When the marketing team at L’Oréal-owned nail-polish brand Essie began looking for the perfect face of its new long-lasting gel polish, a certain pair of very large ears in Brooklyn started burning.

Who better to promote the product—and serve as Essie’s first celebrity spokesperson and sports partner—than the New York Liberty’s iconic mascot Ellie the Elephant, who became a cultural phenomenon as the team worked its way to its first WNBA championship last year?

There was just one problem.

“This elephant doesn’t even have nails,” Zoe Housman, VP and head of marketing and strategic projects at L’Oréal, told Marketing Brew.

That didn’t slow L’Oréal’s marketing team down. “She’s out there, she is attending events, she’s doing handstands on the court, she’s everywhere, so she can handle it all, just like this gel that can handle it all,” Housman said. “It really took on a life of its own from there.”

In April, Essie announced that it had become the New York Liberty’s first-ever official nail-polish partner, and Ellie got her first-ever manicure as the brand’s first celebrity (and mascot) spokesperson.

• In the weeks since Ellie debuted her new nails, a move that Housman acknowledged came with a fair amount of risk for Essie, the brand has seen elephant-sized results from the campaign, she said.

Elephant ears nails: As part of the partnership with the Liberty, Housman and her team were granted access to Ellie—but only after signing an NDA that Housman said prohibits Essie’s marketing team from sharing the identity of the person who plays Ellie under the costume.

Housman told Marketing Brew that she didn’t see anything, anyway—but isn’t that exactly what someone under an NDA would say?

Continue reading here.—AM

Upfronts week is all about talking a big game, and YouTube closed it out eager to talk the biggest.

The platform hosted its annual Brandcast event Wednesday evening for the second consecutive year at Lincoln Center—but this year, the stage, the scene, and the brand promises were much grander. As YouTube celebrates its 20th anniversary, it spent as much time talking about its history as it did its future, with the platform now ranked the No. 1 streaming platform in terms of watch time two years in a row, according to Nielsen.

“YouTube has become the epicenter of culture,” CEO Neal Mohan told the audience. “But what comes next is even more exciting…This isn’t about YouTube becoming more like traditional TV, this is about TV becoming YouTube.”

Mohan pointed to YouTube’s creator series, gaming livestreams, sports content, podcasts (of which the platform has 1 billion monthly listeners), and music videos as evidence of its wide-ranging content and cross-screen influence.

Perhaps there was no better example of its cultural pull than the closing act of the night: a no-holds-barred set from Lady Gaga, the first artist to reach 1 billion views on the platform.

Keep on uploading: Building off last week’s NewFronts event, YouTube continued to emphasize its creator connections during the presentation, beginning with a red carpet pre-show outside Lincoln Center featuring creators Haley Kalil and Julian Shapiro Barnum. Creator Brittany Broski kicked off the event inside as host, and MrBeast, Sean Evans of Hot Ones, and IShowSpeed were brought onstage during the presentation to discuss their podcasts and video series.

Continue reading here.—KH

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

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in marketing? I feel like Tom Hanks in Big sometimes. This is the job I imagined advertising would be like when I was a kid. I get to think of incredibly fun and unusual ideas for major clients like McDonald’s, Mars, Valvoline, Pepsi, and Subway, present those concepts in meetings, and if all goes well, produce those thought-starters as fully developed commercials or video content that’s viewed by millions of people across the country.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? Probably the campaign we created for Dentsu Creative and Subway amplifying their Footlong Sidekicks menu right before last year’s Super Bowl. My team was involved from pre- to post- and worked very swiftly on a tight timeline to deliver an integrated content campaign starring IG star Tank Sinatra, host of Tank’s Good News on GSTV, to complement the advertising creative, which featured Travis Kelce and Patrick Mahomes.

In the final weeks leading up to the Super Bowl, GSTV came up with a splashy on-screen activation to promote the new Footlong Sidekicks, drive restaurant visitation, and complement the new brand spots with Mahomes and Kelce. Taking cues from the brief’s key insight that “Sidekicks are the unapologetic escape that you need in your day,” the GSTV team enlisted the services of Tank Sinatra for a branded content segment that identified 18,799 GSTV locations within one mile of a Subway restaurant and alerted the viewer that they were less than 5,280 footlong churros, cookies, or pretzels from their nearest Subway location.

Continue reading here.

Mergers and acquisitions, company partnerships, and more.

• Dick’s Sporting Goods struck a deal to acquire Foot Locker, which will continue to exist as a standalone brand.
• Booking.com became the official online travel partner of the NBA and the WNBA, marking the brand’s first US women’s sports sponsorship.
• Away, the luggage brand, is one of the newest sponsors of the New York Liberty.
• Olly, the supplements brand, signed on with the Golden State Valkyries for the team’s first season in the W.
• Hawaiian Tropic tapped influencer Alix Earle for its summer ad campaign.
• Expedia announced a handful of new ad tools involving integrations with Instagram Reels, OpenAI Operator, and Microsoft Copilot Actions.