Nike has Jordan, but Adidas has Hailey Van Lith.

College basketball has been on fire—especially in recent weeks, and especially on the women’s side. This year’s Elite Eight matchup between Van Lith and LSU and Caitlin Clark and the University of Iowa was one of the most-watched college basketball games ever. Adidas, it seems, saw the signs years ago.

The German sportswear brand has been shifting some of its marketing focus from pro to college hoops for the past several years as its NIL strategy and roster have developed, according to Chris Murphy, SVP of brand marketing. This year, Adidas ran a campaign in both the men’s and women’s tournaments, but spent more of its media dollars on the women’s side.

“We started a few years ago to see a rebirth or a growth in NCAA basketball, especially during this time period, especially on the women’s basketball side,” Murphy told Marketing Brew. “Our investment followed that trend.”

All hail Hailey: Van Lith was one of Adidas’s first NIL partners, and the brand has since used her in plenty of its marketing materials, according to Murphy. She was one of the faces of the Exhibit Select women’s basketball sneaker last year, and was involved in Adidas’s March Madness campaign in 2022 when she was playing for the Louisville Cardinals, he said.

Two years later, Van Lith is an ideal fit for the brand’s current campaign platform, “You Got This,” which is about promoting “fun, optimism, and joy in sport,” Murphy said.

“Hailey embodied that more than anybody else,” he told us. “We were looking to say, ‘Do we have a partner who embodies our brand really, really well at one of our [sponsored] schools that is doing well…and is on the women’s side, given the growth we’re seeing in women’s basketball in terms of interest.’”

Continue reading here.—AM

Trying to buy a house in this economy is no longer the hardest thing you’ll have to face. Not when the entire state of marketing is changing and making your job harder than it’s ever been before.

So we wanna put you on a certain li’l channel that can help: partnerships. Not sure exactly why you need ’em? impact.com breaks it down in their blog on affiliate and influencer partnership programs, hitting the key reasons for investing in collabs, like how:

• Budgets are changing, and so should your priorities.
• Key priorities for marketing teams tie into sales and revenue.
• Collaborations with content creators provide deeper connections.

Dwindling budgets, the need to constantly innovate and drive ROI but also make sure you’re adhering to data privacy regulations…whew. It’s a lot for a marketer to handle alone.

Peep these insights on partnerships.

The University of South Carolina came out on top of this year’s women’s March Madness, but the tournament was a win for more than just the Gamecocks.

Viewership records were repeatedly shattered, from the second round all the way through to the championship game, when 18.9 million viewers tuned in to watch Kamilla Cardoso and the University of South Carolina topple Caitlin Clark and the University of Iowa and complete the Gamecocks’ undefeated season. That final matchup had one of the biggest US TV audiences for a sporting event since 2019, behind only football, the World Cup, and the Olympics, according to the Associated Press.

Big numbers: During the championship game, viewership peaked at 24.1 million, according to Nielsen data. The 18.9 million average viewership figure, also from Nielsen, made the Iowa-South Carolina matchup the most-watched women’s college basketball game on record and the most-watched basketball game since 2019.

By comparison, the men’s championship game drew 14.8 million viewers, 4 million fewer than the women’s, per Nielsen, the first time ever that the women’s final had a larger audience than the men’s.

Read more here.—AM

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a federal privacy bill.

Over the weekend, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) unveiled a bipartisan, bicameral data privacy proposal that, if it were to pass, could fundamentally alter the US consumer privacy landscape.

The bill, called the American Privacy Rights Act (APRA), would, among other things, give consumers the right to opt out of targeted advertising, allow them to delete any data that was collected about them, and create a federal data broker registry. If it were to become law, it could simplify the patchwork of privacy laws that currently exist across more than a dozen states including Virginia, California, and Texas, as it would preempt state legislation.

“This bipartisan, bicameral draft legislation is the best opportunity we’ve had in decades to establish a national data privacy and security standard that gives people the right to control their personal information,” Cantwell and McMorris Rodgers said in a press release.

What’s in this bill? In addition to the targeted advertising opt-out and the federal data broker registry, the bill would also allow for a private right of action, meaning individual citizens could sue businesses directly, instead of having to wait for action by regulators or state attorneys general. The inclusion of that right, as well as the bill’s preemption of existing state privacy laws, could make passing the APRA an uphill battle, the Spokesman Review noted in an interview with the legislators.

“We’re still open to constructive feedback,” McMorris Rodgers told the Spokesman Review.

What the industry thinks: Lartease Tiffith, EVP of public policy at the IAB, told Marketing Brew that the bill “is a major step forward” from previous bills, but that the inclusion of “a private right of action could create a flood of lawsuits, so it’s important that the language be airtight.”

Continue reading here.—RB

Press play on your video strat. We teamed up with Wistia to take a reel good look at the state of video marketing today—and laid out the top insights we found in our new article. Get the lowdown on engagement rate benchmarks + how to make engaging videos and develop a cohesive strategy.