What do Beyoncé, Mia Farrow, Jacob Elordi, and Carmela Soprano have in common? We know what they’d look like as Bratz dolls.

Bratz, the nearly 25-year-old doll brand, has become known for its social re-creations of paparazzi shots, memes, music videos, red carpets, and other pop culture moments. One video from 2022, in which animated Bratz dolls re-create a scene from the HBO series Euphoria, has amassed more than 42 million views and 10 million likes on TikTok alone.

Josh Hackbarth, CMO of Bratz parent company MGA Entertainment, told us the brand intentionally looks to re-create tastemakers in art, music, and fashion on social media to keep it on the “cutting edge of culture.”

Bratz, he said, have always been known for being edgy (and sometimes controversial), but it could still come as a surprise to see a doll brand promoting cocktail Friday or horror movies like Nosferatu and The Substance, which aren’t exactly made for kids. Hackbarth said that’s by design: the brand has shifted from targeting kids to Gen Z and younger millennials online, specifically those that may have played with the dolls as children or watched Bratz’s TV show or any of Bratz’s movies from the mid-2000s.

“We’ve evolved with our audience,” Hackbarth said, adding that “whatever’s hot in pop culture goes down [from young adults] to kids and up to parents and older.”

Bratz has amassed more than 5.5 million followers across TikTok and Instagram. While not every young adult is collecting dolls, Hackbarth said the fan engagement, brand differentiation, and cultural relevancy are more important to the brand than hard sales figures.

“You don’t last for 25 years by just focusing on sales,” he said.

Continue reading here about Bratz’s social approach.—KH

The playing field for sports seems to be getting bigger by the minute.

NFL teams are going international, European soccer clubs are growing their footprints stateside, and US women’s leagues like the NWSL and WNBA are eager to add franchises as their fandoms expand. Less traditionally popular sports like Formula 1 and pickleball are gaining steam, too.

All the fan, brand, and investor interest has made for a “more professionalized” sports landscape and mounting competition for fan attention, Deloitte principals, directors, and leaders wrote in the consulting firm’s 2025 Global Sports Industry Outlook. Here are some takeaways for how sports organizations can approach a couple of major components of the industry, like streaming deals and data collection.

Stream on: Streaming live sports is the norm these days, with more SVOD providers than ever for fans, as well as leagues and teams, to choose from. As the Deloitte authors note, “fragmentation is a persistent concern,” but new content and services keep coming.

• Sports broadcasters and streamers are increasingly adding shoulder programming like podcasts and documentaries to their coverage, and some fans are eating it up: 40% of Gen Zers and millennials said “they’d like more documentary-style content about sports and players in the offseason,” according to Deloitte Digital Media Trends data.

Read more here about the report’s biggest takeaways.—AM

What do we want? More live ad capabilities! When do we want it? Now!

Live ads and buy-side interoperability were top of mind for streamers at The Trade Desk’s Fwd25 event in New York last Thursday. Execs from NBCU, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, and Disney were among those who showed up to discuss their offerings for advertisers this year.

What a time to be (a)live: Last summer’s Paris Olympics proved to be “the best testing ground on what we’re going to do for the future” for NBCU’s live programmatic ad capabilities, Alison Levin, NBCU’s president of advertising and partnerships, said onstage. Ahead of the Olympics, NBCU inked a partnership with The Trade Desk to make Peacock ad inventory available on the platform. It seemed to be a success: “90% of the advertisers who programmatically activated with The Trade Desk with the Olympics [had] never activated for the Olympics before that,” she said.

Programmatic has also helped NBCU understand performance more quickly at a more granular level, she said, rather than waiting for advertisers’ sales data to measure campaign success. For example, programmatic data revealed that about 95% of the consumers reached by two Olympics advertisers were “unreachable on other AVOD and streaming platforms,” she said.

WBD’s US ad sales co-president Ryan Gould was high on the promise of live ad offerings in sports.

“The promise of large-scale live sports events in connected-TV environments makes everyone here super excited to be able to send addressable messages to sports fans,” he said. “I don’t think we’re there yet as an industry, but I think that’s definitely a way to drive more performance in streaming.”

Read more about streamers’ priorities heading into Upfronts season.—JS

Stories we’re jealous of.

• Business Insider attended the sold-out concert of “virtual influencer” Mori Calliope and reported on the experience.
• The New York Times wrote about the return of news aggregation platform Digg.
• The Wall Street Journal wrote about the brand deals that have emerged from high-profile breakups.

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