The brands have packed up and headed east from Las Vegas to Indianapolis.

Less than a week after the Super Bowl, NBA All-Star Weekend tipped off on Feb. 16, and for some brands, the three-day basketball festival leading up to the 73rd NBA All-Star Game between the Eastern and Western Conferences yesterday was a pillar of their sponsorship with the league.

“After tip-off, it’s the next key moment in the season for us,” Julia Cheney, cultural marketing lead at Google, which has a wide-reaching partnership with the NBA and WNBA, said. “It is something that we put a lot of emphasis and focus on.”

For AT&T, another major NBA and WNBA partner, its presenting sponsorship of the weekend’s annual slam dunk contest serves as the “crown jewel” of its NBA activations throughout the year, according to Sabina Ahmed, assistant VP of sponsorships and experiential. Frank Bracken, EVP and chief commercial officer for NBA marketing partner Foot Locker, said All-Star Weekend is “arguably, the Super Bowl of the NBA.”

Brands faced stiff competition to stand out, given all the activations taking place on the ground (and online) leading up to yesterday’s All-Star Game. But they’re not all playing against each other: Several brands formed all-star teams of their own to take on the weekend.

All in this together: Throughout the weekend, Google worked with AT&T to encourage fans to visit both brands, Cheney said. The two companies appeared side-by-side at the NBA Crossover fan event at the Indiana Convention Center, and fans that got stamps on a passport from both could be entered in a raffle to win an autographed jersey.

“Having been around these events for a number of years, we look to partner with [other brands] because we know that people are going to do more than one thing,” Cheney said. “We’re good partners with AT&T, so we’re making sure that we’re doing cross-traffic driving opportunities between the two.”

Continue reading here.—AM

Looks like none of us are going to be able to use our exes’ Disney+ logins anymore.

Beginning this summer, the streaming service will begin cracking down on password sharing, Disney SEVP and CFO Hugh Johnston announced earlier this month during Disney’s quarterly earnings call.

• Later this year, account holders will be able to pay an additional, as-of-yet undisclosed fee to add users outside of their households to their subscriptions. This summer, the actual crackdown will begin, with accounts identified as sharing subscriptions receiving notifications from Disney encouraging them to open new accounts.
• Existing subscribers to Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ have until March 14 before Disney will begin enforcing new terms and conditions that prohibit password sharing, limiting use of an account to the account holder’s immediate household, according to an email sent to subscribers. New customers who have signed up since January 25 are already subject to those terms.

“While we are still in the early days, and don’t expect notable benefits from these paid sharing initiatives until the back half of calendar 2024, we want to reach as large an audience as possible,” Johnston said.

Copycat? Disney’s crackdown on password sharing follows a similar move from Netflix, which began limiting password sharing last year as a way to encourage new sign-ups and generate more revenue.

In May, the streamer began charging users $7.99 per month to add an additional user outside of their household. It seems to have paid off: Netflix added more than 13 million subscribers last quarter, and the streamer now has more than 260 million subscribers globally, it reported late last month.

Read more here.—JS

Nobody really likes ads, but more and more people are willing to put up with them, at least if they’re streaming, according to a survey from consumer data company Disqo.

What’s newsworthy: 13% of consumers are opposed to ad tiers on streaming platforms, according to the survey, which polled roughly 18,000 US adults. That’s a significant decrease from last year’s 36% who said they were opposed to ads in exchange for discounted streaming.

In other words, it seems like Amazon picked a good time to cram ads into Prime Video. The company’s ad-supported tier, which went live at the end of last month, will automatically reach about 115 million monthly active viewers, the streamer has told advertisers (unless viewers cancel, or opt to shell out an additional $2.99 a month to watch ad-free).

Other streaming services are continuing to encourage ad-supported viewing across the ecosystem by rolling out ad tiers and making ad-free viewing pricier. Netflix’s ad tier, which it rolled out in November 2022, now has 23 million monthly active viewers, the streamer told investors earlier this month; Disney last reported that 5.2 million customers were watching the ad-supported tier of Disney+.

Continue reading here.—RB

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Executive moves across the industry.

• Whataburger hired a new CMO: Scott Hudler, a Dunkin' alum.
• Rivian, the electric vehicle company, tapped Jennifer Prenner, a Meta and Amazon vet, as its new marketing VP and CMO.
• X brought Christian Kimberley-Bowen on board as its agency development global lead. He was formerly at Meta, where he grew its relationship with Omnicom.