When e.l.f. Cosmetics ran a regional Super Bowl ad starring Jennifer Coolidge in 2023, beauty brands and sports weren’t typically considered members of the same team.

Almost two years later, that’s starting to change, with more beauty and personal-care brands tapping into sports and leagues of all kinds, including the NFL and the Super Bowl. In 2024, the biggest football game of the year included ads from brands like CeraVe, NYX Professional Makeup, and e.l.f., which upped its regional buy to a national spot.

Some marketers expect to see more from the category in the 2025 game. While e.l.f. hasn’t announced any plans yet, the brand’s Super Bowl ad last year came together in less than three weeks—and Chief Brand Officer Laurie Lam said that “anything is still possible.”

Super Bowl or not, e.l.f. is sticking with sports marketing in the year to come, Lam said, including for its latest campaign, which is all about sports fandom.

“When you see the signals in there, you see that those proof points are working, you go in harder,” Lam told Marketing Brew. “You’ve got to walk the walk. You’ve got to show up.”

Continue reading here.—AM

Yahoo is jumping on the curation bandwagon.

The digital media company will work with a host of partners to offer more white-glove advertising services in an effort to help advertisers reach their intended audiences and avoid some of the pitfalls of programmatic advertising, it announced at CES last week.

So what? After several years of bad press about “made for advertising” inventory and wasted budgets, curation has become the buzzword du jour in the ad-tech world, as seemingly every ad-tech company seeks to sever its connection with the open web (aka where all those ads end up).

• In 2023, Yahoo’s demand-side platform rolled out Yahoo Backstage, an offering that promises “direct access” to publishers like News Corp and ESPN.

Last week, Yahoo said it would build on those efforts, announcing partnerships with ad-tech analytics company Jounce, contextual advertising company Peer39, and ad-tech emissions tracker Scope3, all with the intention of helping its advertisers avoid the junk of the internet. Advertisers can, if they wish, lean on these partners to weed out programmatic resellers offering lower quality and “made for advertising” inventory.

“This empowers the buyer to decide what inventory they want, and they’re in control of creating their own packages,” Adam Roodman, GM of Yahoo’s DSP, told Marketing Brew.

Read more here.—RB

The House of Mouse is getting even bigger.

Disney has more than 157 million ad-supported monthly active users across Disney+, ESPN+, and Hulu, the company announced at CES during its annual Global Tech & Data Showcase.

As the company continues to grow its streaming subscriber base, the entertainment giant is also rolling out new ad products and is expanding some of its previously offered ad capabilities, including new ad tools, updates to its clean room, and audience segments. Here are some of the details shared at the showcase.

Time to play: As streamers like Peacock lean into engagement tools like mobile mini-games, Disney is also expanding its gamified ad format, which first rolled out on Hulu in June. Disney is now expanding their availability, the company announced this week, offering users polling, trivia, and other games through partnerships with Brightline, KERV, and Innovid.

Do it live: Disney is also growing its Magic Words ad product that debuted last year at CES, which lets brands target consumers within scenes. The technology will soon match brands’ creative with moments in live events, the company announced, and the product is currently being tested with brands like Chipotle and T-Mobile. It will be available next quarter.

Continue reading here.—JS

Executive moves across the industry.

• Warner Bros. Discovery hired Priya Aiyar as its new chief legal officer.
• Publicis Groupe hired Omnicom’s CEO of North America investment, Geoff Calabrese, to serve as CCO.
• Speaking of Publicis Groupe, the holdco hired Omnicom Health Group CEO Matt McNally to serve as global CEO of Publicis Health.
• Asics promoted its European communications director, Caroline Fisher, to global brand communications director.