Opening days, All-Star games, and championships have been mainstays on the calendars of sports fans since practically the dawn of time. In the modern, social-media fueled era of fandom, there’s another moment before seasons start that fans have come to know and love: the day their favorite team drops its game schedule.

For leagues like the NFL and NBA, the schedule release has become something of an art form, with teams parodying popular TV shows, petting puppies, and poking fun at their coaches.

In a sign of the growth in women’s sports, WNBA teams have also started getting creative.

This year, WNBA teams have come up with friendly roasts, ’90s references, movie poster re-creations, and more to announce their schedules in campaigns that their marketers told us can take months to put together. The efforts aren’t just about driving ticket sales—team execs said these elaborate campaigns can also be integral in building team brands and fanbases.

“There’s an expectation now that you have to step your game up and have a pretty cool schedule release video,” Seattle Storm CMO Will Gulley said. “Otherwise, you’re gonna get trolled.”

Continue reading here.—AM

Sometimes 2026 feels like a dystopian nightmare. When tech leaders make remarks comparing the energy it takes to “train” a human compared to LLMs and Amazon reportedly has plans to use robots over 600,000 human hires, it’s hard not to feel like that nightmare is a reality.

But the reality isn’t so black-and-white, and that nuance is central to the message that TD Bank is leaning into with its new brand platform, “More Human,” which imagines a world where tech and humans work together for a better future for all.

Over the course of a 60-second spot created by Publicis Groupe Canada, a delivery robot travels throughout a city with passersby curiously observing its moves and lending a hand—one woman even helps prop up the robot after it gets stuck in a pothole—until it ultimately delivers a coffee to a crossing guard.

“It’s a relatable and real-world example,” TD Bank CMO Jennie Platt told Marketing Brew. The brand’s point of view, she told us, is that while technology has its positives, “it’s got to exist in a world of humans, and we’ve got to figure out how to merge and blend the role that humans play with the role of technology. They need to help each other.”

To Platt, that message is the right one for a financial institution like TD Bank, as “banking can often be seen as still transactional, cold, and full of friction.” At the same time, “banking can be very complex,” which requires the embrace of digital innovations that are in service to customers.

Read more here.—KM

It’s no secret that brands have grown their investment in AI and are now experimenting with agentic use cases. At Marketing Brew’s The Art & Science of AI in Marketing event in New York last month, marketers from brands including JPMorgan Chase, Getty Images, and Booking Holdings dove into the nitty gritty.

During the event, brand marketers discussed how exactly they’ve been powering their own tech capabilities and creative operations with AI, and grappled with how the AI landscape has changed over the past few years. For those who couldn’t join IRL, we compiled some of the highlights below.

Build your own tools: AI tools can be customized to meet needs of a specific brand with unmatched speed, David DiCamillo, chief technology officer at Code and Theory, said onstage, and “vibe coding”—aka asking AI tools to build code that can be used to create apps—can come in handy in creatively envisioning what’s possible. With that said, it’s not that simple: There’s far less rigor involved in building out tools for internal experimentation versus going to market with it for clients, and external tools must meet stricter standards.

Later in the morning, Howard Pyle, founder at think tank and product studio XF, advised against using the term “vibe coding,” describing the term as seeming potentially “flippant” or even cheesy—but he emphasized the value of the concept itself, which he suggested rebranding to building “build your own personal tool set.” He listed a number of use cases for marketers where AI tools of their own creation could be useful, whether that’s developing a specific tone of voice or understanding specific audiences.

“The most creative people are building their own tools,” he told attendees. “That’s the future.”

Continue reading here.—JS

Nearly half of consumers say AI-generated ads don’t change how they feel about a brand—but AI-made music is a tougher sell. New research explores how sentiment toward AI, creators, and brand experiences is shifting.