This story is the first in a series on women leaders working to increase brand investment in women’s sports.

When Sara Gotfredson first started selling sports ad inventory in 2001, brands hardly had any opportunity to run ads during women’s games, and that content wasn’t a priority at media companies that were airing sports, she said.

“Very rarely did we talk about women’s sports in the early 2000s,” Gotfredson told Marketing Brew. “It just didn’t seem like a lot of the legacy sports media companies cared.”

At that time, the landscape for women’s sports looked very different: The WNBA, now the most popular women’s league in the US, was just five years old, and women’s soccer, a current favorite among brands, was hardly established in the country, with the Women’s United Soccer Association just getting off the ground and its successor, the National Women’s Soccer League, more than a decade away from forming.

But women like Gotfredson, who grew up playing sports, were starting to make their mark on corporate America, specifically at legacy sports media companies. After a few years as a digital media sales account executive at CBS Sportsline.com (that later became CBSSports.com), Gotfredson went on to work in ad sales for Disney and ESPN before starting her own sports media agency, Trailblazing Sports Group, about a year ago. Its mission? To grow brand investment in women’s sports.

More than 20 years from her start in the business, that still isn’t easy, Gotfredson said, but with growing audiences and attention, the space has approached a “tipping point” that has her optimistic about the future.

Continue reading here.—AM

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On Monday, programmatic media buying agency MiQ acquired compliance platform Grasp, the latest in a series of acquisitions in the last year.

Grasp will remain a standalone business, Paul Silver, MiQ’s global president of corporate development, told Marketing Brew. He declined to share how much MiQ paid to acquire Grasp.

Grasp offers quality-assurance tools that work inside major digital ad-buying platforms like Google and Meta to flag campaign issues and help marketers ensure their campaigns are set up properly. The tools are designed in part to reduce campaign overspend.

The platform puts digital guardrails and checklists in place for media buyers when they’re logged into buying platforms, and can also send real-time alerts through Slack and Microsoft Teams to flag noncompliance or campaign issues. Grasp claims on its website that for every $1 million campaign, $45,000 is overspent.

The usefulness of a tool that helps “prevent human errors in media buying workflows” has grown in importance, especially as agencies have hired more remote workers, Silver told Marketing Brew. “It’s very hard to train teams the way we might have trained them 10 years ago, [since] not everyone is in the office every day learning on the job,” he said. Modern compliance and safeguarding tools like Grasp, he said, can, “for newer members coming into the industry, help minimize the rate of mistakes.”

“Workflow and [operations] stuff tends to be really unsexy, but it’s the stuff that’s actually the hardest thing to solve, and it’s the most valuable and impactful day to day,” he said.

Read more here.—RB

When you think about PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay division, you probably think about, well, Fritos and Lays, but there’s a whole portfolio within the CPG giant’s snacking subsidiary targeting consumers looking to crunch on something a little more healthy.

Eight brands—including PopCorners, SunChips, Stacy’s, and Off the Eaten Path—have been organized into Frito-Lay’s Better Choice Snacking portfolio, also referred to as Positive Choice internally, for the last four or five years, and it’s the job of the portfolio’s VP, Rhasheda Boyd, to continue to grow these brands’ reach. Boyd has spent over a decade at PepsiCo, overseeing marketing for Funyuns, as well as Frito-Lay’s variety packs before moving into Better Choice Snacking.

This portfolio has evolved a lot over the years since Boyd first joined the food and bev giant, when her first gig was working on the launch of nut brand TrueNorth (now owned by B&G Foods). That was the first time outside of SunChips and Lays Baked! that PepsiCo was creating a brand from scratch to target consumers moving away from overly salty snacks, she said. Now, the Better Choice portfolio has become a collection of snack brands worth more than $1.5 billion as PepsiCo has worked to establish a “spectrum of opportunity of snacking for consumers,” Boyd told Retail Brew, which includes improving its current portfolio and bolstering its better-for-you options to meet changing consumer needs.

Read more of this story from Retail Brew here.—EC

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Executive moves across the industry.

• Whitney Wolfe Herd, the CEO of Bumble, is stepping down, per the WSJ. Slack CEO Lidiane Jones will assume the role.
• Will Lewis, the former publisher of the Wall Street Journal and CEO of Dow Jones, is the Washington Post’s new CEO.
• Hugh Johnston, longtime PepsiCo CFO, will join Disney in December as CFO.
• Sona Iliffe-Moon, a Lyft alum, is taking on the role of chief communications officer at Yahoo.

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