut on the growth engine is a real signal, and the stock is trading at the low end of its year. Cheaper is not the same as safe. For us the useful read is on the ad side: a platform growing ads over 80% and still missing its own target tells us advertiser demand is there but measurement is still earning trust. Treat it as a watch item, not a pick.
⚠️ Not investment advice. Verify independently before any decision.
The standing list, straight from Kelly.
Hannah Montana 20th Anniversary Special
Disney+/Hulu. Miley at 33, hosted by Alex Cooper.
Disney+ / HuluLove Story: JFK Jr. & Carolyn Bessette
FX/Hulu. Ryan Murphy. 40M+ hours watched.
FX / HuluThe Pitt
Still the most intense thing on TV.
MaxYouTube
Everything about Claude Cowork.
YouTube