Data Drop: Nutter Butter Math

ADWEEK has a new weekly newsletter exploring the topics marketers care about through numbers — both hard and soft. It’s called Data Drop. You can sign up to receive it here.

Below is a sample of this week’s edition.

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The Numbers Behind Nutter Butter’s Nuttiness

If you haven’t visited Nutter Butter’s TikTok account lately, it’s worth the trip. Bizarre and sometimes frightening stuff is happening there. Also: It’s receiving millions of views.

The brand began flirting with the absurd in early 2023, meaning enough time has passed to ask the responsible question: Has the viral content led to hard sales?

Data from Stackline, an AI-enabled retail intelligence and activation platform, reveals a bump that began in May and has yet to go away. During the first week of June, to get more specific, shoppers bought more than 5,000 Nutter Butter products on Amazon, up 190% compared to the first week of January.

Additional figures, however, suggest social media doesn’t deserve all the credit. Around the same time that Nutter Butter began selling more products on Amazon, it reduced its prices below the category average.

Another thing particular to Nutter Butter: 77% of the brand’s customers indicate product quality is the main reason they continue to purchase the peanut butter cookies, according to figures from Stackline. Only 46% of consumers say the same about cookie brands in general.

Perhaps the lesson here is that a creamy, surreal content strategy filling can help drive sales as long as it’s sandwiched between wafers of modest pricing and superior quality.

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Beyoncé Cleans Up for Levi’s

On the flip side of Nutter Butter, Levi’s needs a bounce back… in engagement.

The denim brand hopes a new campaign featuring Queen Bey can outperform its previous commercial, titled “The Floor Is Yours,” which ran from March to May. That previous ad generated around 17% less viewer engagement—i.e. online searches and web traffic—than the average clothing and accessories spot, according to TV ad performance tracker EDO.

It’s clear Levi’s has pulled out the big guns to get a jolt.

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Creators Spur More Spend This Holiday Season

Brands that can’t afford Beyoncé to promote their goods and services can always consider influencers. Thankfully, there’s no shortage of them. And evidence shows they’re effective.

The latest holiday forecast from Adobe Analytics estimates online U.S. sales between Nov. 1 and Dec. 31 will reach $240.8 billion, an 8.4% increase compared to the same time last year.

Adobe anticipates creators and influencers to play a major role in this season of giving, encouraging people to shop 10 times more than social media overall.

Although paid search will remain the main driver of retail sales across major marketing channels, growing at a rate of 1% to 3%, affiliates and partners—a category that includes social media influencers—are set to grow more: 7% to 10%.

Cyber Week, which captures around 17% of the season’s spending, is also expected to break records this year. While Cyber Monday will remain the year’s biggest online shopping day, Black Friday and Thanksgiving Day are bound to outpace Cyber Monday in terms of growth—rising 9.9% and 8.7%, respectively—as retailers offer better deals earlier.