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Marketing Brew

Cannes 2025

Alyssa Meyers

marketingbrew.com

Sports equipment and apparel brand Salomon is largely known around the world for its winter sports gear, and for good reason. The company, which has been around since 1947, contributed to the invention of seven Olympic sports, including ski cross, boardercross, snowboard halfpipe, and freestyle skiing, according to Global Chief Brand Officer Scott Mellin.

While winter sports remain core to the brand, Mellin wants its reputation to stretch further beyond the slopes and deeper into culture, much like how Jordan Brand is linked to basketball, or how Vans has come to represent surf and skate culture.

“We’re the icon of the mountain sport lifestyle,” Mellin told Marketing Brew at Cannes Lions. “The elevator pitch for Salomon is we’re the modern mountain sport lifestyle brand. The dream that we create—you can see this in all of our advertising, all of our communication—is that you can be part of the mountain sport lifestyle.”

Salomon’s history with the Olympics and the Winter Games means that that property is still a major part of the brand’s marketing strategy each year, and Salomon will serve as a premier partner of the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Games. But Mellin also has an eye on other sports like running, as well as partnerships outside of the sports space.

Running is a key vertical for the brand, and Salomon is leaning in beyond just making sneakers. Last fall, Salomon 

 a line of shoes called Grvl, which are specifically designed for gravel running, which is something of a middle ground between road running and trail running, Mellin explained.

That effort to “see the next thing” in sports and develop products around those trends, like Salomon’s gravel running shoes, clothes, bags, belts, and bottles, ideally helps embed the brand in culture, he said.

“That triangle of white space, product innovation, and culture is really a secret sauce of Salomon,” Mellin said.

Salomon is also in the process of nominating trail running to be included in the Olympics for the first time in 2034, he said, which “would be good for the business” in general—“not just Solomon.” For now, the company has its own teams of trail and road runners, and it has also sponsored marathoner Matthias Kyburz, who competed in the men’s Olympic marathon event in Paris and was, according to Mellin, the first Salomon athlete to participate in the Summer Games.

Before 2034, though, Mellin is focused on Milano Cortina and the 2028 Summer Olympics in LA. The Milano Cortina sponsorship is locked in, and his team has already “identified the size of the commitment that we want to make” and selected which athletes to sponsor for LA28, he said.

Despite Salomon’s reputation being tied primarily to winter sports, Mellin said that 80% of its sales can be attributed to shoes. And Salomon’s footwear lines aren’t just for intense sport: The brand also sells lifestyle sneakers, which gives it a natural path into the fashion and art worlds.

As Mellin works to build out Salomon’s associations with culture and sports, the brand is tying up with events outside of the Olympics, including Paris Fashion Week and Art Basel. At Paris Fashion Week, Salomon’s Sportstyle vertical was involved in several activations, including a 

Details of the Art Basel collab have yet to be officially announced, but Mellin told us it marks the brand’s first venture into the art space, which he expects will be a natural fit given that “there are so many runners in the art world.” Even the products in the Sportstyle line tie back to Salomon’s more practical athletic roots: Some of those shoes are Salomon trail-running sneakers from 10 years ago that younger people in Paris started wearing as a fashion statement, Mellin said.

“We’re pushing into lifestyle, and that side of the business is really growing, but it’s an authentic integration into urban culture,” he said.

Mountains and molehills: Salomon’s push beyond winter sports

The sports equipment brand has deep roots in winter mountain sports. Now, its global chief brand officer has ambitions to do more in the lifestyle space as well.

Any athlete’s stat line can tell you that data is abundant in sports. But when it comes to fans, that’s not always the case.

 seemed to be that most sports properties weren’t yet taking full advantage of the fan data at their disposal. In the year and a half since, there have been 

 that it’s starting to shift, at least when it comes to the big leagues. Younger and more niche sports, though, aren’t as well off as the Big Four when it comes to data and measurement, according to several sports execs who spoke at Cannes Lions.

While newer and emerging leagues are starting to build out their fan data sets, they’re also embracing other methods of setting up campaigns and measuring performance for sponsors in the meantime.

