If there’s one thing Gap’s gonna do, it’s make people dance.

So far this year, the clothing brand has created two music video-esque campaign spots, much to the delight of the internet. For its spring campaign, “Linen Moves,” singer Tyla dances in what’s essentially a re-creation of the music video for Jungle’s hit single “Back On 74.” And last month, the brand recruited singer Troye Sivan to dance to “Funny Thing” by Thundercat for its fall “Get Loose” campaign.

“Linen Moves” was one of Gap’s “most successful campaigns to date” in terms of online engagement, Erika Everett, head of marketing at Gap, told Marketing Brew, and her team wanted to keep the momentum going.

“We needed to one-up ourselves, essentially,” she told us.

So far, it seems to be working. A TikTok video from the brand featuring Sivan already has nearly 30 million views and more than 400,000 likes, and some people have re-created the spot, getting their own fair share of engagement. Based on performance to date, Everett told us she’s optimistic this campaign could “potentially outperform” the last.

Gap’s song-and-dance campaigns come as part of an 18-month “brand reinvigoration” that Everett says is centered around participating more heavily in pop culture through social-first content. The goal, she said, is to “drive relevance with today’s consumer” while also paying homage to the brand’s legacy.

“The Gap’s first store opened selling jeans and records,” she said. “So music will be a key cultural pillar for us going forward.”

Continue reading here.—KH

Fireball is spicing things up this football season.

Earlier this month, the cinnamon whiskey brand rolled out a new campaign centered on football rivalries. The campaign, which features a new tagline, “Ignite Your Rivalry,” marks the brand’s first paid advertising effort on TikTok, and is part of a strategic effort to strengthen its ties to the sport, according to Danny Suich, Fireball’s global brand manager.

“There’s no better feeling than beating your rivals, and then being able to trash talk your friends who are fans of those rivals,” Suich told Marketing Brew. “We thought that aligned perfectly with what our core mission is on Fireball, to really inject fun and a little bit of mischief into every experience.”

Friendly fire(ball): The campaign consists of two ads starring comedians Stavros Halkias and Andrew Santino. In both, Halkias loses a bet to Santino, resulting in Halkias shaving his eyebrows in one version and getting a tattoo in the other.

When the Fireball team initially started planning the campaign, they considered going a more traditional route and having pro athletes front the ads, Suich said. But when they thought about who might resonate best with the brand’s target audience and “who would be able to get the tonality of Fireball across in an authentic way,” they landed on the comedians, who are real-life friends and football fans.

“We thought it made the spot feel even more authentic to football fans and to our core demo, because I think they would be able to sniff out if we were just hiring guys who had no idea about the NFL or about college football,” Suich said. “They had this playful rivalry between the two of them, and it led to some really amazing, laugh-out-loud one-liners.”

Read more here.—AM

Publishers are just looking for a little attention. Integral Ad Science hopes to serve it to them.

The ad verification and brand safety company on Thursday unveiled an attention tool that it says publishers can use to better sell their advertising inventory. The tool, called Quality Attention for Publishers, uses eye-tracking data and machine learning to gauge how much attention readers might give webpages.

The tool will be available to publishers, as well as the supply-side platforms (SSPs) that sell publisher inventory programmatically, and will allow them “to demonstrate inventory quality, enhance their ad effectiveness, and optimize user engagement,” according to IAS.

Attention, please: In recent years, attention metrics, which aim to estimate the quality of content adjacent to ad inventory, have become all the rage as advertisers and publishers continue to shift away from more traditional metrics like viewability. In April, the New York Times announced that it was working with the attention company Adelaide to create attention benchmarks for its ad inventory.

But the tech is still relatively new: IAS only made its Quality Attention attention metrics for advertisers product widely available in January.

Zoom out: Publishers have traditionally been a little uneasy about their relationships to verification companies, with some claiming that companies unfairly scrape websites and then sell data back to them.—RB

Stories we’re jealous of.

• New York magazine wrote about the AI-slop-filled future of the internet.
• Business Insider explored the reasons why influencers and creators are hosting more in-person events.
• The New York Times wrote about plant company The Sill, which recently closed its last remaining retail location in an effort to better meet Gen Z where it shops: online.