One audio company is in the midst of a serious rebrand.

Last month, SiriusXM shared its plans for a brand refresh that includes new content, tech, partnerships, and an upgraded app that became available to users today. To accompany the rollout, the brand has crafted new marketing assets, including a new logo, mascot, and color palette, all of which will be on display in the new year when the company starts one of its biggest marketing pushes ever.

The goal of the new app and branding effort is to attract new, younger audiences in the face of increasing competition in the audio world, without completely abandoning SiriusXM’s brand roots, SVP and Chief Growth Officer Suzi Watford told Marketing Brew.

“When you’ve got this established brand where you’ve got that many subscribers who are experiencing it, particularly in the car on hardware, it’s not like you can change all of that overnight,” Watford said. “It’s really important to make sure that you maintain some brand consistency, and that it’s not a complete [about-face] and people don’t recognize who you are.”

Come closer: The reason for the rebrand wasn’t that SiriusXM wanted to raise brand awareness, Watford said. (The company has been around under its current name since 2008, when satellite radio companies Sirius and XM merged, and now has about 32 million subscribers.) Instead, the brand wanted consumers to “reassess the role that it can play amongst all of their other media consumption,” she said.

Nils Leonard, founder of Uncommon Creative Studio, the agency SiriusXM tapped to help with the rebrand, said his team was asked to figure out a way to help the company “matter to people again” and remind them that the brand can “bring something new to the table.”

• After conducting research and having conversations with internal stakeholders, the team decided that the message SiriusXM should convey to listeners is a feeling of “proximity to the things they love,” Leonard said.

“It’s the antidote to [Spotify’s] Discover Weekly,” he said. “It’s not about loads more stuff.”

Continue reading here.—AM

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For some families, the highlight of Christmas is gathering around a brightly lit tree and opening presents. For others, the best part is basking in the glow of their TV screens as they watch the annual Christmas Day NFL or NBA games—or both.

Advertisers, too, are fans of the Christmas Day matchups, according to Jacqueline Dobies, VP of revenue and yield management at Disney Advertising. Monday Night Football is the star on top of the tree that day, she said, with more advertisers and categories this year than last, and the five NBA games airing that day are also holding their own, “nearing sellout” as of the first week of December.

“Christmas Day has really always been a huge flagship sporting day for us in the sports world,” Dobies told Marketing Brew. “It’s really a special day for us that we take a lot of pride in.”

NFL sleighs: Once upon a time, Christmas Day was “owned by the NBA,” Dobies said, but the NFL has been establishing more dominance over that airtime with its own matchups.

This year’s games are likely to be of high interest for a couple of reasons. For one, Monday Night Football viewership is already up by about 29% compared with this time last year, according to Dobies. Plus, with top Super Bowl contenders the Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers facing off in that slot, some fans are sure to be roused from their cookie comas to tune in.

• As for the brands, 33 across 23 categories are advertising in the game, up from 30 brands spanning 21 categories last year.
• Of those brands, 14 are full sponsors, including insurance companies Allstate and Progressive and fast-food chains Burger King and Taco Bell.
• As of last week, the game was nearly sold out, Disney said.

Read more here.—AM

When Kate Spade died in 2018, fashion brand Frances Valentine faced a decision: either shut down or keep going “without one of the founders and core creative minds behind the company,” its director of marketing Florencia Gilardoni told Retail Brew.

Frances Valentine chose the latter, and one way it bolstered its brand presence during that difficult first year without Spade at the helm was a seemingly retrograde form of marketing: catalogs and direct mail.

“When we went into catalogs, customers’ mailboxes were still pretty slim and nobody was doing direct mail,” Gilardoni said. “So we were able to get a huge share of the mailbox at that time, which was great for us.”

But the fashion brand isn’t alone in reappraising the value of catalogs. The age-old marketing technique is seeing a comeback, as retailers seek a more direct route to their customers due to increased competition and higher costs in digital marketing.

Polly Wong, president of Belardi Wong, a marketing agency that specializes in DTC brands and counts Frances Valentine among its customers, said she’s seen a “resurgence” in the practice. Her firm launched direct mail campaigns for at least 75 retailers per year for the last five years.

“The No. 1 reason is that most of our clients are very sophisticated marketers who realize that you can’t put all your eggs in one basket,” she said. “You can’t just rely on Google and Meta, right?”

Mixing it up: Why not? Cost is one reason. Wong said digital advertising has become more expensive over the past five years. “If you look at CPMs and CPCs, they’re up double digits,” she said. “And with the increase in the cost of digital marketing, somehow we landed where you can send four direct mail pieces to a targeted audience for the cost of one click.”

Read more on Retail Brew.—AV

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

Nerdy: Why Nerds is advertising in the Super Bowl for the first time.

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Worldly: The biggest advertising trends from around the world in 2023 outside of generative AI.

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