TV

Football is Canceled. Sports-Themed Ads Aren’t.

Good news for bored girlfriends of football guys everywhere: The Big Ten and the Pac-12 both canceled their upcoming fall football seasons this week. 

• It’s not such good news for the TV ad industry, though. Postponed college football games have the potential to wipe out $1 billion in TV ads, per The NYT. 
• Some experts think moving NFL games to Saturdays could help mitigate the damage to advertisers and networks.

But just because sporting events from football to the Olympics have been canceled and postponed doesn't mean brands are giving up trying to reach sports fans.

The shift 

From influencers to partnerships to ad spots, sports are everywhere in the marketing landscape right now—even without fans in the stands.

Ads: Oakley’s new music video-type spot stars athletes (rather than musicians) playing the sports they love set to Bob Marley’s “One Love.”

• “The world is in a fragile place right now, but sport has the power to evoke emotion, whether participating or spectating,” Ben Goss, Oakley’s global marketing director, told The Drum. 

Influencers: Oakley isn’t the only brand utilizing the emotional power of sports in marketing.

• DTC clean beauty brand Versed Skincare tapped three top WNBA and U.S. Olympics athletes for its latest product launch, an acne control body mist.
• Serena Williams, the second-most-followed female athlete on Instagram, starred in Stuart Weitzman’s new ad campaign for shoes you definitely can’t wear on the tennis court.
• Even TikTok found time to get in on the trend—it struck a three-year deal with the New York Yankees that includes branded TikTok content, using the players as influencers.

Is everything canceled? Hulu is banking on some sports surviving the pandemic. It’s using body doubles of famous athletes to promote its live sports offerings in a new ad for the few sports that haven’t been canceled yet.

Bottom line: Canceled or postponed seasons won’t stop marketers from tapping into the increased levels of emotion surrounding sports right now.

AGENCIES

The New Queen of Virtue Is a Drag Queen

Virtue, Vice’s creative agency, somehow blossomed during the pandemic—it just promoted two new leaders in hopes of extending its successful spring and promoting diversity within the agency. 

Genie Gurnani is now the executive creative director of Virtue Americas. 

• Gurnani was previously the head of creative at Vice and Virtue in APAC, where they oversaw clients in Singapore, such as Urban Decay. 
• Gurnani also happens to be a fabulous drag queen who recently appeared on Drag Race Thailand.
• In true Vice spirit, they hope to bring a “spirit of rebelliousness” to agency work that they feel is missing in the industry, per Adweek. 

Krystle Watler will now serve as Virtue Americas Managing Director.

Virtue already has an edgy reputation as an agency—and a quickly growing profile.

• It added 17 major new clients to its portfolio in 2020, such as Canada Goose and Frosted Flakes. 
• The agency was named Cholula Hot Sauce’s lead creative agency earlier this year.
• Virtue also recently launched a new campaign for P&G brand All Good.

Looking ahead: In 2019, fewer than 1% of Vice Media Group employees identified as non-binary, and only 8% were Black or African-American. With that in mind, Gurnani’s and Watler’s new leadership roles feel even more influential.

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BRANDS

Women, Books, and Booze

Baileys (yes, the liquor company) and the Women’s Prize for Fiction recently partnered to launch Reclaim Her Name—a collection of 25 novels first published by women under pen names, reimagined with the authors’ real names.

Baileys might have aligned itself with the project to get back to its original brand identity.

• The creators of Baileys referred to it as a “girly drink” when it was created in the 1970s.
• Since then, the brand has made multiple efforts to get back to those roots, including a female-focused campaign from Diageo and BBH London targeting millennial women in 2014.
• The “girly drink” framing just might work, as liquor and wine are basically tied as the favorite alcoholic drank among U.S. women, per Statista. 

+1: Baileys doesn’t sell books, making its association with “Reclaim Her Name” feel more authentic than salesy. That’s part of where Barnes & Noble and TBWA/Chiat/Day went wrong with a similar campaign during Black History Month.

My takeaway: Liquor and literature have been associated since Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald famously lifted a glass—or a bottle. But Baileys attaching its name to a collection of female authors could further the brand’s cachet among the Zelda Fitzgeralds of the world.

WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• WarnerMedia opened HBO Max’s ad inventory up to everyone rather than pursuing exclusive sponsorships.
• The Martin Agency’s Joe Alexander saw his lawsuit against Diet Madison Avenue and Adweek dismissed.
• Foursquare received the first-ever accreditation for location data from the Media Rating Council.
• Apple TV+ signed a first-look deal with Martin Scorsese.
• TBWA’s global creative director, Andre Gray, left the agency for Eleven.

FRENCH PRESS

Marketing tips to make you fancy

CMOs: Morning Brew CEO Alex Lieberman spoke with Dan Gardner, CEO and Co-founder of Code and Theory, this week. Click this link to watch their conversation about building a leading creative agency.

Images: The official 2020 guide to social media image sizes is here, for everyone from social media managers to those looking to make their LinkedIn profile look a little more profesh. 

Ghosts: Zest sent me this case study of Casper’s reverse-engineered marketing funnel. It breaks down 14 marketing strategies that took the mattress brand from nothing to a $750 million valuation in four years.

B2B: B2B content marketing can be tough, so here are three (detailed!) real life examples of strategies that actually worked in the space.

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ICYMI

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