Privacy and ad tech may seem like vinegar and oil, but to Jules Polonetsky, CEO of the Future of Privacy Forum, a rich vinaigrette may be unavoidable. He would know, having previously served as chief privacy officer at AOL and DoubleClick before it was acquired by Google.

“Everybody needs some chops in ad tech,” Polonetsky told us at the IAPP’s Global Privacy Summit in Washington, DC. “Even if you’re not in the advertising business, your organization markets what it does, has a website, has analytics, has code. It’s been invaluable to me in my career to understand the concepts.”

Marketing Brew caught up with Polonetsky after he was recognized as the winner of the 2023 IAPP Leadership Award to chat about his ad-tech origins and whether the industry’s pioneers ever anticipated such a complex privacy landscape.

Read our conversation here.—RB

Sounds like some people could use a beer.

A week ago, trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney posted about a partnership with Bud Light, showing off a custom can designed to celebrate her one-year mark since transitioning, which she has documented through her “Days of Girlhood” TikTok series. The partnership has since drawn some very heated reactions from conservatives, including musician Kid Rock, who responded by *checks notes* shooting Bud Light cases with a rifle.

As talk of a boycott rumbles online, some say it’s nothing more than performance politics. Bud Light, for its part, seems to be standing by its work.

A new leaf: Bud Light’s work with Mulvaney takes place under the purview of Alissa Heinerscheid, the company’s VP of marketing. As the first woman to oversee the brand, Heinerscheid has been open about her goals to increase female representation in the brand’s marketing, as exhibited in recent commercials like Bud Light’s Super Bowl ad and “The Bud Light Carry.”

In a recent episode of the Make Yourself at Home podcast, Heinerscheid said she decided to home in on inclusivity as a way to attract young customers and lift the Bud Light brand out of a years-long decline. On the podcast, she described Bud Light as having been “a brand of fratty,” “out-of-touch humor,” comments that have also come under fire in the backlash to the Mulvaney campaign.

So what’s next? Keep reading here.—KH

A significant portion of AAMCO’s leadership team has reportedly left the automotive services company, according to sources who spoke to Marketing Brew.

The company’s franchise website states there were 573 AAMCO locations in the US and Canada in 2021.

CMO Amy Johnson has reportedly departed. Johnson joined American Driveline Systems, AAMCO’s parent company, in 2019. James Gregory, AAMCO’s chief executive, is also among executives rumored to have left. (Gregory has been named as a defendant in a lawsuit alleging racial discrimination filed last September by a former executive, Jerome Staley.)

Johnson, Gregory, and other executives who may have left the company, did not respond to our request for comment by time of publication. AAMCO had also not responded to requests for comment.

AAMCO is owned by Icahn Automotive Group, a subsidiary of Icahn Enterprises, which also owns Pep Boys, Auto Plus, and Precision Tune Auto Care; Auto Plus voluntarily filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January. Icahn Automotive was founded by Carl Icahn, who was listed on Forbes’s “world’s billionaires list” in 2023, and is the chairman of the board of Icahn Enterprises.—JS, MS

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

Bark-eting: Why so many brands are breaking into the pet products market.

#LinkedIn: How to tell if all those hashtags you’re using on your LinkedIn posts are actually driving traffic.

Fun facts: Bring up one of these “33 key moments” in social media history next time the small talk has stalled with a colleague or client.

Listen, learn, win: Iterable’s Activate Summit is a meeting of marketing masterminds. Hear from the CMOs of Strava, Gitlab, Iterable, and Vimeo, plus TikTok star Corporate Natalie. Register in the next 3 days to win a $1k Airbnb gift card.*

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The Brief: A Marketing Brew Summit is next month! We still have a few more discounted tickets up for grabs, but they won’t stick around for long (you have until next Monday, April 17, before prices go up).

Here is what you get with your discounted ticket:

• interactive workshops to sharpen your skills and stay ahead of the marketing landscape
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Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• To stay on trend, agencies are bringing TikTokers in-house
• In trimming ad tech, Bloomberg seeks to put its audience ‘first’
• Twitter’s ad revenue will fall drastically this year, according to estimates