Three years ago, new streaming services were favoring purple as their brand color of choice. Now they’ve all got the blues.

Warner Bros. Discovery’s decision to rebrand its flagship streaming service from purple-drenched HBO Max to royal-blue Max made it official. “We need to start a dialogue,” Twitter user RK Jackson joked, posting pictorial evidence: Now, Prime Video, Max, Paramount+, and Disney+ all prominently feature blue in the branding for their services, whether it’s a lighter blue for Prime Video or a midnight blue for Disney+.

The slow shift to blue is a bit of a pivot in the streaming entertainment world, whose apps and services have long featured a rainbow of colors like red, neon green, purple, and orange. But streaming services are under immense pressure to make their services as attractive as possible to the broadest consumer base they can—and they’re increasingly gravitating toward a safer, and perhaps less inspired, color scheme.

“Purple was very distinct, but like HBO, it’s actually a fairly divisive color,” Pato Spagnoletto, CMO of Warner Bros. Discovery Streaming, told Marketing Brew. “There’s people who really love it and people who don’t. By contrast, blue is the most-loved color by the most audience segments.”

Read the full story here.—KS

Here’s a story most consumer brands can relate to: You need to engage younger audiences and create a buzz around an exciting new product. It’s a tale (almost) as old as marketing itself.

When the luxury brand Coach set out on this journey to launch their Dreams Sunset perfume, they partnered with Studio by impact.com—aka the managed services team for influencer and creator programs. Studio acted as a collaborator and confidante on Coach’s hero journey, and it resulted in quite the fairy-tale ending.

By strategically leaning into influencer marketing, Coach saw a 4.5% increase in engagement and an organic reach of about 327k. Studio helped the brand tap into a wider range of influencers who created 117 pieces of audience-winning content.

What’s that? A whiff of your brand’s future success? Learn more.

What do casino gambling and cannabis have in common?

Medill School of Journalism Professor Ashlee Humphreys has the answer: She has been studying how industries become socially accepted for some time now. Or, in fancy academic speak, she studies “the role legal and cultural institutions play in creating markets and the influence of language on consumer judgments of legitimacy, and the process of consumer cocreation.”

Marketing Brew sat down with Humphreys, a sociologist who specializes in marketing strategy and consumer behavior, to learn about her experience and hear her thoughts on the trends du jour in the industry.

How’d you end up becoming a professor of marketing?

I didn’t know that you could get a PhD in marketing. That was something that was new to me when I was an undergraduate. I was a philosophy student and I was an economics student, and I wanted to go to graduate school, so I applied and got into a philosophy PhD program, and then I applied and got into one marketing PhD program after writing my honors theses on brand value. That program was Kellogg, and I decided to go there. It seemed to have the most options I was most interested in.

Could you give a high-level overview of the research you’ve done?

I study how industries become socially accepted, particularly new or formerly illegal industries. So some of my first work was on casino gambling, and I followed that work up with looking at industries like cannabis, for example. So that’s a good part of my work. I also study social media and have a book on social media. I also look at other industries where the companies lead rather than the consumers. So I’ve done work in wine, for example, where it’s important for companies to kind of develop new products that they think are interesting, irrespective of consumers.

Continue reading here.—JS

If you haven’t noticed, we recently started recapping the biggest agency leadership moves, account changes, and other news each week. Have (agency) updates to share? Email Jasmine Sheena. Read last week’s recap below.

Hires and departures

Omnicom’s “cultural strategy consultancy,” sparks & honey, promoted COO Mark Newhouse to president. He will continue to serve as COO. The consultancy also promoted chief client officer Davianne Harris to managing partner, though she will keep her former title as well.

WPP Open X, the holding company’s unit dedicated to Coca-Cola, has named Andrew Keller global chief creative officer. Keller previously spent more than seven years at Meta, most recently as the company’s VP of creative and experiential.

McCann Worldgroup promoted Michelle Tang to global chief growth officer. She was previously chief growth officer for the North America region. McCann has also hired Nathan Brown to serve as global chief audience architect, a new role at the agency.

Read the full recap here.—JS

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

*Click*: A beginner’s guide for crafting an influencer marketing strategy.

Change is good: Tips for pivoting your go-to-market strategy when things start to go off course.

In real time: YouTube has made some updates to its live-shopping capabilities for creators.

Stronger together: The best creative copywriting combines AI *and* human strength. Neurative uses AI to generate actionable insights about your target audience, then real storytellers use that info to create engaging copy. See how it’s done.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}

We’re convening some of the most recognizable brands to spotlight innovations, highlight strategies, and seek solutions to tackle the future of marketing.

Sound exciting? Just wait until we sit down with Tracy Bussan, senior vice president of culture and partnerships at Diageo, a leader in spirits and beverages with a portfolio of superstar brands such as Baileys, Guinness, and Captain Morgan.

Tracy will share how to tap into experiential opportunities that engage your audience and connect with customers’ value systems while driving cultural conversations.

Get your tickets to hear from pros like Tracy before they sell out. See you at The Brief!

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

• The hyperlocal, microinfluencer campaign that may have impacted the Wisconsin Supreme Court race
• New York City’s tourism branch is still working to get visitors back
• How ESPN picks its Sunday Night Baseball anthem