When Major League Soccer came knocking on Radhika Duggal’s door, she thought it was a joke.

Duggal, who is now CMO and SVP of the league and its marketing arm, had never worked in sports, and had instead spent time as a consultant for Fortune 500 companies at Deloitte before moving onto marketing leadership roles at startups and major pharmaceutical and financial institutions like Pfizer and Chase. As she moved through the MLS interview process, though, it became an opportunity she couldn’t resist.

“I started to realize that, differently from some of the other roles I had had in the recent past where I was marketing credit cards, or travel, or pharmaceutical products, this job was about marketing joy, and fun, and escape,” Duggal told Marketing Brew. “How would I say no to this?”

Duggal joined the league during a watershed moment for North American soccer. Between Leo Messi’s induction to Inter Miami last year and a summer full of international soccer tournaments like Copa America and the Olympics, interest in the sport stateside is on the rise. That’s evident in ticket sales, too. So far this season, 8.3 million fans have attended MLS games, the most in league history by this date in the season, and 153 matches have reached sellout, another midseason high, according to the league.

As Duggal learns the ropes on the fly, with this Wednesday’s MLS All-Star Game taking place less than three months after she started, she’s leaning on skills from her past roles to focus on driving awareness and building fandom that could ensure the league finishes its season strong and comes out swinging—or, rather, kicking—again in 2025.

Continue reading here.—AM

You’ve only got 128 days until the biggest marketing event of the year. Yep, Black Friday/Cyber Monday is juuuust around the corner.

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• testing new segmentation strategies to see which groups engage well
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Bring it on, BFCM. With this calendar, you’ll be prepped for whatever it throws your way.

To B, or not to B? For Havas, it seems to be the latter.

Four of the agencies within the Havas network—Havas London, Havas Lemz, Havas New York, and Havas Immerse—had their B Corp status revoked Thursday by governing nonprofit B Lab due to Havas Media’s work with oil and gas company Shell.

As part of its decision, B Lab announced that all Havas agencies will no longer be eligible for future B Corp certification.

The move comes nearly a year after a group of B Corp-certified agencies and the climate activist group Clean Creatives filed a formal complaint letter with B Lab, asking the nonprofit to re-evaluate the agency’s status and arguing that Havas’s work with Shell violates the certification’s Declaration of Interdependence.

Havas “cooperated in good faith throughout B Lab’s investigation,” Havas spokesperson Kristin Calmes said in a statement provided to Marketing Brew, adding that “we accept the ruling and they will cease to be B Corp certified.” The four Havas agencies that were previously B Corp certified “do not have a relationship with Shell,” she said.

Holding to account: Chris Norman, founder and CEO of creative agency Good, told Marketing Brew that he enlisted Clean Creatives in September to push for change after Havas secured the Shell contract and after Chris Turner, executive director of B Lab UK, was “very ambiguous about whether B Corp agencies could work with fossil-fuel clients” in an interview with The Drum.

While Good’s B Corp certification is something “we hold very highly,” Norman said, “when those standards are kind of undermined by B Lab’s behavior, then it gets slightly difficult.”

He called the group’s Havas decision “a very exciting moment,” even if the review period took longer than he would have liked.

Read more here.—KH

Fresh off its 107 Emmy nominations, Netflix has another big number to brag about.

The platform has 278 million member households, it said in its Q2 earnings report on Thursday, up from about 270 million last quarter. With more than two viewers per household on average, the company estimates that it’s providing programming for around 600 million people.

The streamer reported 17% revenue growth, making nearly $9.6 billion in the three months ending June 30. One source of that revenue growth has been its ad tier, which grew 34% quarter over quarter and now accounts for more than 45% of sign-ups in markets where the streamer offers ad-supported tiers.

But that ad tier growth may come with a caveat: slightly lower average revenue per member.

• In the United States and Canada (UCAN) region, where it makes the most money per member monthly, ARM dropped from $17.30 in Q1 to $17.17 in Q2. (Within the UCAN region, Netflix grew its paid memberships to 84.1 million, up from 82.7 million in Q1.)

Read more here.—JS

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