One brand’s misfortune is another brand’s treasure.

After BioSteel, which used to be the official hydration partner of the NHL and its players’ association, filed for bankruptcy right around the start of the league’s 2023–24 season, there was an opening for a new partner. The sports sponsorship space is especially competitive in the beverage category, so when BodyArmor CMO Tom Gargiulo heard the news about BioSteel, he said he jumped at the chance.

“BodyArmor has had relationships with a couple of [hockey] players in the past…but it’s been several years since we’ve really played in this sport,” Gargiulo told Marketing Brew. “When we were looking at different opportunities of how to bring our brand to life, and the fact that we just recently launched in Canada, this opportunity popped to the top.”

As the Coca-Cola-owned brand kicks off its five-and-a-half-year deal as the official sports drink of the NHL and NHLPA starting with this year’s Stanley Cup playoffs, Gargiulo laid out the company’s goals for the partnership and how he thinks it will contribute to the brand’s larger sports marketing ambitions.

Continue reading here.—AM

Is it okay to ask your co-worker how much they make? Is Gen Z set up for failure in the workplace? Should you really bring your whole self to work?

Each week on Per My Last Email, Morning Brew’s resident career experts, Kaila and Kyle—whose careers have collectively spanned the corporate, government, nonprofit, and startup sectors—debate the trickiest challenges in work life and share insightful (and sometimes hilarious) tactics on how to overcome them. Listen now.

This story is the seventh in a series on women leaders in sports and sports marketing. Read the rest of the profiles here, and keep reading Marketing Brew for more profiles to come.

In 2019, the US Women’s National Team won its fourth FIFA World Cup title, and as the players prepared to accept their medals, the stadium in France erupted in cheers. It wasn’t to chant “USA,” though—fans began to shout “equal pay”; earlier that year, the USWNT had filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against its governing body, the US Soccer Federation, seeking to be paid equally to the men’s national team.

Laura Correnti, a longtime media planner and partner at full-service ad agency Giant Spoon, remembers it well. She was watching the game from the Jersey Shore with her best friend, with whom she’d grown up playing soccer, and says she got goosebumps at the historic moment. Not long after that, she began to wonder about the commercial viability of the NWSL, the league in which many of the USWNT players compete stateside. Correnti says she went to its website and found just four brand partners listed.

“In that moment, I remember thinking that if this set of brands doesn’t evolve, and the investment doesn’t increase, I don’t know how this league, and this system, or this infrastructure, can support the demand that we’re seeing from consumers,” Correnti told Marketing Brew.

So she set out to do something about it.

After years of testing and planning, Correnti in January opened Deep Blue Sports + Entertainment, a firm that she hopes will become “the leading agency of record for women’s sports,” she said, providing clients like MassMutual, the UCLA women’s basketball team, and Ally Financial strategic counseling and other services as women’s sports become an increasingly significant part of brands’ marketing plans.

Read more here.—AM

Another lighthouse is trying to cut through the murky fog of ad tech.

The ad-tech consulting group DeepSee is rolling out a platform that the company’s founders say can help improve transparency in an industry that’s been plagued by claims of potential fraud and waste, it announced today.

Called the Publisher Research Portal, the platform is designed for advertisers and ad-tech intermediaries to use as a way to help gauge the quality of publishers across the expanse of programmatic advertising.

DeepSee, which is primarily a service-based shop that uses web crawlers to spelunk the depths of the internet and offer advertisers tools like exclusion and inclusion lists, is using the data gleaned from those crawlers to power the new platform, which offers something akin to a nutrition label for digital publishers. It can show advertisers what a website’s ad load looks like, whether it appears to host pirated content, and whether its traffic patterns are stable.

Rocky Moss, CEO and co-founder of DeepSee, said that a finding of “unstable” traffic could indicate that a website has “used inorganic or paid means to bring a bunch of visitors or bots to their website,” a potentially meaningful metric for advertisers.

DeepSee’s tech analyzes the text on websites, looking for phrases like “follow this link” and “torrents,” which likely signal that the site contains links to pirated content. users can select their preferences on what kind of sites to avoid and what to optimize for, which can help inform an advertiser’s programmatic advertising strategy, co-founder Antonio Torres told Marketing Brew.

The goal, Moss said, is to create a SimilarWeb for advertisers, referring to the analytics company that primarily measures and compares website traffic. The platform’s beta testers include The Trade Desk and TripleLift, Moss said.

Continue reading here.—RB

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Executive moves across the industry.

• Paramount ad sales vet Jo Ann Ross, who has been with the media giant since 1992, is stepping down at the end of the month.
• United Talent Agency alum Kyle Boulia is the latest addition to Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s PR team.
• The marketing agency United Entertainment Group tapped Ann Wool to be the first president of its North American operations. She was formerly president of Translation.