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Solo Stove and Snoop Dogg, the duo behind one of the buzziest campaigns of last year, are back together again with an even bigger effort in which the rapper doesn’t blow any smoke.
Hot on the heels of his gig as an NBC special correspondent at the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris, Snoop stars in “Blunt Marketing” for Solo Stove, a maker of premium firepits. Created by The Martin Agency, the campaign is a follow-up to the brand’s “Snoop Goes Smokeless,” which went viral and sparked an industrywide debate about the effectiveness of celebrity-driven marketing.
With the first campaign, Snoop, a cannabis connoisseur, pretended to give up smoking, but it was actually a stunt to promote Solo Stove’s smokeless fire pit range. Now, Snoop, hanging out with his longtime collaborator, Warren G, gets blunter about his intentions: He’s just here to sell stoves.
“Snoop Goes Smokeless” is Solo Stove’s largest and most integrated campaign to date, and it will run through the rest of the year.
In the videos, Snoop employs his signature blunt humor. Lounging by a firepit, he tells viewers: “This is an ad for Solo Stove. You should buy a Solo Stove … I’m here because you’re more likely to buy this firepit because I’m Snoop.”
The ad ends with a flurry of Solo Stove logos and cha-ching sound effects.
Like Snoop himself, the brand is unapologetic about capitalizing on the rapper’s appeal to move its bottom line.
“We know brands hire influencers to sell products and drive awareness, but as an industry, we kind of hide behind this. We decided to just be direct,” Luana Bumachar, chief marketing officer of Solo Brands, told ADWEEK. “Snoop is here because he’s going to sell.”
Lessons from going smokeless
After its 2023 prank went viral and generated international media coverage, Solo Stove’s first collaboration with Snoop grabbed attention for another reason.
In January, Solo Stove CEO John Merris, who had praised the Snoop campaign, left the company. Chief financial officer Andrea Tarbox said then that the stunt “raised brand awareness” but “did not lead to the sales lift that [they] had planned.”
The CFO’s comment triggered a debate within the ad industry about whether the brand had mismanaged its marketing budget with a big celebrity partnership, or simply set unrealistic expectations of return on investment.
Bumachar—a former Unilever marketer who joined Solo Stove as its first CMO in February, after the campaign concluded—told ADWEEK that the initial effort was “misunderstood” and proved successful for the business by several metrics.
“Snoop Goes Smokeless” garnered 19.5 billion impressions, more than 10,000 media placements in 68 countries, and $100 million in earned media value, according to the brand. Solo Stove also saw a 500% increase in organic search and 70% rise in revenue within 30 days of the campaign’s debut, and the best four weeks of firepit sales immediately after the ad launched.
“It made Solo Stove a household name. We were everywhere,” Bumachar said.
However, the brand learned a few marketing lessons that informed the development of its new campaign.
Because “Snoop Goes Smokeless” launched in November 2023, just six weeks before the year ended, the brand “didn’t have enough time to capitalize on the campaign” commercially, said Bumachar.
Therefore, “Blunt Marketing” starts earlier and runs longer, until the end of 2024, coinciding with three product launches in the fall.
While the first campaign “didn’t connect all the dots from awareness to conversion to consideration,” this one is larger and more integrated, “not only from investment but also from reaching consumers at every touchpoint,” she explained.
It includes video, digital, social, influencer, audio, search, performance, and retail marketing across programming and channels including Thursday Night Football, NFL Sunday Ticket, TikTok, Amazon, and The Voice (in which Snoop stars as a coach).
“Where you see Snoop, you will see Solo Stove,” Bumachar said.
The brand also created Snoop x Solo Stove limited edition firepits, which come with special merchandise including accessories, sweatshirts, hats, and water bottles. There will be custom Snoop Dogg Fire Rings and Surround Lights sold separately.
Finally, Solo Stove learned to “not treat Snoop as an influencer but as a creator,” Bumachar said. “We let him be himself.”
The Martin Agency wrote a script, but Snoop riffed on the lines, many of which ended up in the final ad.
This unfiltered approach is true to Snoop’s personality—he’s been candid on Instagram about making nearly $9 million as an Olympics correspondent, for example—but will also help Solo Stove stand out from other advertisers, according to Bumachar.
“It’s a different creation process versus other brands, where everything tends to be very scripted,” she added. “This is the tonality we’re going to carry with the brand: witty, funny, light-hearted, unapologetic.”
Nevertheless, Solo Stove is very clear about how it will measure the success of this campaign.
“We want to see Snoop selling a lot of stoves,” Bumachar said.
