In the world of women’s soccer, 2019 was pivotal: It was the year the US Women’s National Team won its fourth World Cup title while in the middle of a legal dispute with its federation over equal pay, which was settled last year.

It’s also the year four current and former players from the roster—Tobin Heath, Christen Press, Megan Rapinoe, and Megan Klingenberger—founded their own company.

At the time, Re—Inc was a commerce business. From there, in addition to continuing to sell apparel and accessories, the team built a membership community. Then, just in time for this year’s Women’s World Cup, Re—Inc debuted its first show, in what Heath said is the jumping-off point for an entire media division.

“We wanted to use this vehicle to reimagine the status quo, and how better to do it than with the platform of the World Cup?” Heath told Marketing Brew. “We were passionate about using our voices, our platforms, to create content that looked and felt more like us.”

Keep reading here.—AM

IRL ads hit different. A whopping 84% of consumers can remember seeing digital out-of-home (DOOH) ads. For context, recall rates for social media ads were 55% for Gen Zers, 46% for millennials, and 26% for boomers, according to a study by Kantar and Snapchat.

Moral of the stat story? DOOH ads can be a game changer in helping you reach your audience.

But to build attention-grabbing ads that drive action, creative teams and media buyers need to be in total alignment. And Vistar Media’s new ebook, Mind the Gap, can help you do it. It guides you through:

• how media planners and creative can break down organizational silos
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• what questions to answer before launching a DOOH campaign

Don’t leave your DOOH potential untapped. Download Mind the Gap here.

Duolingo showed strong revenue growth in its Q2 earnings this week.

The language-learning app reported $3.7 million in net income, up from a $15 million net loss in the same period last year.

• Revenue increased 44% to nearly $128 million, and Duolingo raised its full-year guidance to $510 million–$516 million in revenue, up from the $500 million–$509 million forecast last quarter.
• Duolingo reported 5.2 million paid subscribers, a 59% improvement YoY. It also saw its monthly active user count jump to 74 million, a 50% YoY increase.

The brand’s strong earnings come after a year of topical marketing, particularly on TikTok, where Duolingo has a following of 7.3 million. Duolingo frequently creates TikTok content around trends and memes on the platform, with many of its videos featuring its green owl mascot, Duo. “Our brand is very unhinged,” Emmanuel Orssaud, Duolingo’s VP of marketing, told us.

Marketing was a central focus of Duolingo’s shareholder letter in Q2.

• In it, Duolingo’s CEO Luis von Ahn touted the company’s “social-first marketing,” stating that it has “tested our way to a marketing strategy that inserts our brand into pop culture events and social media moments in order to expose it to new audiences and drive word-of-mouth growth.”
• He added that Duolingo does not “sell directly” in its social campaigns. “This strategy is relatively low-cost, and has generated outsized returns in terms of social media impressions, press coverage, and, ultimately, new users to Duolingo.” According to von Ahn, the brand’s social media impressions have grown 150% YoY.

Read the full story here.—JS

This year, Heineken has been making a push into the light beer space, and is using Formula 1, tennis, and music festivals to do it.

In March, just days before the beer market would be shaken by Bud Light’s partnership with Dylan Mulvaney, Heineken debuted Heineken Silver—a lower-carb, lower-calorie premium beer—in the US to help the world’s second-largest beer company gain a foothold in the US light beer market.

While Heineken reported a tough second quarter last week, with a 5.6% drop in volume, CEO Dolf van den Brink said on its earnings call that Silver had grown its volume by 45%, and in the US is seeing “encouraging early results in distribution build-up and rate of sale.” He also said the company has “significantly” boosted US marketing spend to build on “the momentum that we’re now gaining” on Silver.

Part of that marketing strategy is introducing the product through new and existing event partnerships, Frank Amorese, VP of media and partnerships at Heineken USA, told Retail Brew.

Continue reading on Retail Brew.—EC

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

Deck the halls: Ahead of the holidays, Google has outlined how advertisers can use its AI tools to optimize their shopping campaigns.

Kicking and snapping: Here’s how Snapchat is using AR to promote its sports tie-ups.

Prove it: A look at social proof, what it means, and how to use it in marketing.

Connection starts here: Is your relationship marketing strategy falling flat? Get Marigold’s ebook and be inspired by real brands’ approaches to interacting with their customers—from initial impressions to final conversions. Get your copy.*

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