Much like the weather in the spring or the next big brand collab, sports are unpredictable.

​Caitlin Clark, who was the hottest ticket in sports sponsorships ahead of this year’s March Madness, wasn’t always a brand darling. The NWSL, which saw commercial revenue skyrocket last season, had only a handful of sponsors a few years ago. And who would have thought that San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy, the 2022 NFL Draft’s Mr. Irrelevant, would go on to sign with brands like Toyota and Alaska Airlines (and lead his team to the Super Bowl), or that a sport like pickleball would have sponsors in seemingly every category?

​For sports marketers, getting in early with the right athletes, teams, or leagues can pay dividends in the long run, but they can’t predict the future (not even using AI…yet).

“Everybody wants to be the first mover,” Harry Poole, VP of marketing solutions at Excel Sports Management, told us. “They want to attach themselves to something that’s not at its peak, and something that’s on the way up…where the investment still is relatively palatable and low.”

While there’s a certain level of science and data that brands and agencies can apply to their sports sponsorship strategies, several execs said landing a deal with an athlete before they go mainstream can be as much about gut feelings and personal experiences than anything else.

Continue reading here.—AM

Set up a 401(k), buy a starter home, retire by 65…we’ve heard it all before. But is that traditional financial advice still valid? And should it be?

The Money with Katie Show is a weekly podcast unpacking the biggest questions around millennial money, from the myth of the starter home to the impacts of self-care culture and the beauty industry.

See why this illuminating podcast has 5m+ downloads—tune in now.

While other retailers are just learning to crawl, Target’s ad business could soon apply for a learner’s permit.

The Minneapolis-based retailer has sold digital ads since the Obama administration. At Cannes, Target hosted happy hours and panels about the “evolution” of retail media, joining the crowded field of retailers on the Croisette, pitching their sweet, sweet shopper data to the ad industry.

A look at the business: Roundel, Target’s advertising business, brought in $1.5 billion “in value” for the company and grew 20% in 2023, Cara Sylvester, Target’s chief marketing and digital officer, told investors during its Q4 earnings call.

• Roundel grew another 20% in Q1 of this year, per the company’s earnings report.
• According to analysts at BMO Capital Markets, in 2023, Target operated the fourth largest retail network, behind Amazon, Instacart, and Walmart.

The ad business is among the company’s fastest-growing revenue streams, even as Roundel’s reported value represented less than 1% of the retailer’s total revenue last year. Target isn’t alone in this trend: Over the last several years, retailers from Costco to The Home Depot have added ad networks into their e-commerce platforms. The category is expected to grow to $166 billion by 2025 and will account for 20% of all digital media spend this year, according to eMarketer.

Read more here.—RB

While Google only began phasing out third-party cookies in January, some people had been freaking out about it long before: 40% of marketers Adobe surveyed in 2022 who said the cookie phaseout would hurt their businesses thought it would cause “significant harm or devastation.”

Several months later, marketers are still trying to adjust to the new ad tech landscape. It’s being reshaped by not only the decrease in cookies, but also by the effects of generative AI and expected higher demand for content, according to a survey of 2,800 marketers Adobe released this week (having recently debuted its own GenAI tools). While marketers now say they’re less concerned about the cookie phaseout, many say they don’t have the structure in place to adapt, according to Adobe.

“Brands are struggling to build a strong data foundation beyond third-party cookies, and risk hurting their business,” Adobe found.

Shake it up: Almost half of companies globally (49%) still “depend heavily” on third-party cookies; the travel, technology, public sector, and financial services industries are the most dependent, according to the report. That’s a drop from 75% in 2022.

Company spend on activations that use cookie-based targeting has also nosedived since 2022: While in 2024, 28% of companies surveyed indicated they spend 50% or more of their budgets on those activations, in 2022 that number was 45%.

Continue reading here.—JS

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Join us at Marketing Brew’s Summit on September 12 in New York, where we’re creating a space for marketers to keep pace with the industry’s constant evolution and drive it forward. In a world where innovation is the heartbeat, performance is the measure, and people are the driving force, the winning formula balances all three. Come for the headline speakers, stay for the networking, and leave with tactical tools to improve your business acumen.

Executive moves across the industry.

• Dove CMO Alessandro Manfredi, who worked closely on the brand’s iconic “Real Beauty” brand platform, is exiting the company after more than 20 years at parent company Unilever.
• Tools for Humanity, a tech company founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, hired former Twitter and X executive Damien Kieran as head of privacy.
• Alloy, an identity risk management company, hired Kathryn Cook as CMO.