| Inside Blueair’s sports sponsorship strategy. |
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It’s Tuesday. Look, we know you didn’t wake up wishing for more emails. Neither did we. But since we’re both here, let’s make this worth your time. We’ve got the industry intel you need at our Marketing Brew Summit on September 30. Grab your ticket now before prices increase. In today’s edition: —Alyssa Meyers, Jasmine Sheena |
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SPORTS MARKETING Deep breaths  Blueair | There was something in the air at Madison Square Garden during the NBA Finals this year…Or should we say, a lack of something. Blueair, an air-care company that sells products like air purifiers and humidifiers, announced a partnership with the New York Knicks in mid-March, about a month before the end of the NBA regular season. Lara Kerbaj, Blueair’s chief marketing and growth officer, knew the team hadn’t won a championship since 1973 but—since New York teams tend to have particularly high cultural cachet—she felt comfortable signing mid-season anyway. “We knew that the hype would really help us drive the brand where we want to be,” Kerbaj told Marketing Brew on the day the Knicks paraded through Lower Manhattan, celebrating their first NBA championship in more than half a century. “Now, it’s an amazing story that we can say we have our purifiers in their training centers…I’m not saying it’s the air, but I’m not saying it’s not the air that’s helped them win.” Blueair is relatively new to sports partnerships, having debuted in the space by signing pro tennis player Jessica Pegula in January. But between the brand’s work with Pegula and the Knicks, including guard Josh Hart, its Instagram views and follower count, as well as its website visits, have skyrocketed this year, so Kerbaj is looking to build on the strategy. Continue reading here.—AM |
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AI Robot takeover?  Getty Images | On June 3, bots made up 58% of all worldwide traffic to HTML pages, according to data compiled by the network security provider Cloudflare. Human-generated traffic, meanwhile, accounted for 42%. “Welp, that happened faster than I predicted,” Matthew Prince, Cloudflare co-founder and CEO, wrote on X at the time. “Agentic traffic [is] growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet’s history.” It hasn’t exactly been a secret that bots were slowly taking over the internet; automated traffic overall across the web increased nearly eight times faster than human activity last year, according to a report from cybersecurity firm Human Security. “Bad bots,” aka those that execute actions ranging from data scraping to transaction fraud, made up 37% of internet traffic a year ago, according to an April 2025 report from the network security firm Imperva cited by the Video Advertising Bureau in a February report. What’s a marketer to make of the sea change? Jeff Eisenfeld, director of activation at the agency Media by Mother, told Marketing Brew that there’s still a ways to go before most clients are considering all—or any—of the potential ramifications. “There is going to be a whole AI cybersecurity concern movement when it starts to get [to be] really mature AI and folks want to leverage it for the wrong reasons, but [at] this moment, it hasn’t been top of mind for our clients,” he said. “A lot of brands are still understanding how to use AI and what’s the importance. A lot of folks are still at that beginner infancy stage.” With that said, some agencies and brands are leading the charge as they think about ways to protect against bad bots—and optimize for better ones. Read more here.—JS |
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SOCIAL & INFLUENCERS Creator first  Natalie Silverstein | Natalie Silverstein, chief innovation officer at Collectively, is set to speak at our upcoming Marketing Brew Summit on September 30. Ahead of the event, we caught up with her to hear what brands that have a best-in-class creator strategy are doing well, and what most brands still get wrong. What do you think most marketers get wrong in their creator strategy today? A lot of brands are still thinking in creator campaigns instead of adopting a fully embedded creator-first strategy. Campaign thinking has brands assembling a roster, activating for a moment, then doing it again six months later. Creator-first means creators are baked into how you go to market continuously, across every tier from flagship partnerships down to affiliates. It’s always-on by default. Very few brands are actually there yet. Where do you see the biggest gap between how marketers think audiences behave and how they actually behave? Marketers still think in platforms. They build a “TikTok strategy” or an “Instagram strategy,” as if there’s a coherent audience sitting on that platform, waiting. But there’s no such thing as the TikTok audience. There are hundreds of millions of people, each with a completely different algorithmic experience, shaped by their own behavior, their own niche obsessions, and their own watch history. Content enters thousands of individually constructed feeds simultaneously, most of which have nothing in common with each other. The platform-hopping reality makes this worse. People don’t live anywhere. They discover something on TikTok, look it up on Reddit, check the reviews on YouTube, buy on Amazon, and tell their friends on iMessage. The journey is fragmented, and it’s not going to un-fragment. But most marketing plans still draw a clean line from awareness to consideration to purchase as if that sequence happens inside one app. The brands that understand this build for resonance and trust the distribution. Everyone else is trying to game feeds that no two people share. Continue reading here. |
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PODCAST He never turned pro—now that’s his superpower  | A 21-year-old college student who didn’t turn pro turned that into his superpower, and now with the World Cup, he’s seeing more growth than ever. Senior reporter Alyssa Meyers sat down with Kevin DeCristoforo to discuss the importance of transparent, authentic content, World Cup momentum, and his dream brand deal. Listen to the conversion |
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french press  Morning Brew | There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those. Drafty: A list of the 2026 NBA draftees with the most endorsements. Word search: Strategies for brands looking to optimize their AI search visibility. Social managed: Tips for marketers and creators tasked with managing more than one social media account. *A message from our sponsor. |
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Jobs  | Real jobs, shared through real communities. CollabWORK brings opportunities directly to Marketing Brew readers—no mass postings, no clutter, just roles worth seeing. Click here to view the full job board. |
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JOINING FORCES  Francis Scialabba | Mergers and acquisitions, company partnerships, and more. - Mike’s Hot Honey partnered with Chicago Fire FC as part of a multichannel campaign.
- Reese’s Puffs tapped rapper GloRilla to remix the brand’s viral track “Eat ’Em Up.”
- Dove Men+Care, a Unilever-owned brand, is working with TV personality Kyle Cooke and fitness brand Strava to promote the relaunch of its line of two-in-one shampoo and conditioner.
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