Between overlapping international soccer tournaments, the Paris Olympics and Paralympics, and the US Open Tennis Championships, sports fans would be forgiven for expecting youth baseball to fly under the radar this summer.

To the contrary, the Little League World Series Championship Game, which aired on ABC the day before the first round of the US Open began, was the most-watched of its kind in almost a decade, according to ESPN.

The series was front and center on ESPN platforms, and in addition to mainstream network viewership, Little League boasts a media landscape and major brand sponsors like Gatorade, Adidas, and T-Mobile, painting a picture of an industry whose viewership and sponsorship interest looks increasingly similar to the big leagues.

Ballpark figures: Little League games have appeared on Disney-owned channels like ABC and ESPN since the early 1960s, according to Liz DiLullo Brown, Little League’s EVP and chief marketing and business relationship officer. “It’s one of our longest-standing partnerships,” Deidra Maddock, VP of sports brand solutions at Disney Advertising, told Marketing Brew.

• This year’s Little League Baseball World Series Championship Game averaged 3,535,000 viewers on ABC, up 20% year over year and delivering the highest viewership since 2015, according to ESPN.
• Excluding the MLB postseason, MLB All-Star events, and World Baseball Classic games, it was also the most-watched baseball game at any level on any network since the 2021 Field of Dreams game, per ESPN.

Read more here.—AM

The Menendez brothers, the subject of Netflix’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, are having a moment. From steamy edits of the actor who plays Lyle Menendez to Kim Kardashian publicly supporting the real Menendez brothers’s bid for resentencing and California Governor Gavin Newsom considering their clemency petition, they’re everywhere.

Could Netflix’s new tool, Moments, drive further conversation around the show?

The new feature, which Netflix announced late last month, allows viewers to clip scenes from Netflix shows and share them on social media platforms. Viewers can tap Moments on their screens to save a clip to their My Netflix tab.

Moments is the latest effort from Netflix to boost fan-driven marketing as it looks to drive awareness of its titles and continue growing its subscriber base.

“It’s just one more way that Netflix can have a role in conversations that are happening online and offline,” Ashley Shaffer, CMO of Stagwell’s Redscout, said.

Read more here.—JS

Dirt trackers, biohackers, and professional snackers.

No, Marketing Brew isn’t getting into slam poetry. Those are three subcultures identified by Horizon Media’s Why Group intelligence center in its third subculture field guide, which is meant to help marketers target people based on interests and passion points as opposed to more traditional demographics.

In past years, the guide has focused on Gen Z subcultures, but expanded to a cross-generational approach this time around. Gen Zers have been “paving the way” for the rise of niche communities because they’re “extremely online,” but Horizon clients have been increasingly asking about subcultures among other generations, Maxine Gurevich, Horizon SVP and head of cultural intelligence, told Marketing Brew.

“We got a lot of statistics back on the fact that people are more likely to trust someone that they have more common interests with than someone their own age,” she said. “That was the moment when we were like, ‘We need to look at subcultures that are defying age, because that’s not really a key marker of identity anymore.’”

This year’s subcultures encompass millions of adults across seven areas of interest, which were identified based on social media audits, a September survey of 1,000 US adults, MRI-Simmons research, and Horizon’s social intelligence tool. Here’s a high-level look at the niches the report suggests marketers might want to dive into.

Continue reading here.—AM