If you shopped on Amazon this year, you’d have been hard-pressed to miss the marketing for some of Prime Video’s biggest programming swings yet.

• On Amazon.com? You might have seen a video on the homepage plugging Thursday Night Football, which streams on Prime Video free for Amazon Prime members.
• Signed up for Prime? Maybe you checked out a special sneak peek from The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power before clicking Buy Now.
• Orders of items like toothpaste or an extra phone charger may have shipped in branded cardboard boxes promoting the programs.

And that’s just the start of it: The company also has Amazon Music, Wondery, Audible, Twitch, and more, all of which can serve as marketing platforms as needed.

“Using all of those tools, we can actually connect with customers and enable them to go deeper with the content that we’re putting out,” Greg Coleman, Amazon’s global head of marketing and franchises, told Marketing Brew.

Big picture: Those efforts illustrate the extent of the scale Amazon has at its disposal to try and turn its content into successes in the face of mounting competition in streaming. And while some of the viewership results so far have been uneven, its marketing execs are eager to keep using some of those touchpoints to continue promoting its biggest entertainment bets.

“Working within the Amazon ecosystem is a marketer’s dream,” Coleman said.

Read the full story here.—KS

Cariuma is a sustainable sneaker brand worn by celebrities like Pete Davidson and Helen Mirren. But there’s another fanbase that the company is courting: podcast hosts.

It first started running podcast ads a couple of years ago, according to Chief Digital Officer Felipe Araujo, working with shows with about 50,000–100,000 downloads to start.

• When “rates ended up coming down” in the early Covid days, Cariuma started moving into the 500,000+ download range and found “awesome success” with major networks like iHeartMedia and Spotify, as well as a successful and ongoing partnership with indie powerhouse Crooked Media, Araujo said.
• Podcast advertising has worked out so well for Cariuma that it was one of only two channels in which the brand increased its spend this past year (the other being Google), he said. Podcast ad platform Podscribe estimated that Cariuma spent about $4 million on podcast ads in the past year.

Araujo told us the brand’s podcast strategy is largely focused on creating long-term agreements and relationships with hosts so that Cariuma can start to feel “ingrained in the culture of the show,” instead of being a one-and-done sponsor.

Own it: Cariuma takes care of all its podcast advertising internally and works to foster those relationships by having “direct conversations with the hosts,” Araujo told Marketing Brew. The brand has worked with over 30 different podcasts, according to Araujo, a relatively small number compared to other podcast advertisers like Athletic Greens and Uncommon Goods.

Part of that process is an onboarding call, during which hosts are familiarized with Cariuma and its products in order to “start with the right foot forward,” Araujo said. That includes testing them out; Araujo said he’s a big believer in asking hosts to try Cariuma’s shoes before doing ad reads.

Continue reading here.—AM

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Badum: Netflix is reportedly short on inventory and returning money to advertisers as a result. Here are two lessons marketers can learn from the shortfall.

Learn: Tis’ the season of giving—and here at The Brew, we’ve got a free workshop for you. Tomorrow you can sit down with Karla Starr as she talks all things data and analytics. Register here.

Metaverse reverse: Last year it seemed like every company wanted a Web3 makeover. But now brands are hitting pause. Have we reached peak metaverse? Check out mntn’s new article to learn about Web3’s future.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}

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