The crack and fizz of a freshly opened bottle of Mountain Dew. Matthew McConaughey wielding a fried chicken wing like a baton. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, so decadent and oozing with chocolate that they’re driving people to risk self-immolation at the foot of a volcano.

This year’s Super Bowl Sunday was a typical junk-food bacchanal. That is, until one ad may have cast that second helping of buffalo dip in a different light.

In the third quarter of the game, the DTC telehealth company Hims & Hers ran a PSA-style ad highlighting America’s obesity epidemic, complete with shots of jiggling bellies, spinning scales, eerie medical scans, and a message that “obesity leads to half a million deaths each year.”

“Something’s broken, and it’s not our bodies,” the ad warns viewers, before offering a solution: weight loss drugs, like semaglutide, which Hims & Hers sells in a compounded form.

The commercial, set to Childish Gambino’s “This is America,” was the only national broadcast mention of semaglutide, the main ingredient in some so-called miracle weight loss drugs that have exploded in popularity in recent years, but its presence in the game represented a stark reminder of the still-to-be-seen effects on the segment of the food and beverage industry that could simply be categorized as junk food. According to a KFF survey taken last year, 1 in 8 adults have used GLP-1 drugs, and by 2033, the market is expected to balloon to $150 billion, according to an estimate from BMO Capital Markets. Executives at companies like Walmart have acknowledged the business impacts as consumers using the drugs buy and eat less food.

“That spot, I think, in many respects, represents a real warning shot to the legacy traditional food and beverage industry that is spending…millions upon millions of dollars at the Super Bowl,” said Sam Hornsby, the founder and CEO of Triptk and an executive team member of Havas’s GLP-1 consultancy.

Continue reading here.—RB

Jason Kelce has a pretty distinct look: bushy beard, dark eyebrows, and the build of an offensive lineman. Ahead of this year’s Super Bowl, Marriott Bonvoy found 25 guys who look just like him to keep fans all over New Orleans guessing.

In the week leading up to the Super Bowl, the hotel loyalty brand tapped into the growing popularity of celebrity look-alike contests by holding its own version. Instead of putting out a call for fans to enter themselves into a look-alike contest for a city-associated celebrity, as was the case for Timothée Chalamet look-alikes in New York or Jeremy Allen White doppelgängers in Chicago, Marriott Bonvoy gathered its own Jason Kelce look-alikes to scatter throughout NOLA. Then, five fan duos competed to find the real Kelce during the brand’s activation, with the winning pair scoring a stay in the Courtyard Super Bowl Sleepover Suite inside Caesars Superdome itself, and tickets to the big game the next day.

The event was designed to add a little more fun around the Super Bowl, a matchup between Kelce’s former team, the Philadelphia Eagles, and his brother Travis Kelce’s Kansas City Chiefs, while also leveling up Marriott Bonvoy’s partnership with Jason Kelce, who has served as the brand’s first-ever “Fanbassador” since September, according to Peggy Roe, EVP and chief customer officer at Marriott International.

“We’ve been doing the Super Bowl sleepover for a while, and it’s always gotten interest within our customer community,” Roe told Marketing Brew. “So we were thinking about, ‘Well, how do we really tie this to the rest of our campaign and what we’ve been doing with working with Jason Kelce?’”

Read more here.—JN

US senators are asking brand-safety and ad-tech companies for answers after a report from the research firm Adalytics alleged that advertisers appeared on image-sharing sites that have, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, been found to host child sexual abuse materials (CSAM).

In letters sent to the CEOs of Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify on Friday, Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Richard Blumenthal wrote that they have “serious concerns…[that] advertising verification and brand-safety products have led advertisers to inadvertently fund websites that are known to host child sexual abuse material” and asked both to respond to a set of questions by this Friday.

Similar letters were also sent to the CEOs of Google, Amazon, the Media Ratings Council, and the Trustworthy Accountability Group.

The report in question, published on Friday, says that Adalytics observed ads for Mars, PepsiCo, Domino’s, Amazon, and the Department of Homeland Security, among others, next to explicit content on two image-sharing websites that host user-uploaded content. One of those websites was “notified dozens of times over the course of 2021, 2022, and 2023 that [it] was hosting child sexual abuse materials,” according to data from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children cited in the report.

Continue reading here.—RB

Brands, take note: Influencers are over unsolicited PR packages. Find out how intentional gifting and sustainability are shaping the future of influencer marketing—and why sending gifts without asking could be a huge waste.