Sometimes you need a good old-fashioned American road trip. That’s especially true when you’re creating an ad to celebrate America.

As Coca-Cola’s creative team was crafting its campaign to commemorate America’s 250th birthday this year, they knew they would hit on themes of togetherness and optimism, but they needed some inspiration to land on the story. So they hit the road.

“Let’s just go out there and find the story,” Alex Ames, senior director of content and creative excellence at The Coca-Cola Company, told us. “They went out there and shot. The music and the lyrics came later, inspired by [the team’s] great American road trip.”

The team included members from Coca-Cola, agencies Ogilvy and VML as well as Mayan Productions. They covered 10 states in 20 days to craft a three-minute spot, “Drink in America,” which features an update to 1971’s “Hilltop” jingle, “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke.” (Yes, the same “Hilltop” featured in—spoiler alert—the Mad Men finale.)

“It was probably one of the best road trips I’ve ever had,” Joe Sciarrotta, deputy CCO at Ogilvy Worldwide, said. “We treated it like a family road trip going across the country. We filmed everywhere.”

The team had the mentality of “tornado chasers,” Sciarrotta added, making sure they were “scrappy” enough to capture the moments they had planned but leaving room for “happy accidents” along the way.

Continue reading here.—KM

What do you get when you combine PGA Tour golfers with screens, mics, a rotating green, and a handful of other twists?

TGL, aka TMRW Golf League, the new-age golf competition founded by Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, and sports exec Mike McCarley in tandem with the Tour.

Golf has long been associated with an older audience. A 2017 Sports Business Journal study that’s still often cited found the average age of a PGA Tour fan at the time was 64, and the country-club vibes of the sport have left it largely associated with an older, affluent, white male audience.

The emergence of TGL, which recently wrapped its second season, is one of the latest in a line of indicators that the image is starting to change. The median age of Season 2 TGL viewers was about 56, and about one-third of the audience was made up of 18- to 49-year-olds, according to the league.

TGL execs are working to push that median age down even further, while also expanding into other less traditional golf demos, according to Peter Jung, CMO of TGL parent company TMRW Sports. The tech-forward format does some of that work on its own, and player-led, social-first content is another key element of the effort. The WTGL, TMRW’s women’s league created in partnership with the LPGA, is set to make its debut this winter, and should help draw in the growing women’s sports crowd.

“Looking at where we prioritize to grow our fanbase, I think that younger sports fan audiences are ripe for more TGL and WTGL,” Jung told Marketing Brew.

Read more here.—AM

Each week, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.

Kimberly Veale is SVP of marketing and communications at the Portland Fire, a WNBA expansion team. Prior to that, she was SVP, marketing and communications at another expansion team, the Golden State Valkyries. She has also worked for the Golden State Warriors and Seattle Storm.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? I was part of leading the internal task force that helped bring the Golden State Valkyries to life, from the expansion bid through building the foundation of the team as the SVP of marketing and communications in their inaugural season. As a Bay Area native, it was a special and rare opportunity to create something entirely new and push the boundaries of how a team shows up in the Bay and the WNBA.

Getting the chance to do that again now with the Portland Fire is incredibly special. There’s nothing like the opportunity to set the foundation and identity of a team from day one.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? This spring, we unveiled the Portland Fire’s 2026 schedule with a campaign featuring Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein of Portlandia. Carrie and Fred have been such iconic faces of the Portland community that partnering with them was a perfect fit from the start. We shared the idea of leaning into Portlandia’s signature interactions and humor to unveil the schedule, tying in the 15th anniversary of the pilot episode’s airing, and they were immediately on board.

Continue reading here.

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Mergers and acquisitions, company partnerships, and more.

• M&M’s is partnering with Love Island USA to become the series’ exclusive confectionary partner in a deal that will also include limited-edition candy packs and social cross-promotion.
• Wrangler is working with Coors Banquet and country music artist Chase Rice on a pair of “Beer Chords” jeans featuring musical notations from Rice’s music printed on the denim using beer-infused ink.
• People Inc. has submitted a proposal to acquire the remainder of MGM Resorts, which owns resorts and casinos like the Bellagio and Mandalay Bay.