This story is the latest 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 hicks@morningbrew.com.

A mouse in the office. A fish fillet in the microwave. An employee locked in a closet. All of these relatable office situations have made for the basis of InStyle magazine’s social-first mockumentary series The Intern.

In the year since it debuted, all eight seasons and 40-plus episodes of The Intern have generated more than 36 million views. The Boss, its newest series that premiered in February, so far has 2.3 million views.

InStyle’s editor in chief, Sally Holmes, told us that both series are meant to be “entertaining first,” rather than traffic-drivers. Yet they stand out as a new way of bringing InStyle to a new generation. The magazine now counts more than 15 million followers across social channels.

“It has been fun to watch the comments from people who discovered InStyle through [The Intern],” Holmes said. “When I was a teenager, I waited for InStyle magazine to come in the mail…and now for the new generation of teenagers, what that looks like is, ‘I can’t wait for my new show to drop on social.’”

As print media continue to face numerous business challenges, InStyle has turned The Intern into a monetizable vessel, with brands like Fossil and e.l.f. Cosmetics appearing in certain episodes. Additional sponsors, Holmes said, are already on board for new series ideas.

“What has made this successful is that we are doing something that is true to us and our brand and people like it,” Holmes said. “Then we figured out how to monetize that.”

Continue reading here.—KH

It’s every young athlete’s dream to get scouted. And while that experience typically goes down on the court, in one March Madness campaign, it happens on the floor of a Dick’s Sporting Goods.

To close out the college hoops season, the retailer partnered with Nike for a campaign called “The Scouts are Out,” which stars WNBA legend Diana Taurasi and rapper and comedian Dave Burd, aka Lil Dicky, as scouts looking for the next generation of basketball stars at Dick’s stores. The campaign includes a series of spots that also feature Nike, Jordan Brand, and Converse athletes like Jayson Tatum, Sabrina Ionescu, and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.

The basketball vertical is a “critical business” for Dick’s, and “The Scouts are Out” represents a significant step into the sport in terms of marketing efforts, VP of Brand Building Melissa Christian said. While Dick’s has run March Madness campaigns before and included basketball as one of many sports in other ads, this campaign is one of the first from the brand focused exclusively on basketball, she said.

Despite the emphasis on the sport, the aspirational tone and overall plot of the ads are meant to appeal to non-basketball fans, too, in an effort to drive engagement and sales.

“There’s so much rich storytelling that happens around these student athletes competing at such an elite level,” Christian told Marketing Brew. “It just draws everyone in.”

Read more here.—AM

If there were three takeaways from YouTube’s 2026 NewFronts announcements this year, we’d boil it down to this: creators, creators, and creators. Which is not to be confused with last year’s YouTube NewFronts which were also about…creators.

The Rise of the Creator may sound like a new Star War, but it’s clear that “creator” has entered big-business territory, and it’s something marketers want to tap into. According to IAB’s November 2025 report on the creator economy and ad spend, creator ad spend “is projected to reach $37 billion in 2025, up 26% year over year and nearly 4x faster than the media industry’s overall growth. YouTube, of course, is a major creator hub, and this year, the platform is rolling out new tools for brands to connect with creators, complete with new features powered by Google Gemini.

“Creators are no longer just competing for attention. They’re winning it,” Anne Marie Nelson-Bogle, YouTube ads marketing VP, said onstage at YouTube’s NewFronts presentation in New York. “Influencer marketing was just a piece of your larger strategy, and now creative partnerships are at the core of your campaigns.”

Continue reading here.—JS

Join us at POSSIBLE for a private lunch where the main course is a conversation on what actually breaks through today. We’ll explore how AI is changing the landscape, why creators and communities matter more than ever, and what marketers are doing to keep up. Come hungry for insights (and actual lunch).

Eyes will roll! This week’s episode of Marketing Brew Weekly takes a look at the brands brave enough to attempt an April Fools’ prank on their customers, but(t) beware: It can backfire on those that do it too well—or too wrong.

Kay Hsu is the global head of Spotify’s creative lab. She’s set to speak at
Marketing Brew’s upcoming event, The Next Phase of Social & Creator
Marketing, on May 12. Explore what she has to say about advertisement
and the media industry.