Last summer’s smash hit and Warner Bros. cash cow Barbie is up for eight awards at this year’s Oscars on Sunday—not to mention the awards it already picked up earlier this year at the Golden Globes, Critics Choice, and People’s Choice awards.

The film’s feminist commentary and photogenic cast aren’t the only things it will have going for it when the awards are doled out on Sunday.

• Quite a lot of advertising has gone into trying to secure those gold statuettes for Barbie, including special screenings in Los Angeles and New York, out-of-home advertising, and mailers, along with discussion panels, some featuring director Greta Gerwig and singer Dua Lipa, whose song, “Dance the Night,” was featured in the film.

Barbie isn’t the only production using those kinds of marketing tactics in an effort to encourage awards-show wins. For Your Consideration campaigns, an advertising machine that kicks into action ahead of awards season to encourage awards voters to support certain shows and movies, are nothing new in Hollywood, where a gold trophy can bring with it positive attention, new audiences, and future opportunities.

In the last few years, For Your Consideration, or FYC, campaigns have transformed considerably, as audience fragmentation, increasing pressure to win over consumers—along with voters—and the still-lingering effects of last year’s writers’ and actors’ strikes continue to transform the way FYC campaigns are executed.

“People’s attention is very fractured right now, very fragmented,” Rick Markovitz, president of Weissman/Markovitz Communications, which has worked on Emmy campaigns for shows like American Horror Story and Breaking Bad, said. “You really need to have a 360-degree campaign.”

Continue reading here.—JS

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Ahead of this year’s Super Bowl, a group of more than 100 CMOs, media execs, and leaders from sports teams and leagues like the NWSL, MLS, and Nascar met for lunch at a pop-up restaurant in Las Vegas to discuss something other than the big game.

Instead, participants were focused on the women’s game—not just women’s football, but women’s sports across the board, and how brands are evaluating their investments in the growing space.

• The VIP event was jointly orchestrated by women’s sports agency Deep Blue Sports + Entertainment and Ally Financial, one of the companies that’s been at the forefront of the push to further monetize women’s sports with initiatives like its 50/50 pledge to achieve equal media spending on men’s and women’s sports by 2027.

“It would be incredible to be able to host the same luncheon at the NWSL championship, or the WNBA championship, and we will be doing that as we progress forward,” Stephanie Marciano, head of sports and entertainment marketing at Ally, told Marketing Brew. “But right now, and for the last decade, marketing executives, folks in front offices, media execs, they show up at the Super Bowl whether or not they’re in football…so for us, it was, ‘we need to be there.’”

Done deal? The Super Bowl might not be an informal upfront in the way CES is, but media buyers and sellers do tend to engage in business conversations as they mingle at meetings and parties over the week leading up to the game, Marciano said.

Ally, she told us, set out to be a “positively disruptive” force in those conversations.

Read more here.—AM

Try Googling, “Has Google gone downhill?”—you’ll notice that many people are convinced the answer is yes. The first blue link will take you to a collection of Reddit rants, full of complaints about paid ads and product-peddling spam sites that seem to frequently prevail among Google search results, according to the commenters.

Recent research suggests that the frustration isn’t just nostalgia for some mythical heyday of the 25-year-old product. A group of leading internet scholars from Germany found that Google struggles to keep sites with misleading product reviews out of its top results.

Google told Gizmodo that junk results mostly come up for queries about products and that it’s made improvements to clutter-proof its algorithms.

But while Google was found to perform better than search rivals Bing and DuckDuckGo, Google’s misfires are magnified, given that it commands over 90% of the world’s search market. But its current primacy doesn’t mean it should kick back and take it easy: A fresh crop of AI-powered tools threatens to challenge its status as the go-to for anyone needing to know whether a rash around their belly button is serious.

• OpenAI, the ChatGPT-maker, is reportedly building its own search product and lending AI capabilities to Microsoft’s Bing.
• The Jeff Bezos-backed AI bot Perplexity summarizes info from the web and provides links to reputable sources. It’s valued at $520 million after a recent fundraising round.

Is Google “enshittifying”? That’s what the inventor of the concept of “enshittification,” Cory Doctorow, thinks. The internet culture critic coined the term in 2022 to describe the decay of mature online platforms when they choose to juice profits at the expense of user experience.

Doctorow claims that Google’s top results have become “dominated by spam, scams, and ads.” He says it’s become too easy for sites pushing useless content to manipulate the guarded algorithm that ranks search results.

Read more from Morning Brew here.—SK

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Executive moves across the industry.

• Rent the Runway brought on board Natalie McGrath, formerly of AfterPay, as CMO.
• PayPal hired Geoff Seeley—also from Afterpay—as its new CMO.
• Coterie, a baby-care brand, tapped Jess Jacobs to be its chief brand officer.