In my family, password-sharing is its own love language. My sister gets my Hulu password in exchange for her husband’s Peacock Premium login. My boyfriend’s parents subsidize our HBO Max viewing; their grandchildren watch Disney+ using my credentials. My parents spent years watching Netflix courtesy of a neighbor. And one of my best friends, a television buff, accesses all those services and Paramount+ without paying for any of them herself.

Don’t tell me you don’t do it, too. As streaming services proliferate, password-sharing is fast becoming one of the TV industry’s costliest problems.

• In 2019, research firm Parks Associates estimated that piracy, which includes account-sharing, cost US video providers $9.1 billion, with nearly a third due to shared and stolen logins; by 2024, the company projects it to grow to $12.5 billion.

It’s complicated: Cracking down on password-sharing isn’t exactly going to be easy. Believe it or not, streamers admit they benefit from temporary password-sharing when it comes to building brand affinity and audience growth. And convincing people to start paying up in a challenging economic environment with plenty of competition may be even harder than it sounds.

“[Streaming services] don’t necessarily want people to go elsewhere,” Paul Erickson, research director of entertainment and consumer technology at Parks Associates, told Marketing Brew. “We’ll see them navigate that difficult middle ground where they’re not trying to give the service away, but they’re also not trying to drive people away either.”

Click here to read how different streaming platforms are addressing the issue, if it could impact advertisers, and how a password crackdown might backfire.—KS

Eric Clapton sitting in with the Beatles. Scooby-Doo and the Harlem Globetrotters. Awkwardly introducing your mother to coworkers. We all love a crossover, a marketing gimmick as old as time.

To promote DirecTV’s Stream—a streaming service pitched as an offering that combines on-demand and live TV—the creative agency TBWA went whole hog with the crossover theme, turning Serena Williams into DC’s Wonder Woman, placing the tennis star in The Matrix, and most recently, giving Major League Baseball legends proton packs in the Ghostbusters universe.

Marketing Brew caught up with TBWA creative directors Mark Winters and Ryan Buckley, who’ve both worked on the campaign since its debut last summer, to get the skinny on how DirecTV’s multiverse came to be.

Read what they had to say here.—RB

To borrow a quote from Amy Poehler during an Amazon presentation Monday night, this week’s not the upfronts, downfronts, or the old fronts. It’s the NewFronts.

Streaming platforms and publishers have spent the last two days unveiling new ad formats and flashy new programming for advertisers to consider as they work out their upcoming marketing plans. Presentations continue through Thursday, but at the halfway point of the week, here are some of our biggest takeaways so far.

Shop ’til you drop: Shoppable ad offerings on TV are here to stay. Roku showed off a shoppable ad format that lets brands sell products directly to viewers, who can then check out using Roku Pay from their devices. Condé Nast, meanwhile, expanded the availability of Condé Nast Shoppable, which lets viewers instantly buy outfits and items displayed in programming, across multiple platforms and channels.

Perfect placement: Also here to stay: product placement—especially the customizable kind. NBCUniversal’s Peacock showed off a new ad format called “scene ads” that places ads in the background of shows. Amazon also showed off its virtual product-placement technology, which inserts products like drink cans and snack packages into programs like Making the Cut and the Bosch franchise.

Originals rule: Free streamers are trying to make sure their programming is premium, even if the price point isn’t. Fox-owned free streamer Tubi said it’ll release more than 100 original series in the next year, while Roku is highlighting its offering of originals—including The Great American Baking Show, starring (who else?) Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith—for the first time. Freevee, meanwhile, is increasing its own slate of originals by 70% year over year.—KS

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Watch out: Facebook bugs are impacting attribution for advertisers.

Coke vs. Pepsi: How their classic rivalry has shaped marketing.

Collab: TikTok shares how marketers can successfully work with creators on campaigns.

Helllooo, untapped potential: US Hispanic audiences carry hugely influential brand-growth potential—and with TelevisaUnivision’s advanced advertising and marketing solutions, your brand can utilize cross-platform, in-culture messaging at scale to seize this significant marketing opportunity. Grow with TelevisaUnivision here.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}

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Stat: “When choosing people to taste-test new products, major snack companies look for ‘heavy users,’ or people who eat chips around four times a week,” from Eater’s piece on why American chips are “so boring.”

Read: “CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed Covid lockdown orders.”—Vice Motherboard’s Joseph Cox

Another read: But that isn’t all. A few hours later, Cox reported that the same data broker the CDC used was also selling the location data of people who visited Planned Parenthood.

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• Colleges are adapting corporate marketing tactics to drive enrollment
• Internet-connected TV continues rapid growth, but challenges remain
• How one Ukrainian ad agency is surviving the war