There was a time not so long ago that the winner of a celebrity look-alike contest might have rode the virality wave to its crest with something like an appearance on Ellen.

Today, these winners get brand deals with companies like Away luggage and Torchy’s Tacos—and then they get invited to the Golden Globes.

In recent months, celebrity look-alike contests have captured the public’s attention and adoration, starting with a Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest held in New York in October. The event drew in about 2,000 participants and attendees—and even inspired an appearance from Timmy T himself.

Contests searching for doppelgängers of Glen Powell, Paul Mescal, Jeremy Allen White, and other famous faves have followed, and it was perhaps only a matter of time before brands got involved. With that said, marketers told us it took some figuring out exactly how and when to step in.

“We are a brand. We are a company. We didn’t want to taint the experience at all,” said Morgan Hendrix, head of brand marketing, partnerships, and public relations at Torchy’s, which offered a free queso prize and mascot antics at the Glen Powell look-alike contest. “We didn’t want to overstep.”

Continue reading here.—JN

Basketball season is kicking off—again.

Unrivaled, the new 3-on-3 women’s league founded by WNBA stars and Olympic gold medalists Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier, tips off its first season on Friday, and while its courts are smaller than the W’s, the league already has some big brand partners.

In total, Unrivaled has 11 league-wide sponsors, starting with Ally Financial, the league’s first and founding partner.

• Ally is also the official retail banking partner of Unrivaled, a deal that includes jersey patches across all six teams.
• Samsung is the league’s official technology and presenting partner.
• State Farm is the exclusive home and auto insurance sponsor.
• Wilson Sporting Goods Co. is responsible for Unrivaled’s official game ball.
• Under Armour is the official and exclusive uniform partner and performance outfitter.
• Miller Lite will have a presence across the league as its official beer partner.
• Sephora US is the official and exclusive beauty partner, building on the growing presence of beauty sponsors in women’s basketball and across sports.
• VistaPrint is the league’s official print and design partner, as well as the presenting partner and jersey-patch partner of the Mist Basketball Club, Stewart’s team.
• Icy Hot is serving as Unrivaled’s official recovery partner.
• The league has also announced deals with Coca-Cola brands Bodyarmor and Sprite, with Bodyarmor serving as the league’s official sports drink and Sprite serving as the presenting sponsor of its 1-on-1 tournament that will run from Feb. 10 to Feb. 14.

Partnering up with a league in its infancy undoubtedly comes with uncertainty, but some brand execs said the potential upsides of Unrivaled outweigh the risks.

“It’s more than just a basketball league,” Olga Suvorova, VP of mobile experience marketing at Samsung Electronics America, told Marketing Brew. “Maybe there’s a risk with trying something new and different, but I think that if brands don’t [try], then we risk falling behind,” she added later.

Read more here.—AM

The Trade Desk, one of the largest demand-side platforms not named Google, has acquired the ad-tech data platform Sincera, the companies announced Wednesday.

The terms of the deal, which is expected to close in the first quarter of the year, were not disclosed. As part of the arrangement, Sincera’s co-founder and CEO, Mike O’Sullivan, will report directly to The Trade Desk’s CEO, Jeff Green.

Sincera, which was founded in 2022, collects, organizes, and untangles the weedy supply chain of the programmatic ecosystem. It operates a platform that can unpack information, including a given publisher’s ad-tech stack or how many alternative IDs are actually being bid on.

Ad-tech companies can use this data to find the “competitive gaps” between companies, O’Sullivan told Marketing Brew in 2023.

The Trade Desk has worked with Sincera in the past, using the firm’s data to inform its Sellers and Publishers Report, a curated tally of what it considers “premium” inventory. In a press release announcing the deal, the companies said that Sincera’s tools “will help advertisers get the clearest perspective on what they are buying” and “empower publishers to provide the right range of data signals to maximize advertising demand and ad fill rates.”

It’s unclear exactly what the deal will mean for other ad-tech platforms’ access to Sincera; in an email, Melinda Zurich, The Trade Desk’s VP of communications, said the company “won’t stop working with ad-tech companies” but will “evolve the way we work with them.”

Read more here.—RB

Stories we’re jealous of.

• The Verge reported on TikTok’s planned “way forward” in the event of a federal ban, as disclosed in an internal memo.
• Digiday wrote about why advertisers aren’t fleeing Meta platforms in response to the company’s planned end to third-party fact-checking.
• The Wall Street Journal wrote about Costco’s refusal to cave to anti-DE&I efforts led by a right-wing activist group.