The White Lotus returns this weekend—and brands want in on the vacation.

Ahead of the Season 3 premiere on February 16, nearly a dozen brands have been promoting the HBO hit series. Brands like the luggage company Away, Abercrombie & Fitch, Banana Republic, Bloomingdale’s, and Coffee mate are creating licensed, White Lotus-themed products.

American Express, meanwhile, is offering its cardmembers access to White Lotus-themed events for the first time this year, including two wellness retreats at Four Seasons hotels in California as well as in Thailand at the primary location for the new season. Diageo, Google Pixel, Supergoop, Kiehl’s, and CB2 will feature their products as part of the retreats.

“The White Lotus is a marketer’s dream,” Andrew Meengern, VP of HBO and Max Originals marketing, told Marketing Brew. “It’s one of those very rare opportunities where [brand] interest has grown season over season dramatically.”

Cue the theme song: Brand interest in The White Lotus has, perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot to do with viewer interest and conversation about the series, Meengern said. The Season 2 finale in December 2022 attracted 4.1 million viewers across all platforms, a series high, while its second season as a whole attracted an average of 10 million viewers per episode—50% more than its Season 1 viewership.

For brands looking to cut through the clutter, it presents a unique opportunity.

“Media consumption is more fragmented than ever, and so it creates this challenge of needing to continue to innovate in order to connect with our target audiences where they are most engaged and attentive,” Jill Hamilton, VP of global media at American Express, told us. “These types of programs enable us to do just that.”

Continue reading here.—KH

The sports world is shifting focus from the Big Easy to the Bay.

A week after the Philadelphia Eagles took down the Kansas City Chiefs in the Super Bowl, the 74th NBA All-Star Game will tip off in San Francisco, and many of the usual basketball brand suspects will be courtside. For some of them, the event is even more important than the Super Bowl; last year, brand marketers used terms like “key moment,” “crown jewel,” and “tentpole” to describe All-Star Weekend. One called it “the Super Bowl of the NBA.”

For those who are burnt out from the Super Bowl or otherwise suffering from All-Star-related FOMO, here’s a look at how some of the major sponsors are activating around Chase Center this year.

Name on it: All-Star Weekend events like the 3-point and dunk contests are spoken for when it comes to naming rights and presenting sponsorships.

• The oil company Castrol sponsors the Rising Stars practice and game, which features some of the best young players in the NBA, as well as a team of G League players.
• There’s the Ruffles NBA All-Star Celebrity Game, named after the chip brand. This year’s player roster includes influencers like Kai Cenat and Druski and musicians like Noah Kahan and Shaboozey.
• AT&T, a sponsor of the NBA and the WNBA, is the presenting partner of the HBCU Classic, this year featuring Morehouse College and Tuskegee University.
• State Farm All-Star Saturday Night encompasses the Kia Skills Challenge, the Starry 3-Point Contest, and the AT&T Slam Dunk.

Read more here.—AM

Little screen continued to be just as important as big screen this year for brand Super Bowl activations.

While there didn’t appear to be a singular social moment that compared to Oreo’s “dunk in the dark” tweet, there were certain trends and themes that emerged in how brands activated online around the Super Bowl.

Straight to NOLA: It wasn’t just Eagles and Chiefs players on the ground in New Orleans. The NFL hosted more than 150 content creators to the Big Easy, and brands like Gatorade, Verizon, and Abercrombie & Fitch hosted creator-attended events there.

Streaming platform Dazn, which oversees NFL Game Pass International, sent creators to generate trivia and interview content to raise awareness of the game in Europe and the rest of the world, Joe Caporoso, president of Team Whistle, which runs Dazn’s social strategy, told us. The focus, he said, was on “volume and getting more faces down there in more short-form formats.”

Kelsey Chickering, principal analyst at Forrester, also pointed to the number of creator houses that popped up this year around the big game. “It’s interesting to see…this comeback of the live brand activation in-person event and using that as a vehicle to bring in creators, get them to make content, and have that branded content be made naturally in those situations,” she told us.

Switching screens: In past years, brands like Nerds and Sabra hummus have brought creators like Addison Rae and Charli D’Amelio to the big screen in their Super Bowl ads. This year, it seems to have been all about Alix: Creator Alix Earle was featured in Super Bowl ads for both Carl’s Jr. and Poppi, and she participated in Hellmann’s online campaign.

Continue reading here.—KH

Stories we’re jealous of.

• Business Insider wrote about how some brands are blaming the business impact of tariffs for a pullback in their influencer marketing efforts.
• Modern Retail wrote about how Black brand owners are reacting to Target’s DE&I cuts and potential consumer boycotts of the retailer.
• Variety wrote about the state of cable TV amid Comcast’s plan to spin off many of its linear TV channels.
• The New York Times wrote about the ever-growing challenge of measuring—and agreeing on how to measure—TV viewership.