The Masters Tournament is played down south in Augusta, Georgia, but this year, the golf championship is getting a bit of a northern attitude.

For the past six years, ESPN has promoted its broadcast coverage of the Masters by creating ads set to covers of Ray Charles’s “Georgia on My Mind” performed by modern artists like Leon Bridges and Kane Brown. In past years, the network has gone with singers with ties to the South (Bridges is from Atlanta, and Brown is from Chattanooga), but this year, ESPN looked up to Vermont native Noah Kahan to sing the song.

Between his talent, love of golf, and the “sense of place” conveyed through his music, Kahan was a natural fit for the campaign, according to Rachel Epstein, ESPN’s VP of live sports and audience expansion. Plus, Kahan has currency among younger audiences, and while ESPN wants to keep the history of the Masters front and center, the network is also aiming to grow the audience for the tournament to include a more diverse group than the traditional golf audience, she said.

“We’re always going to be fairly traditional and reverent in terms of how we visually showcase the tournament,” Epstein told Marketing Brew. “But just knowing that the Masters—certainly Augusta National and ESPN—are constantly looking to engage and reach younger audiences, music just felt like this important and powerful device that we could use…to engage and be relevant with younger audiences.”

Continue reading here.—AM

The March Madness rankings have been released, and not just the No. 1 seeds.

The University of Connecticut Huskies, a No. 2 seed in this year’s tournament, were the most marketable women’s team, according to the NIL platform Out2Win.

The team scored 96 out of 100, according to Out2Win’s 2025 March Madness Athlete Marketability Report, which highlights the schools and athletes participating in this year’s NCAA tournament that it has determined are especially marketable. The company determines a school’s marketability based on the average score of its athletes, which is calculated by an algorithm that evaluates factors like performance of paid social media posts, engagement rates, and follower growth, according to CEO Jack Adler.

On-court performance doesn’t always correlate with marketing partnership potential, but while the majority of the most marketable teams in the men’s and women’s tournaments are No. 1 or No. 2 seeds, there were a couple of underdogs that Out2Win ranked as highly marketable.

Stor(rs)-y time: In addition to topping the list of most marketable women’s teams, the Huskies dominated the rankings of individual women basketball players based on Out2Win’s marketability scores:

• Paige Bueckers, the Huskies guard who’s considered “a lock” as this year’s No. 1 pick in the WNBA draft, led Out2Win’s rankings with a score of 98.
• Fellow Huskies Azzi Fudd, KK Arnold, and Aubrey Griffin also made the top five.
• USC Trojans guard JuJu Watkins, who this week suffered a season-ending ACL tear, broke up the UConn cohort at No. 2, with a score of 96.

Read more here.—AM

Faced with tariffs and a potential pullback in consumer spending, major retailers popped the hood of their businesses this earnings season, giving investors a look at their burgeoning retail media networks.

Let’s dive into the numbers.

Amazon is still king, and in 2024, it brought in $56.2 billion in advertising revenue. The e-commerce juggernaut still sits comfortably behind Google and Meta as the No. 3 ad platform in the US.

Walmart, the “every day low prices” retailer, brought in $4.4 billion in advertising revenue in FY24, a 27% YoY increase. That could soon be bolstered through the company’s expansion into CTV now that it has finalized its $2.3 billion acquisition of Vizio.

For the first time, Target—or should we say Tarzhay—broke out its advertising business, and in 2024, its retail media network Roundel brought in $649 million in revenue. In January, the company shared that the business was on pace to deliver nearly $2 billion “in value,” which Target spokesperson Brian Harper-Tibaldo described in an email as inclusive of “ad revenue and the offset to cost of goods.”

Though grocer Kroger hasn’t broken out its ad business yet, its “alternative profit businesses” generated $1.35 billion in profit in 2024, with media growing 17% YoY. That was less than expected thanks to “slower growth in advertiser spend,” Kroger’s interim CFO, Todd Foley, told investors.

Read more here about how the retailers are stacking up.—RB

From the fall of Pets.com (2000) to the rise of AI-driven ad strategies, the past 25 years have redefined how brands connect with consumers. Marketing Brew’s Quarter Century Project explores the pivotal moments that shaped modern marketing—and asks what’s next for the industry.