“At the beginning of the league, we don’t really have all the first-party data, so I think one of the tricks for us is to really lean into the storytelling,” Omer Atesmen, CEO of The Snow League, a pro winter sports organization founded by Shaun White, said while speaking during a panel at Cannes Lions. “I don’t know if grown men and women are crying if Maddie [Mastro] doesn’t win our final against Sena [Tomita] in the women’s championship. It’s not like the NFL. The results do matter, but ultimately…they care more about the person than they do the box score.”

 emerging across sports, fragmentation of streaming services, and the decentralization of sports media, even some of the biggest and most entrenched entities in sports are having to think differently about packaging data.

Matthew Jamison, SVP of ad sales strategy and partnerships at 

, said during a panel at Cannes that “social media and data from digital platforms” is becoming more important to Fox’s business.

For younger sports companies, too, data can be integral to everything from connecting with audiences to shaping their products.

“I like to use data to run our leagues,” Dan Porter, CEO of sports media company and league operator 

, said onstage at Cannes. “The best kind of margin of victory in basketball is about nine points. If that starts to creep up—we own all eight teams [in the Overtime Elite league]—we just move the players to different teams so it stays competitive.”

Fan data can also be a draw for sponsors. The US Olympic & Paralympic Committee has been working to help brand partners better connect with fans and measure their 

, including audience segmentation work that will ideally allow for better targeting across the 1,000+ athletes that compete each four-year cycle, according to Chief of Strategy and Growth Katie Bynum Aznavorian.

“The main reasons folks invest in the Olympics and Paralympics and Team USA are the IP association and the global nature of the sporting event,” Aznavorian said during a panel. “That’s still a very strong value proposition, and…there’s many audiences within that. Our job now is to help brands connect with those various audiences within the Olympic world and fanbase.”

Not every sports organization has the reach of an Olympic committee, though, so some are getting more creative when it comes to compiling and analyzing the data surrounding their sports. In its earlier days, the Snow League turned to “syndicated data” to draw insights about the audience for skiing and snowboarding, Atesmen said.

“We have 125 million skiers and snowboarders around the world,” he said. “They’re very affluent, they’re very multigenerational, they’re men and women, and you can really start to understand the psychographic, the behavioral data, all of that, before you can capture all that first-party data yourself.”

As emerging sports properties grow their fan bases, they can start to gather first-party data about their fans by offering incentives like free merch or early access to tickets, Mark Abraham, North American leader for Boston Consulting Group’s marketing, sales, and pricing practice, told us at Cannes. Sports fans, he said, tend to be hyperengaged with their favorite teams, so they are often willing to offer up information like their emails or phone numbers.

“As a sports marketer, you can use that data to make their experience better,” he said.

If big brands choose to tap into emerging sports, they might have their own first-party data to bring to the table. When United Airlines was first considering sponsoring US Ski & Snowboard, sports that have much larger TV audiences in Europe than in the US, it looked at internal data to find that, although the majority of its customers are based in the States, some of its “most valuable travelers” engage with skiing and mountain sports, Luc Bondar, the airline’s COO and president of MileagePlus, said during a Cannes event about sports measurement.

Without major TV viewership, United turned to athlete partnerships, including one with alpine skier Mikaela Shiffrin, to activate that sponsorship, Bondar said; her 

 for the brand, he added, tend to perform “off the charts.”

For brands that aren’t able to run ads with properties like the NFL, there’s an appetite to “get in early with some of those smaller sports,” Cara Lewis, chief investment and activation officer at Dentsu Media US, said during the same panel. But there are still obstacles like measurement constraints that can have a discouraging effect, according to Sophie Goldschmidt, president and CEO of US Ski & Snowboard.

“That’s what we’re all trying to solve,” Lewis said. “We don’t have that measurement piece circling around the full sport.”

Photo collage of snowboarder catching fan data.

Sports organizations are beefing up their fan data and measurement tools

But smaller, more emerging sports still face obstacles when it comes to compiling and tapping into data about their audiences and athletes.

The international hotel brand has been a sponsor of the Formula 1 team for two decades, sticking with them through thick and thin: Last year, McLaren won the Constructors’ Championship, the top honor for an F1 team, for the first time since 1998, and since Hilton has been a sponsor.

Hilton CMO Mark Weinstein wasn’t particularly bothered by the losing streak ahead of last year’s championship win. Being part of a championship team certainly doesn’t hurt, he told us, but a sponsorship can’t be based on a team’s record alone.

