For years, Love Island was associated with fast fashion, dressing contestants in brands like PrettyLittleThing and I Saw It First. UK season five runner-up Molly-May Hague even became the former’s creative director in 2021, and last year’s winner, Millie Court, took a job at Asos after the season wrapped.

• After facing criticism—including from past contestants—for promoting fast fashion given its ties to labor exploitation and environmental waste, British TV network ITV decided to break it off with its fast-fashion partners and recouple with eBay, dressing this season’s contestants in “pre-loved” clothing.
• Here in the US, NBC worked with ITV to integrate shoppable features into season four of Love Island USA streaming on Peacock, enabling viewers to purchase from small retailers they may otherwise not have heard of.

Zoom out: On both sides of the pond, it seems, Love Island has become a vehicle for testing out new ways of influencing viewers’ shopping habits, with a focus away from fast fashion.

Previously…on Love Island

Venice Asourmatzian works on the content and creative systems team as a senior associate director at MediaCom, where she said her team’s role is “helping brands become more culturally relevant.”

“We saw the tension that eBay could solve by providing a more sustainable way to buy fashion,” she told us. When pitching ITV, she said it wasn’t a tough sell given how much “they wanted to evolve.” Read the full story here.—KH

Q2 earnings are (almost) behind us, and just like your cousin’s bachelorette party, there’s a theme.

What is it? Ad spend is down. If you haven’t been paying much attention, companies including Meta, Roku, Pinterest, Snap, and Microsoft mentioned a slowdown in ad spend during their Q2 earnings this year.

Mr. Brightside: Even as advertisers pull back, it’s still not totally clear whether we’re in a recession or not, and Friday’s unexpectedly strong job report didn’t exactly help.

• Zoom in: Last month, employment at US ad agencies totaled 220,500 jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which Ad Age said was an “all-time high.”

Looking ahead: If we are headed toward a recession (or something like it), some say it’s best to keep spending those ad $$.

• Candace Nelson, who co-founded cupcake brand Sprinkles a few years before the Great Recession, recently advised businesses to “fight the urge to slash sales and marketing budget” during a market downturn.
• “In a less noisy ad environment, it’s easier to be seen and heard—and it’s less expensive to get in front of those customers,” she wrote. “Marketing and advertising could very well be the unexpected workhorse to carry you through an economic depression.”
• A recent study by Analytic Partners, which ​​analyzed “hundreds of billions in marketing spend,” found that brands that reduced ad spend during the last recession “risked losing 15% of their business to competitors who boosted theirs.”
• In June, Steve Grant, SVP of human intelligence at Horizon Media, told Marketing Brew that challenger brands that are “aggressive with their spend and targeted with the messaging and activation strategies that they take” can end up making “some headway against overcautious, dominant incumbents” if the latter pulls back on advertising.

+1: Major companies like Diageo, Uniliever, and Coca-Cola all recently said they’ve increased marketing spend this year.—MS

When consumers look to crack open a cold one this summer, they may not be pulling a hard seltzer or premium beer from the cooler. These segments are seeing sales fizzling out this summer, according to major beer makers, as consumers increasingly favor adventurous flavors and price-conscious options.

Hard sell-tzer: On Truly Hard Seltzer-maker Boston Beer’s Q2 earnings call on July 21, chairman and founder Jim Koch said the company saw a “greater-than-expected continuing decline in demand in the hard-seltzer category.”

• Truly saw dollar sales dip 17% in Q2, losing 1.3 share points in the category, the company reported.

“Our core light-flavored Truly business has suffered and not performed as we’d expected, as consumers eagerly adopt what’s new and interesting,” Koch noted.

• In an effort to rejuvenate Truly sales, it’s reformulating its core product with real fruit juice this month and debuting a Truly Vodka Seltzer line in the fall.
• On the bright side: Koch said other RTDs, like Hard Mountain Dew, have been performing well.

Vizzy maker Molson Coors reported a slightly sunnier seltzer performance on Tuesday, saying its share of the segment grew from 7% in Q1 to 9% in Q2 and highlighting its Topo Chico Hard Seltzer, released last year, as a notable success.

Consumer preferences in the beer space may be changing as well. Read the full story on Retail Brew here.—EC

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

Sommeliers: Ryan Reynolds and George Clooney have liquor brands, but women celebrities have been diving headfirst into the wine biz lately (leave Kendall Jenner out of this).

Be a preventer, not a fixer: Find out how one family-run grocery chain is setting itself up for a possible recession.

: Have you heard of these eight new social media platforms?

Crash course: Learn how to make better, data-supported arguments and grow your marketing budget with the Brew’s Business Analytics Accelerator—made for people who aren’t finance gurus. It starts September 6, so apply today!

There are no more cookies in the cookie jar. Marketing Brew and experts from Dentsu Media and PwC will discuss how to deliver personalized digital environments and experiences in a post-third-party cookie world during a virtual event on 8/10 at noon ET sponsored by PwC. Sign up here.

We do not know when, exactly, this ad is from (but our best guess is the late 1800s to early 1900s). We only know that it is good. Hit Reply if you have the answer.

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

• Congress wants the FTC to create a bureau dedicated to privacy. And that’s a big deal
• Marketers focus on low prices and value in back-to-school ads
• Forget college rankings: Which universities have the best brand trust?