This story is the first in a series exploring how brands craft standout social media strategies. If you’d like to chat about how your brand is approaching social, Katie Hicks wants to hear about it. Reach out to her at [email protected].

A rubber chicken eating with the text overlay, “Let your son shine.” A pair of eyes floating over rolling green hills. Masked men dancing and running through a forest. These aren’t images from a fever dream—they’re posts from Nutter Butter.

In recent years, the peanut-butter sandwich cookie brand has become known for sharing increasingly absurdist and intentionally low-quality-looking content on its social accounts, evolving from standard meme formats to deep-fried, sometimes unsettling posts with layers of brand lore beneath them.

Nutter Butter began its descent into madness on Instagram, where it now has around 287,000 followers, according to Zach Poczekaj, a senior social media manager at Dentsu Creative who works on the Nutter Butter account. But in the last year, it’s placed most of its focus on TikTok, where it now has more than 1.6 million followers. The Dentsu team that manages the brand’s accounts hosts weekly TikTok brainstorms to develop ideas for videos that have gone viral relatively consistently. For Nutter Butter, even a video of random images with someone saying “shoe” can generate millions of views.

The weirdness, it seems, is working. Before Nutter Butter started going off online, unaided awareness of the brand was low, Kelly Amatangelo, digital and social customer experience lead at parent company Mondelez International, said. Now, household penetration scores with Gen Z are up, as are awareness, relevancy, and brand equity scores—and that’s with strictly organic posts and a low creative budget, she said.

“We’re seeing people talking about the brand, and that was ultimately what we wanted,” Amatangelo told us.

Read more here.—KH

The NBA is reaching new heights. And no, we don’t just mean the stature of the athletes.

Team sponsorship revenue across the league has almost doubled over the past five seasons, fueled by a record number of deals for a rookie, new jersey-patch sponsors, and an influx of hundreds of new brands this season, according to a report from SponsorUnited based on an analysis of more than 1,700 brands, 2,600 deals, and almost 42,000 social posts.

Welcoming committee: The NBA brought in $1.62 billion in team sponsorship revenue this season, an 8% increase from last season and a 91% increase compared to five seasons ago, per the report. That’s still less team sponsorship revenue than the NFL, Formula 1, and MLB, but more than the NHL and MLS.

This season alone, the NBA welcomed almost 450 new sponsors (the report defines “new” as brands that did not have a “prior team relationship” in the 2023–24 season), according to SponsorUnited. The largest shares of those brands came from the construction, alcoholic beverage, and tech sectors. But the brands spending the most money on team deals, including Rakuten, JPMorganChase, and AB InBev, aren’t new to the league.

Continue reading here.—AM

Retail media is a daunting space for retailers as they keep up with the dual pressures of the pace of growth and relentless evolution.

To rise above the competition, CVS is partnering with social platform Reddit to run pure-play digital ad placements.

“Retail media is perfectly positioned to really connect consumers across multiple platforms,” Parbinder Dhariwal, VP and general manager at CMX, CVS’s retail media arm, told Retail Brew.

On Reddit, CVS will concentrate on promoted posts and conversation placements, which organically match user behavior on the platform. These ads will enable brands to generate traffic and sales by naturally joining trusted conversations between users in relevant communities, the company said in an email.

The next phase of retail media, Dhariwal added, involves “co-creation” and “collaboration.” The idea with the partnership is to develop shared platforms, create content within existing platforms, and build audiences together to connect consumers back to the CVS shopping experience.

“You’ve got synergies in terms of content, how consumers are searching for content, and where they look for content, especially around health and wellness,” Dhariwal said. “The forums and the environment that Reddit creates is much more around discoveries. And we see a very unique opportunity here on being inserted into that conversation—more importantly, inserting the brands and advertisers that we’re working with into that [conversation].”

CVS will test the partnership in beta in Q4 by running ads from consumer healthcare brand Haleon, which sells Sensodyne, Advil, and Tums.

Read more on Retail Brew.—VC

We’re halfway through 2025, and the digital advertising landscape is rapidly evolving. EMARKETER’s analysts are closely monitoring shifts around increased regulation, commerce media, AI transformation in search, and the growing influence of creators.

Prepare for the changes shaping ad strategies with data-driven insights from EMARKETER’s analysts in the full report. Stay ahead of 2025’s ad strategy shifts.

The Marketing Brew Summit is where today’s top marketers gather to trade ideas, challenge conventions, and share what’s actually working in a fast-moving landscape. From legacy brands to breakout startups, this is the room where strategies shift and bold moves begin. Hear from leaders like Emily Sly, head of marketing at PopSockets, on building culture-first brands that connect, grow, and last. Grab your ticket now!

Executive moves across the industry.

• Fabletics promoted Carly Gomez, previously its SVP of brand marketing, to CMO.
• Monday.com announced that Google alum Harris Beber will start as CMO on July 3.
• Vice Media hired NBCUniversal vet Adam Stotsky to helm the beleaguered company as CEO.