“While you wouldn’t back a consistent loser, and while it’s nice to have our brand on a winning team, you have to believe in all the other aspects of the culture and the people, and the other parts of the partnership,” Weinstein told Marketing Brew at the Cannes Lions festival. “It’s a lot more fun to go to a race when they’re winning, but we saw fans that wanted to be there when they weren’t winning because they love McLaren.”

Hilton’s partnership with McLaren started with mutual values, Weinstein said during a Cannes panel with McLaren Racing CMO Louise McEwan. Those values boil down to kindness and optimism, he told us later, both of which seem especially on display at McLaren these days. Under the leadership of CEO Zak Brown and supported by the personalities of drivers Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, McLaren has maintained a reputation for being a nice and welcoming team, which is partially by design, according to McEwan. Hilton, meanwhile, was founded with similar principles in mind, Weinstein said.

“We realized the opportunity around inclusivity, being human, being warm, to welcome those new fans in,” McEwan said during the panel. “That’s always been front and center of mind for us as a team.”

Many of those new F1 fans started following the sport after Netflix released its F1 docuseries, 

, and, on a separate panel, McEwan said the “Netflix factor” has helped to further “humanize the brand.” The show also adds a little something extra to Hilton’s sponsorship, Weinstein told us. While Hilton has run some ads on Netflix, Weinstein said he doesn’t feel the need to advertise against 

because of the attention already being paid to the show.

“We’re getting, essentially, embedded advertisements,” he said. “We bring Paris [Hilton] a lot of times to the races, and she gets great coverage with Lando and the Oscar, so that makes it into the show. You’re seeing us on the [uniforms], you’re seeing us on the car…It plays more naturally than interrupting that show with an advertisement for Hilton.”

Beyond the Hilton logos that appear on McLaren uniforms and car liveries, the brand provides lodging and hospitality services for the entire team when they travel for races, creates social video content with the drivers, and activates through race experiences with fans, Weinstein said.

On the heels of next weekend’s British Grand Prix, Norris’s home race, Hilton is offering a McLaren-themed suite at one of its London properties that fans can book from July 8 through July 20—part of Hilton’s “Stay Like” campaign that has also included 

Weinstein said he views activations like these as perhaps more important than static branding on the cars themselves.

“The livery is probably the least interesting part of it, I’m being honest with you,” he said. “The car should never be slow enough to see our logo. If it’s going too slow, something’s gone wrong.” (With that said, he added, he likes seeing the Hilton logo on the McLaren team’s uniforms.)

Engagement with content featuring the McLaren team is central to the partnership, according to Weinstein. Posts like the “Stay Like a Winner” 

 starring Norris and Piastri after McLaren won the Constructors’ went viral, and fans also specifically noticed the Hilton brand in a livestream of Norris 

 in Miami ahead of his first race win there last year, Weinstein said.

And while hotel bookings are also important, it’s not his primary focus.

“I don’t have an awareness problem,” Weinstein said. “What I have is a depth-of-story opportunity, where not everybody knows about who we are and what we stand for. The fans that McLaren has, our ability to tap into that, can unlock a connection back to us...The main goal is to get people excited and engaged, and then, ultimately, we can convert them later with our marketing tactics.”

McLaren Formula 1 driver Oscar Piastri at Hilton suite

Why Hilton stuck with McLaren for almost 20 years without a championship 

“While it’s nice to have our brand on a winning team, you have to believe in all the other aspects…of the partnership,” Hilton’s CMO said.

You’ve heard of NBA Twitter. Now, get ready for NFL Reddit.

Like on many social media platforms, sports communities tend to gather on Reddit to discuss everything from memes to stats. The platform is home to more than 1,000 active sports communities generating 249 million monthly engagements, according to data Reddit shared last year.

“Reddit has always been a home for the leagues and the fans,” Jonathan Flesher, Reddit’s VP of business development and partnerships, told Marketing Brew at Cannes Lions. Even so, there wasn’t historically “much of a holistic push behind” partnering with teams and leagues, he said.

But last summer, Reddit “took a page out of Twitter’s book,” Fletcher told us—in part thanks to Reddit’s head of content partnerships, Sarah Rosen, who previously worked at the company now known as X. At that point, Reddit started working more deliberately with sports organizations through a partnership program that’s designed to create additional sports content for users and advertisers alike.

