Brooklinen Fires the Agency Search and Casts a Knick Instead
The sheets brand's first celebrity-led campaign, "Best. Sheets. Ever.," was built entirely in-house, and it bets that Robby Hoffman, Alana Haim, and Mikal Bridges know its audience better than any agency pitch deck.
Brooklinen took its biggest campaign to date, and its first built around celebrities, and then declined to hire an agency to make it.
"Best. Sheets. Ever." stars comedian Robby Hoffman, "Saturday Night Live" cast member Ben Marshall, musician-actor Alana Haim, and New York Knicks forward Mikal Bridges, each filmed in their own bedbound vignette: a virtual therapy session, an elaborate excuse to avoid plans, a slow wakeup, a phone interview conducted from under the covers. The 30-second hero spot and its cutdowns were directed by Barbara Anastacio and run across linear TV, connected TV, YouTube, and Meta through the fall, timed to land around the "SNL" season premiere and the NBA's October tip-off.
Chief marketing officer Laura Jacobs framed the in-house call as a casting philosophy as much as a budget one: the brand wanted people "culturally in the conversation" who "spoke to their own audiences," rather than a single face meant to represent everyone. That is a reasonable bet for a category that lives or dies on word of mouth, since four disconnected fan bases cover more ground than one spokesperson's reach ever could.
It is also a test of whether a DTC brand's internal team can do what an agency is built to do: hold four disparate celebrities inside one consistent tone without the campaign reading like four separate ideas stitched together. The vignette structure solves that problem cleanly enough, but the real test comes when the brand tries to follow "Best. Sheets. Ever." with something that tops it, without an agency's Rolodex to call on.
Source: PR Newswire
Kyle Duford, Founder & Editor, BRNDWIRE. More from Kyle →
