If you’ve ever run or attended a marathon, odds are you’ve seen the letters “TCS.”

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a B2B tech services company, currently has 14 active marathon partnerships, including sponsorships with five of the seven World Marathon Majors, according to Global Chief Marketing Officer Abhinav Kumar.

Outside of its presence in running, though, TCS is scarce in sports.

“Once we discovered the magic of marathons, we [made] a decision about 15 years ago that we shut down everything else,” Kumar told Marketing Brew. Now, the company’s entire sports marketing portfolio, with the exception of a title sponsorship of the Jaguar Formula E team, is centered on running.

TCS started sponsoring marathons a couple of years after its 2004 IPO, with the goal of raising its brand profile, Kumar said. Since then, the brand has found that focusing on the running world helps the company connect more deeply with its customers and employees, many of whom are runners themselves.

Continue reading here.—AM

Roku is no Netflix, but it’s no underdog either. The streamer and smart-TV company posted $881 million in revenue in Q1, a 17% YoY increase, according to the company’s most recent quarterly earnings, and its video advertising revenue has grown faster than overall platform revenue.

As the company looks to keep scaling, it has been building up its ad-tech offerings. The company, which opted out of hosting a traditional NewFronts presentation this year, is now leaning on its programmatic capabilities to appeal to advertisers navigating a difficult economic landscape, Roku execs said during the company’s Q1 earnings call.

“If we look at our execution over the last two years, it’s really positioned our business…to navigate environments like we’re seeing now with the macro-uncertainty,” Anthony Wood, Roku CEO, said. “We’ve really diversified our revenue streams; we have more diversified ad products, and we’re less reliant on M&E.”

Share the wealth: Roku has been moving away from being “more of a walled garden” to making its data more accessible through third-party ad-tech integrations, Sarah Harms, Roku’s VP of advertising marketing and measurement, told Marketing Brew.

• To that end, the streamer inked measurement deals with iSpot in April 2024 and, more recently, Incrmntal (which is, you guessed it, an incrementality measurement platform) in February.
• In January, Roku introduced its Data Cloud product, which allows advertisers to access Roku viewer preference data when making inventory buys through Roku Exchange, which itself is linked to several DSPs.

The partnerships all point to a bigger goal. Amid “economic volatility,” Roku execs are hoping advertisers will view CTV as a performance channel, and measurement partnerships are a key part of getting advertisers to see that, Harms said.

“Data Cloud is really just…tying a bow around any of our data applications or assets: making our data available to a holding company for planning or measurement, but also exploring deeper partnerships with a measurement company to share data to improve their methodology,” she said.

Read more here.—JS

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

Hamid Saify is CMO of the energy-drink brand Lucky Energy. He previously worked at Liquid Death, and he has worked at agencies like Doner and Deutsch.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? The Converse ads with Larry Johnson, where they introduced Grandmama as a fictional character played by Larry. It was a culturally fun moment for kids in that time, and it catapulted Converse as a player for a period of time in basketball.

More recently, I loved the Coinbase campaign “Update the System,” which in a very simple way shows you the regression much of middle-class America has made in terms of standard of living in the last 30 years. I thought it was so beautifully done.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: I love reality television. Bravo is just my pleasure—I’m not even guilty about it. The community built around these shows is the most intriguing thing. How “good guys” and “bad guys” are edited and crafted. How the stars in these shows play to their personas and how they grow and evolve as fame becomes a bigger part of their lives. It’s all fascinating.

Keep reading here.

The marketing landscape is always evolving, and so should you! Join us at the Marketing Brew Summit for a dynamic day of innovation and inspiration. Learn from the best, network with peers, and gain the tools to stay ahead of the curve. This is your chance to transform challenges into triumphs. Secure your spot today!

Mergers and acquisitions, company partnerships, and more.

• Amazon inked deals with ad-tech companies InfoSum and Magnite.
• PepsiCo is among the latest US consumer brands to partner with Formula 1 with a five-year deal making Gatorade F1’s official sports drink.
• BetMGM announced its first major women’s sports partnership with the Las Vegas Aces.
• Anheuser-Busch partnered with sports nutrition brand 1st Phorm and UFC CEO Dana White to create a new line of energy drinks.
• E.l.f. Cosmetics teamed up with the aviation nonprofit Aloft to deliver a package of SPF, skin-care products, and cat treats to creator Oliver Widger, who has gone viral for sailing around the world with his cat.