A year later, Reddit is continuing to grow the program, he said, especially among sports communities outside the US.

 The first group of organizations involved in the program are all based in the US but have fans around the world, including the 

The NFL has had a presence on Reddit since 2019, and has been testing out the channel for a few years. During its 2023 season, the league opened video content to advertisers, and last year, it hosted a 

 with Pro Bowl players, which it followed up with a 

With Nascar, Reddit teamed up with JD Motorsports and driver Ryan Vargas in 2022 to wrap his car in a design that featured the usernames of hundreds of members of the r/Nascar community as a nod to the fans. It was a hit. “They went nuts,” Flesher said.

 Sports fans—and advertisers, for that matter—have an appetite for all kinds of content on social, and Reddit is no exception. Highlights almost always perform well for teams and leagues 

, and Flesher said they’ve proven a popular product among Reddit advertisers, too. During one test campaign that ran against video content from the NFL as part of the partnership program, an alcoholic beverage brand saw an 11-point increase in purchase intent, a 9-point increase in favorability, and almost a 6-point bump in awareness, according to the platform.

Reddit could eventually offer advertisers sponsored sports AMAs, Flesher told us. That kind of content could be particularly useful during offseasons, when leagues lack new highlight clips to share but are eager to continue engaging with their fan bases.

“Fans don’t have an offseason,” Flesher said. “In many ways, you’ll see the activity that happens within a subreddit around a sport can be as engaged or even more engaged in the offseason.”

 As Reddit leans further into sports, Flesher said he sees opportunities with more global sports, like cricket. Last week, Reddit announced cricket icon and former captain of the Indian national team Sachin Tendulkar as a brand ambassador. Other international sports already have a presence: Last year, Reddit partnered with Serie A to establish the Italian soccer league on the platform.

While Reddit might sometimes be considered a place for die-hard sports fans, who might gather on the platform to get in the weeds about topics like the mechanics of 

, there’s also space for more casual fans; the 

 subreddit, for instance, is filled with memes as opposed to talk of different types of tires.

Going forward, Reddit wants to foster it all, Flesher said.

“What we’re trying to do with all the leagues is help bring the casual fans into becoming more superfans, and then the uninitiated into the casual fan,” he said. “It’s that entire pyramid of fandom.”

Correction 6/24/2025: This piece has been edited to update Jonathan Flesher’s title.

Reddit is looking outside the US to build its sports communities 

A year after debuting its sports partnership program, the platform is looking to expand it internationally, Reddit’s VP of partnerships said. 

Reddit is looking outside the US to further build its sports communities 

Podcasts have long been known for a very personal style of host-read ads that are often sold directly. So when it comes to programmatic ad sales, the sector has sometimes been viewed as a rare holdout.

But, much like the worst person you know starting a podcast, the introduction of more ad tech and automation in podcasting 

In one of the latest signs of the time, Spotify rolled out its 

this spring, marking the first time the audio giant is letting ad buyers participate in true open-marketplace programmatic bidding through demand-side platforms like The Trade Desk and Google DV360.

“Marketers want more flexibility and more agility to make decisions,” Brian Berner, Spotify’s head of global ad sales and partnerships, told Marketing Brew at Cannes Lions. “They don’t want to be held to the traditional, long-term upfronts. We’ve been getting that feedback for a while.”

As of now, the exchange includes music and video content, but podcasts are soon to come, Berner said. We spoke with him about the new ad exchange and the current state of the audio ad ecosystem.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What was your thinking behind putting all music and video content in the Spotify Ad Exchange first and at the same time?

How we think about inventory in general is we think about the user experience…What we as a company are doing, from a consumer experience perspective, is as we’re making a bigger push to have video content on the platform, it’s because our consumers are looking for music videos or video podcasts. What we think through is, first you look at the user experience, and then it’s like, “All right, based on this moment, am I watching Spotify, or am I listening to Spotify?” Then our tech will, in that environment, whether it’s in-stream or in-feed, decide if it’s best to serve an audio ad right now, a display ad, or a video ad. Regardless of whatever those three ads are, all of it is accessible via programmatic.

