If you can’t beat ’em, teach ’em. That seems to be Vestiaire Collective’s new motto.

The secondhand luxury retailer, which a year ago banned the sale of items from brands it classifies as fast fashion, including Shein and H&M, on its platform, has begun bringing its anti-fast-fashion ethos to its influencer marketing strategy.

In November, Vestiaire Collective kicked off a six-month program with five influencers across the US, France, Italy, the UK, and Germany to educate them about the harms of fast fashion and encourage them to share their learnings with audiences online, Dounia Wone, the brand’s chief impact officer, told us.

Some of the influencers Vestiaire Collective is working with, which include Amy Jackson, Audrey Afonso, and Yewande Biala, have previously worked with, or continue to work with or wear brands that Vestiaire Collective has banned, like Asos, Zara, and Mango. Wone told us that was intentional.

“We wanted influencers that would talk to their community and for their community to not be that educated on secondhand and the damage of fast fashion,” she said.

But how effective can a message be if the messengers are wearing or promoting the very thing the brand says it’s against? Wone said the hope is to “change the way [influencers] do influencing” by encouraging them to adopt a “buy less, but buy better” mentality over time.

“Let’s see in six months…if we change just one influencer among the five of them in our batch, we will reiterate and try with five others, and try and try and try until we see a shift,” she said.

Continue reading here.—KH

From Friday Night Lights to All American, dramas and sitcoms about football have permeated TV networks for decades. In recent years, marketers and brands have looked to get in on the fictional football content game, too.

Last year, both Applebee’s and Bud Light introduced football-centric original content that doubled as marketing campaigns. Other brands are a few seasons in: Dr Pepper has been running its satirical college football drama, Fansville, since 2018.

Given how competitive and expensive sports sponsorships can be, particularly when it comes to football, original content can serve as a way to help brands stand out to fans and stretch sponsorship dollars even further, execs told Marketing Brew.

“Having a chance to bring out something further and something separate [than traditional ads] only broadens the connection between what we’re doing with the NFL as a partner versus just a standard television ad and use of marks,” Applebee’s CMO Joel Yashinsky said. “I think we’ve been able to flush out a bigger opportunity.”

Keep reading here.—AM

In a shocker to no one, the streaming revolution isn’t slowing down any time soon.

In November, streaming viewership increased by 7.6% year over year, according to Nielsen, and households devoted an average of nearly 42% of their TV time streaming shows and movies. While YouTube owned a record 10.8% of TV viewership in November, Netflix briefly hit a record of 8.5% of TV during the same week that it livestreamed the much-hyped boxing match between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson.

With stiff competition and new subscriptions slowing, streamers across the industry continue to contend with this new era of their businesses. A number of streamers spent 2024 building out ad tiers and bundling services to increase consumer uptake even as some of their parent companies struggled to stem the losses from their shrinking cable businesses.

We chatted with two streaming analysts, Eric Schmitt at Gartner and Mike Proulx at Forrester, to get a sense of some of the biggest trends that could shape the streaming business in 2025.

More bundling: “As prices for streaming services continue to rise, and the both need and desire for more streaming services amongst consumers, because they’re trying to consume all the great content that exists across all of these streaming services, it creates a cost-prohibitiveness. There needs to be mechanisms to save money. That’s why bundling is back in a big way. We’re going to continue to see in 2025 big promotions amongst streamers and probably some unexpected partnerships that exist to be able to cross-sell and cross-promote and gain subscribers, but more importantly, to retain subscribers and reduce churn.”—Mike Proulx

More consolidation: “Consolidation is likely to continue…Consumers didn’t want 500 cable channels. They certainly don’t want 82 platforms where they have to figure out what to watch. Advertisers want standards. They want consolidated reach and the ability to get to large blocks of people with efficiency. All of that points to further consolidation.”—Eric Schmitt

More here.—JS