The New York Liberty had quite a year in 2023, but it hasn’t always been rainbows and sunshine and Hot Ones for the Brooklyn-based WNBA team.

Chief Brand Officer Shana Stephenson knows it all too well. When she first started as a consultant with the Liberty in 2018, the team was at the bottom of the league, playing in a small arena 40 minutes north of Manhattan after years of playing at Madison Square Garden. Stephenson had her work cut out for her.

“It was really a very discouraging time,” she told Marketing Brew. “It was a time in which you didn’t know what the future was going to hold, if there would be a team in the next season, if a [new] ownership group bought the team, if they would relocate…There was just all of this uncertainty, but I knew that when I was brought on as a consultant, my job was to try to get as many fans as I could out to Westchester County Center to give this franchise hope and an opportunity to survive.”

The team’s fortunes have since changed dramatically: In 2023, regular season attendance at Liberty home games increased by 45% compared to 2022, and this season is looking even brighter for the league as it welcomes rookies like Kamilla Cardoso and Caitlin Clark fresh off a record-breaking NCAA tournament. At the team’s home opener this weekend against Clark and the Indiana Fever, the Liberty reportedly saw more than $2 million in ticket revenue, a new league record.

The Liberty started off their season with a three-game winning streak last week, and as play continues to heat up, Stephenson said she’s focused on keeping the brand fresh and appealing to a “younger, cooler, more diverse, culturally relevant fan base” while maintaining its relationship with its “core fans, who have been riding with us since the earliest days.”

Continue reading here.—AM

Small-biz owners, prepare for a new kind of Card. The limited edition Boeing 747 Delta SkyMiles® Reserve Business Card design is scheduled for arrival.

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Enjoy complimentary Delta Sky Club® access when traveling on a same-day Delta-marketed or Delta-operated flight.*** Oh, and did we mention you can earn 75k bonus miles**** to put toward your next vacation?

Reserve a piece of history—and take your business to new heights.

*The limited edition Boeing 747 design is made with 33% metal from a Delta Boeing 747 aircraft. Image for illustration only. Does not represent Boeing 747-400 aircraft used for card.

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***Effective 2/1/25, Reserve Card Members will receive 15 Visits per year to the Delta Sky Club; to earn an unlimited number of Visits each year starting on 2/1/25, the total eligible purchases on the Card must equal $75,000 or more between 1/1/24 and 12/31/24, and each calendar year thereafter.

****After you spend $10,000 in purchases on your new Delta SkyMiles® Reserve Business American Express Card within the first six months of Card Membership.

Slowly, but surely, Google is (totally, maybe) moving away from third-party cookies within its Chrome browser. Though Lucy keeps pulling the football, moving the deadline from late 2024 to “early next year,” third-party cookies have already started disappearing, giving advertisers an early snapshot of the post-cookie landscape.

Since the company first made the announcement in 2020, ad-tech companies have been trying to figure out how to replace cookies, which essentially let advertisers track users across the internet—often, and until somewhat recently, without user consent. Google has pitched a few of its own solutions, like PAIR, seller-defined audiences, and Topics. There are also contextual tools that match advertisers with content as opposed to specific users.

One solution backed by many well-known ad-tech companies are alternative IDs, which, broadly speaking, aim to identify users across the web without the use of cookies, and which industry execs claim are more privacy-friendly.

Because we all know the ad-tech ecosystem isn’t getting any less complex anytime soon, Marketing Brew spoke with advertising executives—from media buyers to ad-tech researchers—to try and break down the major differences between many of the alternative ID solutions available today.

“There isn’t going to be one ID to rule them all, but it’s how these IDs can work together in specific environments and use cases,” Jaime Nash, director of product marketing at The Trade Desk, explained.

Read more here.—RB

Each week, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.

Jonathan Haber is the co-founder of the independent agency Giant Spoon. Before founding Giant Spoon, he served as chief innovation officer at OMD.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? I have never forgotten a California Lottery campaign I saw as a kid. The whole spot is a POV, shot from a guy walking through a grocery store with his voiceover. He turns down an entire aisle filled with cheese, and his voiceover inner monologue says, “Suddenly, it hit me: I could totally afford all this cheese.” The idea is so relatable: we have all been in the grocery store and had anxiety over the prices and worried about what our total bill was going to be. One major thing that changes when you finally get some money is buying whatever you want at the grocery store and not thinking about it. Selling that fantasy with the lottery is so much more relatable and real than buying a mansion or a boat.

What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least? People in our business are obsessed with talking about media fragmentation and the oversaturation of content—too many channels, too much programming, too much noise, too many consumer choices, and yeah, too many ads. But it’s something I see as a good thing because, as a creative and as our agency has shown with our work, it pushes you to stand out from the crowd and make an impact.

As for something in our business I find annoying, it’s got to be people like me talking about themselves all the time: “Look at me, I won this award, I won this account, I’m brilliant.” And even though we at our agency have won awards and won big accounts and are brilliant, I believe that, generally, the work should speak for itself. Also, I could talk about AI for hours, but that may be for another time.

Read more here.

More popular than crêpes?! Ooh la la, the numbers don’t lie. Tubi’s 75m die-hard active users outnumber the entire population of France. Translation? When your brand advertises on Tubi, you’re reaching one in four US TV households stuffing their eyeballs with Tubi content (and not their mouths with crêpes). Start advertising on Tubi.

Gen Z is different from older generations. They are digitally native, spend more time watching videos, and have embraced the overlap between media and technology. But Gen Z has some particular habits marketers should pay attention to.

From their aversion to bad memes to their quest for individuality, this EMARKETER guide is your brand’s roadmap to making a lasting impact with Gen Z. Get the full guide.

Mergers and acquisitions, company partnerships, and more.

• Comcast will soon offer customers a bundle of streaming services called StreamSaver that includes Peacock, Apple TV+, and Netflix.
• Zaxby’s tapped MrBeast to be the face of its first celebrity meal ever as part of a year-long partnership.
• Havas acquired the omni-commerce company Liquid, which will be rebranded as Liquid Havas and join Havas’s e-commerce portfolio.