Why wait to add podcast inventory to the mix?

You have to build the foundation and then start putting together all the framework. We needed to build the core ecosystem or infrastructure. Now pods are next on the roadmap, and further innovation to come.

Do brands and buyers still have the same 

 about buying podcast ads programmatically as they did when that tech was less common in audio?

I don’t think so. I think the hesitation a couple years back was that the standardization and verification wasn’t there. [There have been] big announcements from us these past years, like our partnership with IAS and incorporating their brand-safety metrics into podcasts in particular. I think as people have gotten more comfortable with industry standardization that is similar to brand-safety metrics in just digital, period, [that] has gotten everyone more comfortable leaning in and knowing that the right controls are in place to make sure your brand is appearing in environments you want it to. I’d say the hesitation isn’t there as much, but brands are always going to keep brand safety top of mind.

Is the podcasting tech and advertising space up to speed with other digital platforms?

Podcasting is still in its infancy. You’re going to see continued consumption, engagement, and innovation in podcasting. You have creators leaning in, and the ones that are truly partnering with us, or just any audio partner for that matter, they’re starting to understand you can’t replicate your social video strategy the same way you do podcasts. You are going to see some phenomenal creators leverage audio differently than social to build bigger followings.

With video and audio content becoming increasingly tied together, how do you advise brands around measuring campaigns that run against the same general content but on different platforms, like a pure RSS podcast and a YouTube video?

Brands are pushing us there…What we’re trying to solve for is that a good portion of podcasts are still downloaded, and everything Spotify is trying to do with SAI (Streaming Ad Insertion) is to get podcasts into streaming. If you can get more streaming consumption, then you have the standardization of measurement. We are working with brands on holistic performance, and then they’re looking at their creative within maybe music versus podcasts and figuring out what messaging performs. But we still have to continue to invest and innovate in measurement.

Brian Berner, Spotify’s head of global ad sales and partnerships

Spotify’s head of global ad sales on the latest in programmatic audio

The platform recently opened up the Spotify Ad Exchange, giving audio buyers access to real-time bidding for its inventory for the first time. 

FC Barcelona sits atop the La Liga rankings. And Spotify sits atop FC Barcelona—or at least on the team’s jerseys and facilities.

For the past three seasons, the audio company has been the Spanish soccer club’s main partner as part of a long-term deal that includes a front-of-kit sponsorship and stadium naming rights, among other assets.

But it’s not always the Spotify brand that appears on the Barça jerseys.

, Alex Norström, the company’s co-president and chief business officer, hinted in a statement at the time that Spotify was considering using the jersey real estate to highlight various artists and their brands. Since then, Spotify has swapped its own branding out on the jerseys for logos associated with major artists, like Drake’s company October’s Very Own and Travis Scott’s Cactus Jack brand.

Though Spotify occasionally removes itself from the Barça kits, VP of Marketing and Partnerships Marketing Marc Hazan said the sponsorship has proven invaluable for driving buzz for the brand.

“If I wanted to create cultural noise like we do with some of these things that we do, like Travis Scott, could you even do that without this [jersey asset]? I don’t think you could,” Hazan told Marketing Brew at Cannes Lions. “If you were trying to do that yourself, it would be very difficult and probably very expensive…So to us, it’s an unbelievable, unique platform for artists to showcase their work that can’t really be done anywhere else.”

 When the possibility of working with Barça crossed Hazan’s desk, Spotify wasn’t in the market for a sports sponsorship, he said. But the opportunity involved the team’s full suite of rights—including placement on both the men’s and women’s jerseys, as well as the training center and stadium naming rights—so Spotify went all in, according to Hazan.

“Spotify has never undertaken a partnership at this scale before,” Norström said in the announcement post.

While the tie-up was perhaps unexpected, the Spotify team was nevertheless convinced that it would result in worthwhile activations like the artist jersey partnerships, Hazan told us. Spotify kicked off the initiative with Drake in 2022 to celebrate him becoming the first artist to reach 50 billion streams on the platform, and has since partnered with artists including ROSALÍA, The Rolling Stones, Karol G, and Coldplay.

