Last year, MLS got Leo Messi. This year, the league landed artists and music producers Don Elektron and Gotopo.

Don Elektron, a Latin Grammy-award winner, and Gotopo, an up-and-coming Afro-Indigenous-Venezuelan singer and producer, aren’t playing for the league—they’re playing music for it. MLS first worked with the duo when the league used their song “Sacúdete” for the campaign promoting the 2024 season, which kicked off in February. Now, MLS is running the summer edition of that campaign with an original track that Don Elektron and Gotopo created just for the league.

With their latest campaign, the MLS marketing team wants the original song—as well as the league—to be stuck in people’s heads all summer long.

“This year, we really had a specific intention, which was to continue to create this association between MLS and Latin pop music,” Jesse Perl, the league’s VP of brand and integrated marketing, told Marketing Brew. “We think it’s such an ownable sound of MLS that’s there authentically and organically, and as Latin pop music becomes a bigger and bigger part of mainstream culture, it’s really about staking our claim that this is who we’ve always been.”

Continue reading here.—AM

Believe it or not, Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM, as the cool kids call it) aren’t too far away. Wanna know what to expect? Spoiler alert: According to insights from eMarketer, mobile commerce is expected to drive the 2024 holiday season yet again.

Attentive has even more deets on how to crush the BFCM game. They’ve put together a ton of resources designed to help you conquer the busiest time of the year.

We’re talkin’:

• 90-60-30-day guides for long- and short-term planning
• email and SMS templates to help you plan, launch, and track campaigns
• a webinar with hands-on tips, campaign examples, and AI strategies

Get ahead of BFCM.

When FX’s Shōgun premiered in February, it was described as a limited series. But the show, an adaptation of the novel by the same name, immediately found a huge audience, becoming FX parent company Disney’s No. 1 general entertainment series internationally and receiving critical acclaim. To fans’ delight, the series has been renewed for a second season.

The success of Shōgun isn’t a new one in Hollywood; series like HBO’s House of the Dragon and Netflix’s Bridgerton are delivering big audiences for media companies and, in some cases, their advertisers. Those kinds of success stories, though, may be getting rarer: original content production in streaming is slowing down.

In 2023, 516 adult original scripted series were greenlit across domestic cable, streaming, and broadcast services, as opposed to 600 in 2022, FX Chairman John Landgraf said at the Television Critics Association press tour earlier this year. That’s also lower than the number of scripted series greenlit in 2019 (532) and 2021 (559).

There are several factors at play that are affecting the slowdown, including financial pressures to keep costs contained and last year’s actors’ and writers’ strikes, which temporarily reduced output. But for better or for worse, the golden age of television seems to be squarely past us, despite the benefits original programming can have on attracting and retaining consumers.

“The risk tolerance for big swings has gone way down,” Paul Furia, head of content and creative packaging at agency Media by Mother, told Marketing Brew. “Doing more with less is…the norm now.”

Keep reading here.—JS

Imagine having a three-day weekend, every weekend. For the around 50 employees at Chicago-based ad agency Authentic, it’s no fantasy.

The company adopted a four-day workweek in December, following about a five-month pilot program that concluded in May. It started the program to help improve retention, which, as of 2019, was 54.5%, according to founder and CEO Mike Nellis.

“We wanted to try to do something a little bit different [when] we launched our firm [in 2018], and the things that were different six years ago were providing better pay and finding better benefits and creating a safe work environment,” Nellis told HR Brew. “But we wanted to continue to evolve and ideate on how to build a better workspace and how to be leaders in the space. And we decided to push [a] four-day workweek.”

Four-day workweeks have been shown to have a positive impact on both retention and recruitment: 63% of candidates surveyed by Gartner in 2023 noted that a four-day workweek is the “top new and innovative benefit that would attract them to a job.”

• Additionally, employees whose employers offer a four-day workweek reported a 14% increase in productivity and a 17% increase in well-being, according to Gartner.

Authentic started experimenting with flexible scheduling during the Covid-19 pandemic, when it let employees take off Friday afternoons. When its employees and clients responded positively, and productivity stayed constant, the organization decided to embrace the four-day workweek.

Read more from HR Brew here.—AS

Can’t spell “Black Friday” without AI. Last year, nearly 50% of Attentive customers used AI to create or fine-tune their SMS and email campaigns. To help you crush it this year, Attentive is hosting a BFCM planning webinar that spills all the deets on how AI can boost your numbers. Mark your cal.

Join us at Marketing Brew’s annual summit on Sept. 12 in New York! Discover how the brightest minds in the industry leverage cutting-edge ideas and generative AI to stay ahead in a constantly evolving market. Hear from headline speakers like Brendan Lewis (EVP of Global Comms and Public Affairs, Oatly) and Cheryl Guerin (EVP, Global Brand Strategy & Innovation, Mastercard) explore performance-driven insights, and perfect your people-centric approach to building stronger leaders and brand ambassadors. Don't miss out—get your tickets today!