Overtime, a burgeoning sports media company with an eye for the TikTok and Fortnite crowd, wrapped its first ever Overtime Elite (OTE) season last week, where the company paid teenagers $100,000 to put their collegiate eligibility at risk in exchange for exposure.

Having led a discussion at SXSW, Overtime execs spoke with Marketing Brew about how the company is selling itself to advertisers.

Rewind: If you’re not familiar, since launching in 2016, Overtime has become many things:

• It’s a legit basketball league.
• It’s a social media behemoth. Overtime boasts an audience of at least 33.4 million across TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, predominantly serving people between the ages of 18 and 34.
• It’s a reality-television network, portraying the personal lives of young athletes, be they on the precipice of competing in NASCAR or the NBA.

“We do many things, but we are now squarely in the position of creating premium sports IP,” Zach Weiner, Overtime’s president and co-founder, told Marketing Brew.

Though its social feeds are littered with user-generated content, Overtime’s own intellectual property is the prize, creating a virtuous circle comparable to the National Football League and its own NFL Network—the league makes the highlights and the network pumps out the content for advertisers.

Get the full scoop on Overtime’s plans to conquer our free time in our extended interview.—RB

What’s the difference between the sounds of a Dorito, a Tostito, or Lay’s potato chip? It’s a trick question. They all sound the same because they crunch the same way when you bite into them. This posed a challenge for the Tostitos marketing team, who reached out to Made Music Studio, the sonic-branding agency behind audio logos—like HBO’s movie-presentation tune and AT&T’s four-note jingle—for help answering a smarter question:

How could Tostitos make a sound of their own?

Listen carefully: As the team found, the key to Tostitos’s sonic logo lay not in the chip, but in the chip’s beloved companion salsa:

• Made Music Studio started with asking the Tostitos marketing team “questions that we had never been asked before,” Tostitos marketing director Hana Golden told Marketing Brew.
• “We drill down and we find each brand’s, what we call, ‘inevitable sound,’ something that couldn’t possibly be anyone else,” said John Taite, Made Music Studio’s EVP of global brand partnerships and development.

The Tostitos team found that they “didn’t want to just be another crunch,” Golden said, among all their Frito-Lay sister brands, a couple of which have also worked with Made Music Studio. In fact, it was the success of Doritos’s sonic identity that inspired Tostitos to do the same as it was updating its packaging, Golden told us.

“Everything is expected to have a sound, and we didn’t have a sound,” she said. “It was just very clear that with the capabilities that Made Music had, with the success that Doritos had, that we needed this to round out that transformation” of the packaging.

To create a sound for Tostitos that was more than just a crunch, Taite and his team decided to get their hands on Tostitos’s non-chip products, like its salsas. The resulting sounds, including the pop of the top coming off the salsa jar and the rustling of a bag of chips opening, were all incorporated into the final sonic logo.

Find out how salsa (the food, not the dance) finally got its time in the spotlight, for all to hear.—AM

Put the people who actually use your product in the ad for said product. That’s basically the ethos behind graphic-design platform Canva’s new global brand campaign, “What Will You Design Today?”

The video spots, which began rolling out last Monday, and will air in the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia on linear TV, as well as across paid social and out-of-home (OOH), take the viewer on a trip across the globe. From Bali to Sydney, it follows people who use Canva for all kinds of designs in all kinds of places.

But to find out who exactly those people are (as well as why they’re in those places), Marketing Brew spoke with Canva CMO Zach Kitschke, who helped Canva’s in-house creative team ideate the ad.

From Bali: The spot opens with a shot of a young woman surrounded by lush green plants, designing something for a company called “Youthtopia” on a tablet. Turns out, that woman is Melati Wijsen, the founder of Youthtopia, a real-life community organization for kids that want to make a change in the world. She’s also an IRL Canva user, Kitschke told us.

To Paris: At eight seconds, Alexis Bowen and Craig Zapatka, the founders of Elsewhere, a sustainability-oriented travel-booking platform, peer over a laptop in a Paris co-working space. “The Elsewhere team used Canva to build their initial pitch decks and a social media strategy,” Kitschke said. Fun fact: Elsewhere was acquired by Lonely Planet while Bowen and Zapatka were on set with Canva.

Read more about the campaign here.—PB

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Meta: Everything you need to know about the metaverse but were too afraid to ask.

Media: Google says it’s making it easier to advertise with diverse publishers.

What-what: WhatsApp can be a reliable tool for customer service. Here’s how.

Watch: How much are New Yorkers betting now that it’s legal? We hit the streets of NYC just outside Madison Square Garden to find out who’s been dabbling in sports betting since the state gave the go-ahead. Watch now.

Watch: This absolutely mind-blowing Nike ad running on a billboard in Tokyo.

Stat: 238. The number of anti-LGBTQ+ bills filed in 2022 so far, according to an NBC News analysis of data from the American Civil Liberties Union and the LGBTQ+ advocacy group Freedom for All Americans.

Quote: “Chronological” is one of the cryptic clues shared in a post from Instagram yesterday.

Have you ever felt in over your head at work? Like any day your boss will find out you Google 95% of the things you’re supposed to know? Well, so has everyone—even the people you look up to the most.

In order to show that nobody has it all figured out, Morning Brew launched a new podcast, Imposters, where the Brew’s executive chairman, Alex Lieberman, sits down with the most respected names in business, sports, and entertainment to talk about how they overcame their personal challenges.

Check out Imposters here.

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• Report: Google is still funding pro-Russia propaganda online
• Brands take stand against trans discrimination in Texas
• Agencies may need to alter their designs to lure back employees