 One of the KPIs Hazan said he considers for the sponsorship is relative media value, and with a rabid, global fandom, Barça delivers in spades on that front, he said. Buzz is also especially important when it comes to the jersey takeovers. When Spotify put a limited number of the Travis Scott Barça jerseys up for sale—1899, to be exact, in honor of the year the team was founded—they sold out quickly, he said. Beyond that, he said, streams of Travis Scott songs increased by 40% following the Barça activation.

“The [number of] impressions that we get for these takeovers has just gone up and up and up and up and over time, and that’s now started to translate to on-platform activity,” Hazan said.

The activations even seem to supersede La Liga team rivalries; when Karol G performed at Santiago Bernabéu Stadium, where Real Madrid plays, shortly after her Barça takeover, Hazan said he didn’t 

 anyone was put out (although when it comes to fandom, one can never be too sure there are no hard feelings).

 Hazan didn’t indicate any immediate intentions to stretch into other leagues, but he said he’s eager to work more closely with the athletes on FC Barcelona Femení and to tap into the iconic Spotify Camp Nou stadium, which is expected to reopen in September after renovations are complete.

“Each one of these takeovers has grown and grown and grown in terms of scope and opportunity,” Hazan said. “We will continue to push ourselves…because we believe there’s so much more to go.”

Update 06/24/25: This story has been edited to update Marc Hazan's title.

Side by side photo collage of Spotify's partnership with FC Barcelona featuring Travis Scott.

Behind the scenes of Spotify’s partnership with FC Barcelona

Three years into a wide-ranging sponsorship of the Spanish soccer club, Spotify’s VP of marketing and partnerships reflects on how it’s come to life, from jersey takeovers to naming rights.

Happy Friday, and long time, no see! It’s the last day of the festival, and we’ve still got a lot of ground to cover—much like anyone who had back-to-back engagements on opposite sides of the Croisette.

On Thursday, I left my Mercedes hat at home and headed back to Sport Beach to see 

 driver Oscar Piastri, McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown, and CMO Louise McEwen speak about building the McLaren brand on and off the track. It was an interesting discussion, especially given that McLaren is among the oldest and most historic teams on the grid, but went 26 years without winning a Constructors’ Championship before ending the streak last year.

Of course, I couldn’t end the week without talking about women’s sports, so I had lunch with Stagwell brand consultancy Redscout’s CEO Ivan Kayser and CMO Ashley Shaffer to talk about their work with teams including Seattle Reign FC. I also sat down with Stephanie Martin, the chief marketing and communications officer of League One Volleyball (LOVB), and Rosie Spaulding, president of LOVB’s pro division.

LOVB announced a new ownership group for its Austin team this week that includes Spurs Sports & Entertainment, and Spaulding told me sponsorship interest has been strong. The pro league had 30 brands on board before it even played its first season this year, she said, with more to be announced—and, ideally, even more to come as a result of conversations in Cannes.

“Our fan base is female-forward, very digitally oriented,” Martin said, adding that “people really want to connect with” that kind of consumer.

Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t put off talking about AI any longer, and I discussed some of its potential use cases for gathering and implementing consumer data for personalization with Mark Abraham, North American leader for Boston Consulting Group’s marketing, sales, and pricing practice. Unsurprisingly, he noted that AI was a topic CEOs were expecting to learn more about throughout the week.

 VaynerX, for cocktails and macarons to end Day 4, and the Female Quotient, for an inspiring sports panel featuring Olympic gymnast Jordan Chiles, US Women’s National Soccer Team head coach Emma Hayes, and F1 Academy driver Alisha Palmowski. I guess I was a little starstruck (or exhausted, or dehydrated, or all of the above), because I walked out of the Female Quotient’s event space without my laptop. Special shoutout to the FQ’s chief commercial officer (and former Morning Brewer) Jason Schulweis for the save.

 Me, again, for losing my laptop. I also made a few other rookie mistakes this week, including thinking I wouldn’t get blisters (I did, even in sneakers) and not packing enough clothes to allow myself 2–3 showers per day. Also, everyone who RSVPed to events you didn’t make it to…So, basically, all of us.

Make sure to keep reading Marketing Brew in the coming weeks for more stories about all the sports marketing talk that went down in the south of France. Now, time to do what I’ve been dreaming of since the beginning of the week and finally go for a swim.

aperol spritzes being served at Cannes Lions 2025