ESPN’s bet on sports betting only started recently.

Major sportsbooks including FanDuel, DraftKings, Caesars, MGM, and Wynn were already spending millions on social and TV advertising as far back as 2022, and since then, FanDuel and other sports-betting brands have made their Super Bowl ad debuts.

So ESPN Bet, the sportsbook created by ESPN and Penn Entertainment that went live this past November, has had some catching up to do in the marketing department.

“Most people…certainly have their preferred [sports betting] platform, but we felt like we had an opportunity to come in and hopefully provide a better product and better experience to fans,” Alex Healy-Lucciola, senior director of marketing for fantasy and sports betting at ESPN, told Marketing Brew.

While the ESPN brand name may hold weight among sports and sports-betting fans, Healy-Lucciola and his team aren’t relying on that alone to pull in users in an increasingly crowded market. Instead, their play also centers around a brand platform and campaign that’s based on “the language of sports fans” and is meant to “democratize sports betting,” he said.

Continue reading here.—AM

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Wake up and start streaming.

A new sports sponsorship is about to take flight. On Monday, the Baltimore Orioles announced asset management company T. Rowe Price as their first-ever jersey patch sponsor.

The multiyear deal means T. Rowe Price’s branding—the company name and its logo of a bighorn sheep named Trusty—will appear on the sleeve of the Orioles’ uniforms beginning with Tuesday’s game against the Braves at Camden Yards in Baltimore, where T. Rowe Price is also based. The asset management company has done a bit of sports marketing, including a recent deal with the Atlantic Coast Conference, but nothing of this scale, according to Head of Global Marketing Theresa McLaughlin.

“We’ve been working on a brand refresh for about a year now, and this was just the next step for us, making sure we’re really clear on telling our story and our messaging,” she told Marketing Brew. “Sponsorships play an important role in doing that.”

The deal was a long time coming for the Orioles, and the team took its time to find its ideal match patch partner in T. Rowe Price, Orioles SVP and CRO T.J. Brightman said.

When Major League Baseball first announced that teams would be allowed to take on jersey-patch sponsors in 2022, Brightman said the Orioles immediately started exploring opportunities but that the team also wanted to “sit back and observe” the earlier movers in the space before making anything official.

• They had conversations with multiple companies over that time but, based on learnings from other teams, ultimately decided a local brand would be the best fit, Brightman said.

Keep reading here.—AM

In the immortal words of the Grateful Dead, the global ad market just keeps truckin’ on.

Global ad revenue is expected to grow 7.8% this year, totaling $989.8 billion, according to GroupM’s 2024 Global Midyear Forecast, a jump from the 5.3% it predicted in December.

Overall, GroupM expects ad industry revenue to surpass the trillion-dollar mark in 2025, a year earlier than it forecast in its December 2023 report.

That projected growth is largely driven by China’s economic recovery, along with falling inflation, the rapid growth of retail media and streaming platforms, and, of course, the omnipresence of AI, the report found.

Digital advertising is expected to make up about 70% of total ad industry revenue this year, or nearly $700 billion. (That figure excludes “digital extensions of traditional channels,” like streaming and CTV platforms, print, or OOH.) That figure is expected to grow to nearly 75%, or about $986 billion, in 2029.

US of A: US ad revenue (excluding political advertising) is expected to grow 5.8% and reach $365.9 billion this year. In fact, nearly every category of media is projected to grow this year, save for newspapers (-2.2%), magazines (-4.4%), and traditional television (-1.7%).

Read more here.—RB

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Stories we’re jealous of.

• The Wall Street Journal published an investigation into Elon Musk’s “boundary-blurring relationships with women at SpaceX.”
• The New York Times wrote about the TikTok trend involving people filming their Chipotle orders to get larger portions, and the potential headache it’s created for the brand.
• The Times also wrote about how Chucky (yes, the murderous, fictional doll) became a queer icon.