Tubi’s ‘chronically online’ marketing team is building out a new kind of gifting strategy

Timothée Chalamet didn’t win an Oscar this year, but his hardest-working fan did take home a prize.

Or, rather, she got one sent to her. Shortly after this year’s Academy Awards, Simone Cromer, who operates Chalamet stan accounts on X, Instagram, and Bluesky under the moniker Club Chalamet, posted a photo on X showing off a self-care package sent by the streamer Tubi. The gift included a massage gun, eye masks, and a Tubi-branded baseball cap, along with a handwritten note.

“They wanted to let me know they noticed the hard work I put into supporting Timothée during the awards season, and although we didn’t get the golden outcome we expected, they wanted me to take care of myself with this gift box,” she wrote in a post accompanying a photo of the gift box. “Thank you guys so much!”

It’s a bit of an unusual brand gift, especially in the streaming landscape, where PR packages are often title-specific and are sent to critics, entertainment journalists, or awards voters. But according to CMO Nicole Parlapiano, giving back to fans is a core part of Tubi’s gifting and brand strategy, which also serves as a way to “actively reject the monoculture” she finds can be commonplace in entertainment marketing.

“I always like to tell people, I’m not a fan of the shows; I’m a fan of the fans,” Parlapiano told us.

Talk to the fan

When Parlapiano joined Tubi in 2022 as the company’s first CMO, there was no social team. Today, she said she considers all 40 members of her marketing team to be part of the social team, which allows them all to keep an eye out for fans and identify who they might want to send gifts to.

“We’re all on different [For You pages],” she said. “We are so chronically online because we have to be. [My colleague] Dana hosts a biweekly ‘gremlin hour’ where we’re just trying things off the internet, just so we are challenging ourselves to try things.”

Sending a package to someone like Cromer, whose Club Chalamet X account has nearly 46,000 followers and an entry on Know Your Meme, came from the team’s social listening efforts, according to Parlapiano. While Tubi plans some of its gifting opportunities around big moments like the Super Bowl, release dates of Tubi originals, or the arrival of beloved IP on the platform, it’s the reactive moments that she finds most exciting.

“It’s an opportunity to be in conversation with our fans, to show them that we’re listening, to show them that we are here to celebrate whatever they’re into,” Parlapiano said. “I don’t know that it’s formulaic. Just when we see it, we know it, and we try to anticipate what people need and have an empathetic lens.”

What is also important, she said, is for Tubi to zig where others zag. “I want to make sure that we’re not doing what other people do, which is like, sending stuff to big accounts,” she said.

Sending gifts doesn’t make up a big percentage of Tubi’s marketing budget, but Parlapiano said gifting spend has “a ton of support internally, from CEO down” and that a companywide appreciation for fans and viewers allows the marketing team to justify the cost.

“We’re a streamer. We don’t have a tangible product,” she said. “So I think it does help build that brand love and build that loyalty. And internally, as a company, everyone’s obsessed with merch.”

Sending gifts is central enough to the marketing strategy that Tubi has created its own site to help speed up the logistics of gifting. Instead of going back and forth in DMs, Parlapiano said that people and accounts they want to send gifts to are directed to forms where they can input details like their address, size, and select any desired products.

Don’t forget the little guy

Running a stan account like Club Chalamet isn’t the only way to get noticed by Tubi. Several lower-profile fans also recently received projectors, popcorn makers, and Tubi-branded Snuggies more evergreen gifts that Parlapiano said all started with a woman named Kesha Renea, known online as Tubi Bae, who periodically posts about her favorite Tubi movies alongside a glass of wine and her bathrobe. As a thank-you, Tubi sent Renea a custom Snuggie, a wine glass, and a projector.

“You just want to be so grateful when people are doing God’s work for us as marketers,” Parlapiano said. “I feel like those posts and that contribution is better than anything I could ever make.”

Those gifts have now become a go-to thank-you gift for fans, according to Parlapiano. Outside of the evergreen program, the team sometimes taps into show-specific lore and dedicated fan accounts when the streamer acquires existing IP. When Tubi brought on Degrassi, for example, Tubi created custom whale tails—a reference to an iconic outfit from the series’ Season 3 episode “U Got the Look”—to give away in a sweepstakes, Parlapiano said.

Tubi’s not the only brand that sees the value in gifting the little guy. Companies like beauty brand Cocokind and beverage brand Vita Coco have recently turned away from influencer gifts and focused more on customer appreciation, even taking some on brand trips and giving out gifts to everyday customers.

For Tubi, customer appreciation will continue to be a big focus—and it could even get bigger than a PR package.

“For certain shows that people were really big fans of, we’ll bring them to set so they can capture content,” Parlapiano said. “We definitely like to be an accessibility brand, [and] if they’re a really big fan, give them an experience that they couldn’t have had before.”