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Gen-Z, Millennial Parents Opps: Crocs promotes CMO amid significant spend increase (Score 59)

Our favorite shoe brand is back like nearly year-long CMO vacancy with Heidi Cooley in March 2021. Cooley joined the company in 2016 and most recently served as the VP and head of its global marketing. During her tenure, Cooley has expanded Crocs's longstanding "Come As You Are" campaign, which promotes self-expression, individuality and uniqueness. With a new chief marketer at its helm, it's likely Crocs will continue increasing its ad spend. 

Additionally, in February 2021, the company named Regina Ilustre as the senior digital marketing specialist of its paid social and display efforts. This appointment shows that Crocs's focus on paid social channels is on the rise, which should also result in upped spend.

According to execs in the company's latest earnings call, the company's social and digital marketing are "creating exceptional consumer engagement"; this shows that the current upward momentum of Crocs's investments in these channels (more below) will continue throughout 2021.

YTD, Pathmatics reports the company has spent roughly $1.9m on digital ads, more than double the roughly $834.1k it had spent by this point last year. Crocs's estimated full-year 2020 spend grew by % to $6.7m from that of $7.5m in 2019. It has earned around 437.8m digital impressions since the beginning of 2021 via desktop display (50%), Instagram (26%), Facebook (14%), mobile display (7%) and Twitter (2%) ads. Top site destinations for this year's desktop display ads include zillow.com (14%), yahoo.com, dailymail.co.uk, football.fantasysports.yahoo.com and finance.yahoo.com.

Crocs's digital ad spend is already on the rise in 2021. It also invests in influencer partnerships with celebrities such as Zooey Deschanel. The company primarily targets Gen-Z and millennial parents with a slight skew toward moms. To reach Gen-Z, I expect Crocs to make forays into additional digital channels such as OTT and/or podcast under its new marketing chief. Per Kantar data, the company also utilizes OOH (in which it first began investing in 2020) and print media. 

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