It’s a tale as old as time in the television industry: There’s no better way to make a TV show a success than to move it into a hit-making time slot.

This summer, ahead of the debut of Industry’s third season, Warner Bros. Discovery moved the show from its Monday night premiere time on HBO to the network’s coveted Sunday night slot, which has been home to hits like House of the Dragon, Succession, and The Last of Us. Since then, the show has seen a spike in viewership: According to Nielsen and WBD, the third episode of the new season attracted 370,000 cross-platform viewers, a record for the series.

The move is one of many small steps that WBD has taken to promote the promising series, and it comes as the company is looking to course-correct on a de-prioritization of the HBO brand in its product and once again market it as a place where viewers can expect to find—and pay for—prestige, premium programming.

Recipe for success: Sunday night has been and continues to be strategically essential for HBO: Last March, an HBO exec told Marketing Brew that “Sundays are a defining element of our brand.”

The Sunday night slot alone may encourage households to “continuously associate [the] time slot with sitting down, cracking open a beer, [and having a] glass of wine [or] a cup of tea, and watching their show together,” Tayla-Lee Chick, managing director at creative agency Bald, told Marketing Brew.

Continue reading here.—JS

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Michael J. Miraflor is a bit of an advertising connoisseur. From the looks of his X account, he’s constantly checking the vibes, offering takes honed from nearly two decades in agency life, where he led strategy for brands like Puma, Gucci, and H&M at Publicis and led projects for LVMH and Google at MediaLink.

Today, he’s chief brand officer of Hannah Grey, a VC firm where he says he sometimes “slots in as a short-term, interim CMO” for some of the firm’s portfolio companies. Marketing Brew asked Miraflor about how his gig differs from agency life, and how he offers founders ways to troubleshoot marketing challenges.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

What does a chief brand officer do within a VC firm? I don’t think of marketing when I think of venture capital.

It is a very unique title for VC, but I think it speaks to our unique value prop as a fund.

I’m equally obsessed with brands and creativity as I am with technology and innovation…not only [is Hannah Grey] capable of identifying founders with a lot of potential, but we can actually help them, both strategically and tactically, with their go-to-market…It boils down to helping portfolio companies and their founders with everything that they need to go from zero to one with all things marketing. …It doesn’t matter what category, every brand needs a website, they need to do some very fundamental things like SEO, SEM…In some ways, for some of our portfolio companies, I sort of slot in as a short-term, interim CMO, just to get the house in order.

How is VC life different from agency life?

The big fundamental thing that I sometimes still need to pause and wrap my head around is that when you’re on the agency side, there are a lot of deadlines that happen in rapid succession, fairly quickly…In VC, especially in the early stage we invest in—pre-seed and seed—we know that a breakout hit won’t happen for five to 10 years. It’s going to take that amount of time for even the most talented of founders to grow their company to a point where they can either be acquired or go public, which are the ultimate best-case scenarios, and that just takes time.

Continue reading here.—RB

Celebrity endorsements are hardly a new concept for CPG brands, but these talent-brand partnerships have evolved beyond just one-off commercials of A-list actors hawking products they’ve potentially never tried. The type of talent that commands consumer attention is changing, as is the level of involvement celebs are seeking in a business.

Enter Parallel, a creative partnership studio and strategic investment firm, which unites those two interests by brokering partnerships between creative talent and brands. The company was co-founded by Ken Kao, co-founder of Waypoint Entertainment, a production company behind films like The Favourite, and film producer Nic Gonda, while partner Jocelyn Florence previously led the branded content team at Quartz. Together, they act as a “bridge” between entertainment and entrepreneurship, Florence said.

The company earlier this summer helped low-sugar candy brand Behave bring in actor Busy Phillips as an investor and advisor. It has also brokered a partnership with hydration brand Cure and creator Caitlin Murray, produced content for the Venus Williams-co-founded protein drink brand Happy Viking, and also invested in ready-to-eat meal brand Proper Good and non-alc beverage brand HOP WTR.

“We can kind of speak the language of entertainment, and we can also understand what founders or startup teams are going through, because we’ve all kind of spent both time on both sides of that,” Florence said.

Read more on Retail Brew.—EC

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Executive moves across the industry.

• X tapped Hyundai vet Angela Zepeda to serve as its global marketing head.
• Back Market, a French electronics marketplace, hired Joy Howard, who previously worked at Sonos and Lyft, to be its first-ever permanent CMO.
• Discord hired Adam Bauer, who was most recently SVP of partnerships and business development at FaZe Clan, to be its VP of sales.