For experiential agencies, 2022 provided some sense of normalcy after the pandemic turned the events and activations industry on its head.

Last year, we covered pop-ups like Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building experience, Oreo’s takeover of the last remaining Blockbuster, and the Empire State Building’s transformation into a portal to the Upside Down.

To start the year, we emailed five experiential marketing executives to ask them what they’re anticipating in 2023 and to share their favorite activation from last year.

Marketing Brew: What are you anticipating in 2023? Are there any trends or developments we should expect in the experiential marketing space?

Jordan Makow, VP, production, Big Spaceship: With the VR-headset user base continuing to expand and the metaverse growing, I think we will also see the further merging of experiential and digital in virtual environments. There are the obvious advantages around public health for an event that you are not physically at, but there are also much lower expenses associated with making them large scale and with keeping them running for longer periods.

Gregoire Assemat Tessandier, president, North America, Spring Studios: The biggest opportunity that we believe in and will continue to invest in next year is creating and developing our own IPs under Spring Originals. This means going beyond campaign work and one-off activations with clients and partnering with them to create culture-defining IPs and experiences that we can own or co-own. We trialed a few in 2022, including a successful collaboration with IMG called Glam Slam, an immersive fashion-meets-tennis experience during New York Fashion Week and the US Open.

Maria D’Amato, executive creative director at GSD&M: Experiential isn’t going anywhere in 2023. Entering a potentially recessionary year, brands will be looking to get outsized attention for their efforts and investments. Experiential, more so than many other mediums, has the potential to deliver that attention.

Continue reading here.—RB

Fossil who? To ring in the new year on a sustainable note, Vox Media said today that it’ll no longer run ads from fossil-fuel companies.

It’s a policy the publisher has had in place since early 2021, explained AJ Frucci, Vox Media’s SVP of media revenue, but the company is now “kind of formalizing” it.

The update to the company’s advertising policy states that Vox Media no longer accepts ad dollars from fossil-fuel companies, or any companies that mine nonrenewable resources, Vox Media spokesperson Peyton McCarthy said. The policy will also extend to lobbying groups “whose purpose is to support fossil-fuel companies.” The Guardian introduced a similar ban in 2020.

The announcement is part of a larger initiative that Vox Media, which owns publications including New York Magazine, SB Nation, and its namesake site Vox, will make in an attempt to help address the climate crisis.

• Today, Vox Media also announced it would pay the cost of offsetting the carbon emissions generated by the publisher’s new “carbon-neutral” advertising inventory for its Concert advertising network, created in a partnership with Scope3, a company designed to help the ad-tech industry scale back its carbon emissions.
• Advertisers buying carbon-neutral inventory will be paying only for audience impressions, with Vox paying to offset the emissions used to reach them. Frucci declined to share the pricing of the units .
• “Our business success depends on this idea...that the buy side begins prioritizing greener advertising in their campaigns and their buying decisions. And that’s the bet that we’re making,” Frucci told Marketing Brew.

Zoom out: Though Frucci declined to say how much ad revenue fossil-fuel advertisers previously contributed to Vox Media’s bottom line, it’s a heated topic in energy and climate media.

Keep reading here.—RB

Welcome to 2023. We’re about a month out from the Super Bowl. If you’ve experienced a complete memory wipe after weeks of cookies, holiday tunes, and wearing nothing but cozy pajamas, here’s what you need to know about this year’s game.

Where: State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. Also on Fox.

When: Sunday, February 12, at 6:30pm ET.

Who: We don’t know the teams yet. The advertisers, on the other hand…

• After Anheuser-Busch InBev gave up its more than 30-year deal as the exclusive beer advertiser in the Super Bowl, Molson Coors said it would run at least one ad during the game. AB InBev is “likely to run multiple ads” too, according to Ad Age.
• FanDuel is working with Wieden+Kennedy for its first Super Bowl ad, while DraftKings is planning an ad starring Kevin Hart.
• Downy, another first-timer this year, is already teasing a mystery pitch person.
• Rakuten will be back for the second time, this year with messaging around economic uncertainty.
• Other brands planning to air ads include Kia and M&Ms.
• And don’t forget to leave room for Jesus; the “He Gets Us” campaign to “rebrand Jesus” will air two ads.

How much?: Fox said it was 95% sold out of its in-game Super Bowl ad inventory in September, with only about five or fewer 30-second slots unfilled at that time, according to Mark Evans, EVP of ad sales for Fox Sports. This year, some 30-second slots have sold for more than $7 million.

From you: Last week, we asked if, as a marketer, you like watching commercials during the Super Bowl. For the most part, it seems like you do: Out of more than 800 responses, 53% said yes, 18% said no, and the remainder said it depends.—AM

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

Coming up: Check out several predictions for mobile gaming in the year ahead.

Web3: Here are five online communities advertisers are joining to keep up with the metaverse.

Review season: How to ask for a promotion as a social media marketer.

If you’ve watched Stranger Things, you’ve probably noticed that Hawkins, Indiana, is hawking a lot of products these days.

Over 140 major brands and products have appeared in the series, including Nike, Coca-Cola, KFC, and (Eleven’s favorite!) Eggo. Marketing Brew’s investigative crew sat down with the masterminds behind the show’s integrations to find out how production value and nostalgia guided the Duffer brothers’ decision-making and how Netflix maximized their brand partnership potential.

Stat: $55.99 billion. That’s how much Amazon is projected to make in revenue in 2024, surpassing Alibaba’s projected $48.91 billion, according to Insider Intelligence data cited by Digiday.

Quote: “A show that does really well will get more advertisers and more revenue will flow to Netflix…Therefore, our clients who created that show should be compensated for that additional revenue.”—Jeremy Zimmer, CEO and co-founder of United Talent Agency, to the Financial Times

Another quote: “I know that no amount of apologies can undo your experience.”—Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan in a note to travelers whose flights were disrupted by the airline’s holiday meltdown

Read: “How the Cheesecake Factory Became the Chain Restaurant of Millennial Dreams” (Vox)

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

• The 2023 podcast advertising landscape, as predicted by several industry execs
• Overlooked and overhyped: Our 2022 reader survey results
• Warner Bros. Discovery’s global CMO of streaming has big plans for 2023