A friend has picked up a new habit since he started working from home at the beginning of the pandemic. He calls it “the work show,” and the idea is simple: pick a television program, and only watch that show during work hours. His work show? The FX spy drama The Americans.

He’s not the only one: By the end of 2020, Nielsen found that about half of remote professionals were watching TV or streaming content while they worked, and that daytime television viewing was becoming something of a second primetime.

• That sounds like excellent news for the entertainment business, especially streaming, which has benefited tremendously from the growth of people watching shows at all hours of the day. Americans streamed the equivalent of almost 15 million years of content in 2021, according to Nielsen.

At the same time, workers in the entertainment industry aren’t immune from the broader changes in the workforce, whether that’s remote work or the well-documented Great Resignation. That means media giants, already grappling with fierce competition, are now grappling with how to retain their workforces.

“The Great Resignation is real—very real,” WarnerMedia’s chief human resources officer, Jim Cummings, recently told Business Insider. “And it’s hard to blame anyone, or feel sorry for ourselves, when many people have had a bona fide awakening around what they can and should be doing, where they should be doing it, and how they want to balance all the various dimensions of their lives.”

Jumping ship

For one, staffers are finding that the skills they were hired for can translate pretty well across other sectors and industries.

“In the past, to get really good at your industry, you stayed in your industry,” James McQuivey, VP, principal analyst at Forrester, told Marketing Brew. “Maybe you moved from one TV network to another, and that obviously happened a lot.” Now, whether staffers are tasked with social media strategizing or software development, they may realize they “can use those tools at a self-driving car company.”

• That’s not hyperbole: McQuivey said he knows someone who left the media and entertainment business for the self-driving car business, he said with a laugh.

Same but different: Even those who want to stay in the industry are seeing what else it has to offer. “We believe you’re going to start hearing more of the term ‘the Great Reshuffle,’ if you haven’t already,” Roku’s VP of product management, advertising, Louqman Parampath, told Marketing Brew in December.

“The past two years have been so challenging that many workers who are looking to make a change to their current situation are taking advantage of the candidate-driven market and ‘shuffling’ into a similar type of company but into a role that will satisfy more of their needs.”

Remote work and intense competition are also having an impact on workers in the entertainment industry—read the full story here.—KS

SXM Media—the advertising revenue org for SiriusXM, Pandora, and Stitcher—is rolling out its latest audio ad-tech tool today: AudioID.

AudioID is a “first-to-market listener-identity solution offering marketers new avenues to reach, target, and connect with consumers at scale,” according to SXM Media.

Translation: The company says ads on SiriusXM, Pandora, and Stitcher will be better targeted, less repetitive, and more data-driven.

The level of targeting depends on how much information users are willing to share. For instance, in order for SXM Media to access info like mobile ad IDs, email addresses, ages, and genders, users must have already opted in, or consent to share those details with SiriusXM, Pandora, or Stitcher, according to Maria Breza, SXM Media’s VP of audience data operations and ad quality measurement.

Level up: By analyzing types of content—like cooking or sports podcasts—users who have previously opted in are consuming, the AudioID algorithm can make educated assumptions about other users listening to the same kinds of content, even if they haven’t agreed to share certain personal details.

“We can start to use those content signals to tie back into what kinds of people we think are listening,” Breza told Marketing Brew. “It doesn’t require consent—because we don’t know for sure—but we have done some scientific research, we’ve made sure it’s statistically significant, and for the people that we know are listening to this particular podcast, we know these attributes about them, so we can be pretty sure that the other people listening to that content would have similar attributes.”

+1: AudioID tracks listeners across SXM Media’s platforms in order to avoid “broken experiences such as repetitive ads across different publishers,” Andrei Petrus, director of product management for ‎AdsWizz, the platform that powers AudioID, told us.—AM

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Sign up for the Morning Brew Quantitative (MB/Q) accelerator program. Over seven weeks, you and a network of like-minded professionals will learn how to expertly use numbers to drive performance and how to better analyze financial risk before you make decisions—without hating it the whole time.

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Despite crashing cryptocurrencies—uh, Bitcoin was down about 50% from its record high last November as of last week—brewers are going all-in on Web3 and the metaverse for the Super Bowl.

Here’s what we know so far: AB InBev’s Bud Light is dropping more than 12,000 NFTs ahead of a Super Bowl spot that is reportedly for the brand’s zero-carb beer, according to Ad Age.

• Token holders (the “community”) of the $399 NFTs will get access to benefits like “voting rights on future initiatives” such as branded merch, as well as rewards and “surprises.” The sale begins on February 6.
• VaynerNFT, which led Budweiser’s first NFT drop in November, created the collection. But the Super Bowl spot plugging zero-carb Bud Light Next is being helmed by Wieden+Kennedy.
• AB InBev’s chief marketing officer US, Benoit Garbe, told Ad Age that the commercial will reference the metaverse, because of course it will.

Miller Time: Though Molson Coors will be watching from the sidelines—AB InBev holds exclusive rights as the NFL’s official alcohol sponsor—Miller Lite is bringing its brew to the metaverse, specifically to Decentraland, a platform for buying and selling (*deep exhaustion*) digital land as NFTs.

Patrons that come to Miller Lite’s virtual bar within Decentraland will be treated to...an exclusive commercial shot specifically for it. Commenting on the stunt last week, Stephen Colbert joked that the brand’s new slogan is: “Now there’s a reason it tastes like nothing.”

Meanwhile: Details are still scarce about how actual crypto companies are tackling the game.—RB

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Trends: Find out how brands are capitalizing on the collective Wordle obsession here.

New year, new me: Your reporting dashboards deserve a makeover too.

Snap: Read the social media platform’s new report on its users' privacy concerns.

Dropping knowledge is what we do: Check out Marketing Brew’s article on the Great Resignation, sponsored by Salesforce.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}

The vibes during this weekend’s Northeast snowstorm can be seen above in this ad from 1910.

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• What’s it like creating a Super Bowl ad?
• How NBC was able to sell Super Bowl inventory so quickly—and for so much money
• Crypto ads might be taking over the Super Bowl, but details are scarce