For brands and streaming services alike, the hottest real estate in town is in Roku City.

To commemorate the 25th anniversary of SpongeBob SquarePants, Paramount+ is throwing a Roku City parade featuring the characters from Bikini Bottom. Ahead of the Season 2 release of House of the Dragon, Warner Bros. Discovery shipped in a fire-breathing dragon and a castle bearing the Targaryen sigil. In April, a Spotify bus drove through Roku City’s downtown to celebrate the release of the Taylor Swift album The Tortured Poets Department.

And like the real-life cities Roku City is only loosely modeled after, the roads are sometimes choked with cars—and the cars have ads on them: DoorDash signed on as the first partner to buy digital car ads earlier this year.

As CTV continues to grow in popularity, advertisers of all kinds are capitalizing on the attention they can get by being in Roku’s screensaver turned marketing vehicle.

“Being in Roku City just gave us that additional layer and compliment to our partnership…and allowed us to be in a more in-your-face, front-and-center way on connected TV,” Jennifer Austin, senior director of media strategy at Carnival Cruise Line, which ran a campaign on Roku City last fall, said.

Continue reading here.—JS

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Golf announcers aren’t really known for being the loudest or most energetic.

That doesn’t quite match the vibe of Topgolf, the high-tech sports entertainment chain that’s been part of the push in recent years to modernize the game of golf and make it less stuffy. So instead of tapping any human golf personalities for its summer campaign, Topgolf made its own: Chaz Mulligan and Birdie Baker, puppets created in collaboration with Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, the visual effects and puppetry studio founded by the creator of the Muppets.

“We’re just having fun with the idea of the golf broadcast,” Topgolf Chief Brand Officer Geoff Cottrill told Marketing Brew. “We consider [Chaz and Birdie] two new friends, and they’re offering us a lot of opportunities to connect with new people and encourage people to play.”

In addition to the eclectic announcers, Topgolf has a few other tricks up its sleeve this summer and beyond, all of which are focused on positioning golf as fun and accessible.

Not too stuffy: Chaz and Birdie are featured in the latest iteration of Topgolf’s “Come Play Around” campaign, which started in 2022 and is all about “offering an open invitation for anybody and everybody to come play around with us,” Cottrill said. The puppets made their debut in early June and have so far appeared in a few ads for the brand.

• The Topgolf team ultimately decided to use spokespuppets instead of people because they wanted to work with new and flexible personalities as opposed to working around existing public figures, Cottrill said.
• When Topgolf’s agency, Anomaly, approached the Jim Henson Creature Shop with the idea, they agreed almost immediately, and came up with Chaz and Birdie in just a couple of days, he said.

Read more here.—AM

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

Emily Ward is co-founder of the talent agency Shine Talent Group and the angel investment fund Love X Money Ventures (fka Shine Ventures). She and her co-founder Jess Hunichen also founded TheBodCon, a virtual conference series focused on self-acceptance and body confidence. She started her career in public relations.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in marketing? We negotiate collaborations between brands and content creators, similarly to how a sports manager negotiates endorsement deals for athletes. Instead of athletes, we represent social creators with captive followerships.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? Right now, it’s the project management software we have developed called The Thread. As Shine Talent Group grew, we couldn’t find a supportive tool to manage the high volume of campaigns our team was working on, so we decided to build one ourselves. This is the first tool on the market that was built for talent managers’ workflow first and foremost. It’s been instrumental for our growth, and we are excited to finally start opening it up to the industry.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: The amount of kids that are in my house at any given time. It can be a little crazy over here!

What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least? Substack seems to be catching momentum.

For the trend I am least optimistic about, I find it really interesting seeing traditional commercials come back through streaming platforms. I would like to see more intelligence directed toward the cadence of these ads, so the viewer isn’t getting hit with the same commercial 20 times in a watch session.

Continue reading here.

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Mergers and acquisitions, company partnerships, and more.

• Publicis is acquiring influencer marketing shop Influential for around $500 million.
• Polaroid released a limited-edition version of its Generation 2 camera designed in collaboration with Eames Office.
• Snapchat rolled out new Olympics-themed AR lenses, some of which were created with the International Olympic Committee.