Caitlin Clark’s college basketball career has come to a close, but her professional career is just getting started—and fans and brands alike are buying in.

Throughout her final college season, fans lined up to watch Clark lead the University of Iowa Hawkeyes to the women’s NCAA Tournament championship game for the second year in a row, and games repeatedly smashed viewership records.

When Clark declared for the WNBA draft in early March, prices for tickets to see the Indiana Fever, the team with the first pick in the draft, shot up. The Las Vegas Aces moved their July matchup against the Fever to a venue with nearly twice as many seats, and the CMO of the W said broadcasters were “scrambling” for the rights to Fever games this season. Not long after, the league announced that 36 of the Fever’s 40 regular season games would air on national TV.

Then there’s her NIL value. Clark, who became the all-time NCAA Division I scorer last month, had the fourth highest NIL valuation of any college athlete at the end of her time playing for Iowa, at $3.4 million, according to college sports outlet On3’s NIL 100 list. She’s already worked with a dozen brands over the past couple of years, including Gatorade, Nike, State Farm, Gainbridge, Xfinity, H&R Block, and Buick.

There’s no question that Clark is a star on the court, and perhaps one of the best collegiate basketball players in history. But her off-court performance and personality have made her a hot commodity among brands looking to share in her spotlight—and the brands that have already inked deals with her are feeling lucky, to say the least.

“I can’t imagine the volume of deals that she’s seeing,” said Minji Ro, chief strategy officer for life and annuity at the financial services company Gainbridge, which started a multiyear partnership with Clark in March and which has, since 2021, held the naming rights to the Fever’s arena. “We are thrilled, honored, beside ourselves; take your pick.”

Continue reading here.—AM

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If you were one of the tens of millions of Americans who tuned into the Super Bowl this year, chances are you saw pop star/American treasure/master marketer Beyoncé teasing her new country album, Cowboy Carter, via Verizon commercial. That’s because the ad was “burned-in,” which means that it was pre-embedded during breaks in the game for all viewers to see.

But there’s another way that ads could technically appear in major television events, one that is sometimes touted as the future of the advertising industry. Instead of showing the same ads to every viewer, ads during the game could be personalized for different viewers through dynamic ad insertion, meaning that viewers would be shown different ads based on their attributes—which means that while some viewers could have been served the Beyoncé ad, others might have seen a different ad entirely.

In theory, dynamic ad insertion, sometimes referred to as DAI, could lead to increased personalization and engagement, which could result in higher viewer (and customer) retention, Dan Rayburn, conference chairman of the Streaming Summit at NAB Show, told Marketing Brew. In practice, though, it has left something to be desired, Rayburn said: “It doesn’t scale, and it doesn’t work well.”

Despite those challenges, experts told us that the technology could still be promising—as long as some of the wrinkles get ironed out.

Read more here.—JS

Cody Rhodes held his newly won WWE Universal Championship belt in his hands and fell to his knees Sunday night, as Lincoln Financial Field erupted in cheers.

The moment, which capped WrestleMania 40, marked the culmination of an epic, two-year story in which Rhodes, the son of late wrestling legend Dusty Rhodes, attempted to win the championship that had eluded his father. Excitement surrounding the professional wrestler’s journey has been a boon for WWE business, and it also translated to record viewership on Peacock.

WrestleMania 40 was Peacock’s most-streamed entertainment event ever; the event attracted a total of 1.2 billion live minutes across April 6 and April 7, according to data from NBC.

Second only to Taylor: The two-night event also saw gains in average minutes of viewing from last year, with Night 1 up 26% and Night 2 up 30%. Saturday and Sunday’s combined viewership marked Peacock’s second-highest usage weekend ever, trailing only Jan. 13–14, the weekend of the Kansas City Chiefs’ playoff game against the Miami Dolphins, which was the first NFL playoff game to air exclusively on streaming. (Taylor Swift attended that event to support her boyfriend, Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce.)

Continue reading here.—JN

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Executive moves across the industry.

• Citi hired BlackRock global CMO Alex Craddock to be its chief marketing and content officer.
• Bayer appointed Samantha Avivi, the former CMO at Advance Auto Parts, as its new North American consumer health CMO.
• General Motors named Molly Peck, CMO at global Buick and GMC, as chief transformation officer, a new position.
• Amazon brought on former NBCU ad sales alum Krishan Bhatia as VP of global video advertising, where he will lead sales across the company’s streaming video business.