Partnerships are forged in fire, or so the saying goes, and for the McLaren Formula 1 team and the cryptocurrency exchange OKX, the beginning of their years-long partnership came about during some less-than-ideal conditions.

The year was 2022, and at the time, crypto was crashing, and McLaren was solidly middle of the pack. “People weren’t really familiar with us in 2022,” OKX Global CMO Haider Rafique told Marketing Brew. “In 2023, people began to be familiar, but they were also focused on the poor performance by McLaren.”

A few years later, things are looking up for both organizations. At the end of 2024, McLaren won its first constructors’ championship in almost three decades, and OKX is looking at a more crypto-friendly administration in the US.

“We wanted to align ourselves to the winning spirit, and when we looked across the grid, McLaren was one of the oldest teams, but they hadn’t won a constructors’ championship since 1998,” OKX Global CMO Haider Rafique told Marketing Brew. “We were like, ’Not only will millions and millions and millions of people repeatedly be exposed to our brand through the McLaren F1 partnership, but more importantly, if they crack a win, gosh, we’re going to look like heroes. We’re going to look like we were part of that journey.’”

Continue reading here.—AM

Turns out live sports still reliably brings viewers to linear TV and streaming alike.

In January, TV viewership was up 5% compared to December, according to new data from Nielsen, driven largely by live sports on broadcast and cable leading up to the Super Bowl. Streaming viewership made up 42.6% of TV viewership in January, with Netflix and The Roku Channel hitting new viewership highs.

Overall, last month’s streaming viewership was 3% higher compared to December 2024, and was 21% higher than a year ago, Nielsen found. (The company’s reporting period ran from Dec. 30 to Jan. 26.)

Netflix and The Roku Channel in particular increased their pieces of the viewership pie to 8.6% and 2.1%, respectively, according to Nielsen.

Keep score: Football played a big part in bringing eyeballs to both streaming and linear, according to Nielsen. Prime Video’s stream of a Jan. 11 NFL wild-card playoff game contributed to that day being the second-highest streaming day in history with more than 47 billion streaming minutes. (The day with the highest streaming viewership ever was on Christmas Day 2024, when Netflix streamed two NFL games; that day saw 51.2 billion minutes streamed, according to Nielsen.)

On cable, ESPN’s coverage of the College Football Playoffs helped create a 42% month over month lift in cable sports viewing, while the NFL’s AFC Championship game on CBS saw the month’s largest audience overall at 57.4 million viewers.

Read more here.—JS

Big Tech brought in billions last quarter, but it wasn’t enough to please investors. Of the three largest ad platforms in the US, only Meta beat analyst expectations.

One common thread? Executives at Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta evangelized a future with even more AI, and said they’d spend a lot of money to get there. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, said it would invest $75 billion in capital expenditure, including data centers that power AI, while Meta said it would spend about $65 billion on “generative AI efforts and our core business.” Amazon said, hold my beer, telling investors that it would spend more than $100 billion this year, with a focus on building out generative AI services.

Let’s dive into the numbers.

Amazon: The e-commerce juggernaut brought in $17.3 billion from ad sales in Q4, an 18% YoY increase, bringing its total 2024 ad revenue to $56.2 billion. Additionally, the company’s Q4 revenue surpassed Walmart’s quarterly revenue for the first time.

With all that said, its revenue outlook fell short of analyst expectations, and shares slipped.

Alphabet: The internet giant, which is still awaiting a ruling on its ad-tech antitrust case, brought in $72.4 billion in ad revenue from Google and YouTube in Q4, but a slowdown in cloud computing sales sent shares falling.

Meta: The company that owns Facebook and Instagram got a gold star for the quarter, beating analyst expectations. It brought in $46.7 billion in ad revenue for the quarter, and ended 2024 with ad revenue of $160 billion.

When asked on the company’s Q4 earnings call about its pullback from fact-checking, Meta CFO Susan Li said the company hasn’t “seen any noticeable impact from our content policy changes on advertiser spend.”

Warning signs? In December, advertising analyst Brian Wieser wrote that he expects US ad revenue to grow 4.5% this year, down from roughly 9% in 2024, citing concerns around tariffs and proposed restrictions on pharma advertising.—RB

Executive moves across the industry.

• WPP Chief People Officer Lindsay Pattison is leaving the company at the end of May.
• Burger King CMO Pat O’Toole exited the brand, becoming CMO at Unleashed Brands.
• Sony Pictures tapped Pixar alum Michael Agulnek to serve as EVP global publicity.