SPORTS MARKETING

Pro Padel League

There’s a new racket sport in town, and we’re not talking about pickleball.

It’s been more than five years since pickleball took off during the pandemic and subsequently cemented itself in mainstream culture with big-name sponsors and movies like Apple TV’s The Dink and Lifetime’s A Pickleball Christmas. Now, padel may be poised to follow a similar trajectory in the US.

The up-and-coming racket sport, which is somewhat similar to tennis and squash, is already quite popular in countries including Spain, Italy, and the UK. Almost 8,000 new padel courts were built around the world in 2025, including more than 300 in the US, according to a report from racket sports platform Playtomic and PwC’s Strategy& consultancy.

While that’s a small figure compared to the few thousand new courts added in France, the rest of Europe, and the APAC region, per the report, there are several indicators that padel could be the next king of the court when it comes to US sponsorship. As the number of courts and players grow, so too does interest from sponsors, celebrities, and mainstream media.

“Padel is growing so much across the US, but really globally right now, it’s blowing up,” said Jackie Widmann, SVP of marketing and commercial for Bero, the non-alcoholic beer brand started by Tom Holland that has hosted its own celebrity padel tournaments. “It sits at this cool intersection that we really love between social connection, culture, wellness, [and] a bit of lifestyle…Padel just felt like a really interesting lane that hadn’t been taken by any brands in our space so far.”

Continue reading here.—AM

      

Sponsored By impact.com

Picture this: Your affiliate partners are doing everything they can to deliver for your brand. But instead of driving results, the program is costing you hours + opportunities every week.

Partnership automation is the key to getting your program back on track. impact.com’s partnership automation playbook explores how automation can help give you a competitive edge as you scale.

Inside, you’ll get the scoop on how your peers are already automating partnerships at scale. Here’s a sneak peek at the case studies:

• B&Q freed up 3+ hours/week to refocus on partnership growth.
• Rosetta Stone boosted revenue by 87% + doubled their revenue-generating partnerships.
• PUMA reduced fraud by 90% + doubled their active partners.

Start automating partnerships.

BRAND STRATEGY

Screenshot via @ShinolaOfficial/YouTube

For Shinola, this summer has been full of firsts.

Last month, the American-made timepiece and lifestyle brand put out its first-ever brand campaign, in which Succession star Nicholas Braun starred and made his directorial debut. The ad, reminiscent of a tense psychological thriller, features Braun accusing somebody—or something—of causing feelings of anxiety, stress, and being rushed, complete with a rapidly ticking clock. The clock slows, and Braun declares, “I’m in charge,” before the audience sees he’s been addressing his Shinola Runwell watch the whole time.

The campaign, which is the first major work from creative director Jonathan Bailey and created with the agency GentleForces, is also the first traditional commercial spot for the 15-year-old brand, Dana Mosa-Basha, Shinola’s director of marketing, told us.

“We definitely are entering a new chapter for the brand, a new era, and this campaign kind of signals all the new firsts,” she said.

“Set the Pace” is part of a broader marketing transformation at Shinola that is a few years in the making. About two years ago, Shinola’s parent company appointed a new CMO, Kevin Wertz, as part of a broader executive shakeup; Mosa-Basha, who joined around the same time, said the brand has slowly shifted from product-focused marketing toward broad brand-building efforts that inject more emotion, personality, humor, and humanity into the brand voice. That has extended beyond “Set the Pace,” with refreshed efforts across e-commerce, social, email, and paid media.

Mosa-Basha said those efforts are particularly important in a world where it seems anyone can start a brand and consumers can get convinced to make one-off purchases on social. “You can convert people [with] a beautiful product,” she said, “but in the next five to 10 years, what sort of memory are people going to have of you?”

Read more here.—KS

      

RETAIL

Omie

When Nancy Yen’s son was in preschool, she wanted to send him off with a kid-friendly lunchbox she could pack both hot and cold foods in. But when she couldn’t find anything that fit the bill, she set out to make one.

OmieBox, funded in part through a 2014 Kickstarter campaign, is a bento-style lunch box with compartments, including one for a removable insulated food jar that keeps food warm. Think Yeti meets Fisher-Price: design-forward with bright colors and latches made for little hands.

Along with its own e-commerce site, the brand got on Amazon early as a third-party (3P) seller through Amazon’s Launchpad program.

“They provided a lot of handholding on…setting up your own listing,” Yen, founder and now CEO of OmieLife, told Retail Brew. “We didn’t have a big team, and we really relied on Amazon to teach us how to be a really effective 3P seller.” That included “telling your story to the audience,” she said.

OmieBoxes also appear frequently in TikTok videos about packing kids’ lunches, with tags like #schoollunchideas and #lunchboxinspo.

“We have a lot of influencers who we do seeding campaigns with, and those influencers are posting on TikTok [and] Instagram,” Yen said, adding that the brand generally partners with parents who pack their kids’ lunches. “The audience needs to feel like the influencer is authentic, and so if they’re just making lunches for no good reason, it’s hard for the audience to believe them, so we tend to work with folks who have kids.”

Read more on Retail Brew.—AAN

      

Sponsored By Optimizely

See you there? Hear candid conversations about marketing with AI on Sept. 1 at the Javits Center in New York City. Marketing Brew and Optimizely will host talks with industry heavyweights who are actually shipping work with AI. Oh, and did we mention it’s free to attend? Grab your spot.

EVENTS

Morning Brew Inc.

Early bird pricing for the Marketing Brew Summit was supposed to be gone by now. It’s not. Same low rate, same lineup, same room in NYC on Sept. 30 — just a little extra time to grab it. Get your ticket before the bird actually flies.

Level up your career with these resources from our sponsors!

french press

Morning Brew

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

Stay loyal: A rundown of nine customer loyalty tools and how they compare.

Made over: Tips on navigating a rebrand as a large or decentralized organization.

Line of cite: Guidance from LinkedIn on optimizing content for AI chatbot citations.

^{*A message from our sponsor.}

IN AND OUT

Francis Scialabba

Executive moves across the industry.

• Red Robin tapped Whataburger CMO Scott Hudler to serve in the same role.
• Panera Bread brought on board Cava’s former chief marketing and experience officer, Andrew Rebhun, as CMO.
• Target hired Chandhu Nair, who was previously at Lowe’s, to serve as the retailer’s inaugural chief AI officer and SVP.