The 2023 Major League Baseball season has been one of change. The league introduced a pitch clock with the hopes of speeding up the game, and also allowed brands to sponsor jerseys for the first time—a relatively new practice among the Big Four.

Jennifer Halloran, head of brand and marketing at Massachusetts-based insurance company MassMutual, is happy about just one of those things. That’s because MassMutual is the first jersey-patch sponsor of the Boston Red Sox.

“One of the things—I hate to say it out loud—that kind of hurt me this year was that they made the game faster,” she told Marketing Brew. “If the game had been longer, I would have had more people looking at us. I’m the only person that wanted the game to slow down.”

With MassMutual’s first season on the Red Sox’s sleeves coming to a close, Halloran reflected on the sponsorship and how she plans to leverage it in the years to come.

Read the full story here.—AM

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Nearly a quarter of online marketing dollars will go to ad fraud this year, a report from Juniper Research found.

Ad fraud is projected to cost marketers $84 billion in 2023, or about 22% of the $382 billion spent on online advertising, according to the marketing research firm. For mobile, it’s a bit higher, representing about 30% of spend.

According to the report, marketers will spend $747 billion annually on digital advertising in 2028, with ad fraud accounting for 23%. In 2028, most of the ad spend loss (42%) is projected to be in North America, followed by India, per the analysis.

In the report, ad fraud is defined as “the illegal act of intentionally repeated clicking on PPC (pay-per-click) ads to artificially inflate traffic statistics and generate revenue for illegitimate sources whilst reducing return on ad spend for advertisers.” It can be done through click bots, click farms, and incentivized clicks.

The study analyzed digital advertising datasets from 78,000 “unique sources” across 45 countries.

+1: Research released this summer by the Association of National Advertisers found that marketers spend about $20 billion on “made-for-advertising” sites that lure readers in with clickbait.

The industry has recently made moves to try and stamp this inventory out: Last month, several trade groups came together to come up with a common definition for “made-for-advertising” sites, while supply-side platforms like Pubmatic and Magnite said they’d no longer include this inventory in curated publisher lists sold to select advertisers.—RB

Last fall, Digital Voices, an influencer marketing agency with offices in New York and London, was wrapping up a Halloween TikTok influencer campaign for Yoplait UK’s Frubes brand, the yogurt for children in a squeezable tube that’s marketed as Go-Gurt in the US. Reviewing comments to the influencer videos, Digital Voices CEO Jenny Quigley-Jones noticed some had nothing to do with Halloween.

“Might be just me,” commented @dadvgirls on Instagram Reels, “but in the summer I freeze my frubes and then have…a kinda lolly.” (Popsicles in the UK, as Harry Potter fans know, are called “ice lollies.”)

Other parents on Instagram Reels chimed in that they froze their Frubes, too, some noting the ancillary benefit for their on-the-go offspring. Commented @lanaslittlemunchkins, they “help keep the lunchboxes cooler in summer.”

It’s not uncommon for brands to capitalize on TikTok trends, inserting themselves into the conversation when users discover, say, that they can make ice cream from cottage cheese, or that smearing Vaseline on their faces before bedtime improves their complexions.

But a few comments on an Instagram Reel does not a trend make, which is why what happened next is surprising.

Continue reading on Retail Brew.—AAN

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

Reap what you sow: An ad exec shared lessons marketers can learn from farming.

Seen and heard: SEO tips that can help boost your posts on Google.

Get out, right now: Check out a list of social “icks” put together by social media managers.

Get personal: Intuit Mailchimp’s Holiday Report explores 6 data-backed insights into crushing holiday sales with a strategic, personalized approach. See what works and what doesn’t by reading it for free.*

Unleash CTV potential: Learn from Freshpet CMO John Speranza about their TV approach and discover winning ad strategies with insights from our sponsor, MNTN.*

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Executive moves across the industry.

• Janine Pelosi, Zoom’s former CMO, is now CEO of video-tech company Neat.
• Stephanie Latham has left Meta to join Roblox as its VP of global partnerships.
• Lena Waters, a DocuSign alum, is Grammarly’s new CMO.