The key to a good trend post? Be very demure, very mindful…and, ideally, very timely.

After creator Jools Lebron’s “demure” audio took off after it was posted on TikTok on August 5, it didn’t take long for brands like Patrick Ta, Southwest Airlines, Verizon, Synergy Kombucha, Netflix, Edible Arrangements, and K18 to find ways to work with her. Even on videos where Lebron has sought out collabs with brands like Airbnb, she’s attracted offers for opportunities with brands like Spotify and AvantStay in the comments.

One of Lebron’s latest collaborators is real-estate platform Zillow, which appointed her as the brand’s “chief demure officer” and asked her to assess the “demurity” of certain homes in a video posted to Instagram and TikTok.

Ben Levine, senior director of social and channel marketing at Zillow, told Marketing Brew that once the brand’s community managers saw the “demure” trend catch on, they worked with the social marketing agency Viral Nation to connect with Lebron, come up with a concept, and get the video posted—all in four days’ time.

“We found it, we picked up some phones, we made some emails, and we got it out there really quickly,” he said.

Very cutesy, very authentic: Lyft was also eager to partner with Lebron after the trend took off. Anya Schulman, social media manager at Lyft, told us via email that the brand reached out the same day it went live and made their collaboration happen in one week.

“As of now, the Reel is our second-most-engaged organic post of all time,” she said.

Continue reading here.—KH

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“It’s the computer that figures it out.”

That’s US District Court Judge Leonie M. Brinkema, 80, succinctly explaining how an ad exchange manages the frequency caps of a programmatic ad campaign. Heady stuff, but at least by Day 2 of the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google, Judge Brinkema’s questions and statements, like asking on Monday whether an ad auction functions like Sotheby’s, have been direct and to the point. She has seemed to navigate the jargon and complexity of the ad market—a market that she could fundamentally alter at the end of this trial—with ease.

After the first day focused on publishers and competition, the second day of the trial was also not kind to Google’s publisher ad tech. Stephanie Layser, who oversaw the programmatic business at News Corp and now works at Amazon Web Services, described Google’s ad server for publishers, formerly known as DFP, as “slow and clunky” from the witness stand. Eisar Lipkovitz, a former Google VP of engineering on display and video ads who left the company in 2019 after nearly 15 years, described the team working on DFP as “lazy and slow in terms of innovation” in a video deposition that was played in the courtroom.

The point of it all? To illustrate that, despite industry complaints about the technology, Google’s ad server has an enormous percentage of market share. Layser testified that when News Corp tried to find a different ad server in 2017, it determined that losing Google’s advertisers could have cost the publisher at least $9 million in ad revenue that year alone.

• AdX, Google’s ad exchange, which is exclusive to Google’s ad server, accounted for 52.7% of News Corp’s programmatic revenue in 2016, or roughly $43.9 million, she said.

It was “impossible to negotiate with Google,” Layser said.

Continue reading here, and read our dispatch from Day 1 of the trial here. Be sure to catch another trial update in tomorrow’s newsletter.—RB

Big media companies are paying big bucks for big podcasts. But what, exactly, makes shows like The Joe Rogan Experience, Call Her Daddy, and New Heights worth millions of dollars?

It could be the quality, not just the size, of the podcast audience that justifies the high price tags for companies like Spotify, SiriusXM, and Wondery, which in turn sell ads into these shows, according to new research from Morning Consult.

“At first, [the podcast space] was this sort of refuge for smaller brands that didn’t have the budget to play on TV,” Ellyn Briggs, Morning Consult brands analyst, told Marketing Brew. “But now it’s essentially TV for very rich, well-engaged consumers, so obviously everyone wants to get in there.”

Big spenders: Frequent podcast listeners, defined as people who listen to podcasts at least once a week, make more money than the general population, and they’re not particularly stingy with it, according to a Morning Consult report based on surveys conducted from Aug. 27, 2023, to Aug. 27, 2024, among more than 68,000 respondents.

• Frequent podcast listeners are slightly more likely than the general population of US adults to make at least $100,000 per year and have investments worth $50,000 or more, per the report.

Read more here.—AM