Etsy’s first-ever brand boss isn’t interested in ‘shiny, polished’ ads

Etsy is a marketplace hosting 7 million sellers and 100 million buyers. Since it doesn’t have complete control over the user experience, the product images you see are posted by sellers, for example, its brand must be strong. Last month, Etsy appointed its first chief brand officer, Brad Minor, who stepped into the role after two years as the company’s head of brand marketing and communications.

“Over the last few months, Etsy has doubled down on protecting and strengthening its brand,” he says. “Etsy wants to send a signal to all stakeholders, to buyers and sellers and even the broader community, that it is focused on brand at the highest level.”

In December, Etsy cut 225 jobs, equivalent to 11% of its staff, after its sales had remained flat for two years. Its chief marketing officer, Ryan Scott, was let go in the restructure and marketing was consolidated into the operations team sitting under the chief operating officer, Raina Moskowitz. Another high-profile example of the CMO role being scrapped, Etsy joins Compare the Market, Starbucks and others as being CMO-less brands.

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It’s unique for marketing to sit within operations; Minor says it’s the first time he has worked in this setup. The benefit, he says, is that marketers aren’t siloed from the product, trust, safety and strategy teams. “It means you have a better understanding of the how and the why and the direct impact that every decision has on customers because you are working day to day with folks that are better able to infuse and inform your decisions,” he says.

In past roles at HubSpot, Chase Bank and American Express, Minor says marketing was “cordoned” off from the day-to-day operations. But at Etsy, the lion’s share of Minor’s brand work is been “rooted” in policy and product. “It’s less about creating shiny, polished imagery that is devoid of substance,” and instead, the starting point, he says, is always: “What is the substance to customer buyer experience we’re creating? What are the risks of that and what are the things we need to solve as we build in tandem the story and the experience itself?”

Only once you have all of those pieces can you then add “beautiful creative and bold brand media” to amplify that, he says.

‘Keep Commerce Human on Etsy’

Minor admits his marketing strategy “isn’t revolutionary,” but is instead a simple plan of mapping out three key stories a year and building comms around it. The first is all about what Etsy is; this is where Etsy can tell its product story through the notion of helping people be better gifters.

The second story is when people should think of Etsy and what it offers. Marketing in this bucket tends to be seasonal and occasion-based, so Christmas, Valentine’s Day or Halloween, when Etsy can focus on promoting sales and merchandise.

Finally, there is the brand mission – why Etsy matters to the world in the current cultural context. Here, Etsy has launched a new brand platform: ‘Keep Commerce Human on Etsy.’ Its latest campaign under the new platform uses the names and faces of its sellers to show the people behind the products.

Minor explains that ‘Keep Commerce Human’ has always been the internal brand mission, but that it had never been used externally. There was the traditional agency brainstorm trying to land the line for the campaign, before realizing that it already had the line. “We just needed to double down on what Etsy is and make it relevant.”

Fewer, bigger, better media buys

Etsy has been eying up opportunities in entertainment, lifestyle and fashion. Hiring Drew Barrymore as a chief gifting officer is one example, along with a partnership with American musician Kacey Musgraves, who creates bespoke collections, and a brand ambassador deal with Japanese tennis player Naomi Osaka.

Etsy uses its main agency, Orchard, for all its upper-funnel marketing and does its mid-funnel and out-of-home creative in-house.

In 2021, Etsy’s then-chief marketing officer, Ryan Scott, told The Drum that the company was doubling down on its TV investment. Three years on from that and Minor has pivoted the strategy away from getting the most “efficient” TV buy to instead getting the most “unmissable, impactful” TV buy. Its latest campaign was designed with the 2024 Olympic Games in mind, he says.

“How do you show up at that local level and show up where there is an appreciation for brand storytelling, where there is a heroism and the subjects of content? Let’s focus more on that versus being so efficient that we are invisible.”

It is also this thinking that led Etsy to its debut at the Super Bowl earlier this year. The company launched a product feature, ‘Gift Mode,’ at the Super Bowl with a 30-second spot that satirized the French gifting America the Statue of Liberty. It was the first major project to come out of Etsy’s newly combined marketing and ops department.

“The Super Bowl was a chance for us to put a stake in the ground. We have a media buy, there’s a date, there’s a show, there’s a moment and we had to work cross-functionally to make sure the product is ready,” he says. The result was a functioning product and a launch campaign activated across every media channel.

“It created that muscle memory and that proof of concept for what it looks like when product and marketing show up at the same time and work towards a common moment.”

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