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Marketing Brew

Ryan Barwick

marketingbrew.com

Why Coinbase never stopped advertising

As bitcoin surpasses its pre-crash levels, the brand’s CMO, Kate Rouch, walked us through the company’s marketing strategy. 

Why Coinbase never stopped advertising 

Jasmine Sheena

A robot arm reaching out and touching a screen displaying a web browser

Generative AI is already transforming SEO marketing efforts

“AI is just a very powerful weapon that was added to this arms race” between search engines and SEO efforts, one agency exec said.

Get ready: Generative AI is already transforming SEO marketing efforts 

Alyssa Meyers

Gen Alpha is online and developing sports fandom, report says

By age 8, most children spend up to three hours a day on social media, according to a report from Morning Consult.

Data & Tech

Jennimai Nguyen

When a Gen Zer or Gen Alpha kid plays a Roblox game or engages with an in-game activation, there’s a good chance that Gamefam had a hand in creating it.

The game developer is behind several popular Roblox games like 

 and is a key player in creating branded experiences on the platform. As time spent in the multiverse is only increasing, Gamefam Chief Business Officer Ricardo Briceno is keen on convincing brands looking to engage younger generations to get on Roblox.

, where Briceno is set to speak about fan engagement and community building, he shared more about his tips for marketers aiming to go deeper with their audiences.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Tell me about your role at Gamefam and how it relates to fan engagement. 

As chief business officer at Gamefam, I lead all business-related functions including Gamefam’s brand partnerships and advertising network. Every decision made at Gamefam, including all the work we do with brands and the games we develop on Roblox, is designed with players and the player experience as our number one priority. The brands we work with—from FIFA and Nickelodeon to Lego and Old Navy—are looking to engage with new and existing Gen Z and Alpha fans on these platforms where they spend the majority of their time.

What kinds of communities are increasingly important for brands to get involved with? What strategies are you using to connect with them? 

Every brand needs a Roblox strategy if they are looking to engage and be relevant with Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Brands that don’t activate there risk falling behind competitors who are moving quickly to gain share of voice, mind, and heart with these generations.

To further illustrate the marketing opportunity, we have launched over 125 campaigns for our brand and IP partners, including Mattel, Sega, Intuit, Lego, Warner Music Group, FIFA, the NFL, Old Navy, Paramount, and many others. These partnerships range from simple media buys such as display ads to standalone games to brand activations and immersive gameplay integrations in some of the most popular games. With these offerings, we’ve recorded over 11 billion brand engagements via our campaigns, and our portfolio is home to five of the top 20 brand games on Roblox. including No. 1 

What’s your favorite recent cultural tie-in that Gamefam has been in on? 

In Q4 2024, we worked with Warner Music Group to bring Coldplay to Roblox for the first time with a multi-game takeover timed to the launch of their 10th album, 

. It was an interesting problem to solve: Coldplay has captivated the world for nearly three decades, their timeless music spanning generations. Yet today, their core audience skews toward millennials.

In just two weeks, we successfully introduced Coldplay to the next generation of fans and drove excitement for the band’s new album. In total, we recorded 26 million visits on Roblox and 295 million minutes of brand engagement, equivalent to listening to 

 6.7 million times. Directly following the event, 

 soared to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, marking Coldplay’s first No. 1 album in over a decade and fifth No.1 album all time.

As sports partnerships continue to be ever popular and football season kicks off, how do you see your brand getting involved in the sports landscape? 

Football is always a fan favorite on Roblox, and we’re grateful for the opportunity to have worked on not just one Super Bowl activation but two—one becoming the No. 1 concert on Roblox and the other becoming the No. 1 multi-game brand event on Roblox at the time.

Currently, Gamefam and our partners at FIFA are working on a really exciting program to celebrate the road to the 2026 FIFA World Cup in our game 

, the official FIFA game on Roblox. We are building a full calendar of World Cup-themed gameplay events to get players excited every step of the way—looking back at World Cup history, celebrating the qualifying matches, creating buzz around IRL milestone moments like the draw, introducing the tournament mascots to players, and more.

All this activity and fan excitement for the world’s biggest sporting event will also create huge in-game opportunities for brands in and around the soccer world to engage meaningfully and at scale with some of soccer’s biggest Gen Z and Alpha fans with hyper-relevant content.

What do you think marketers are getting right about fan engagement? Where do you think they could improve? 

Here’s our recipe for success for marketers. Test and learn…It takes time to figure out what works and doesn’t work.

Go beyond the test and learn phase: Showing up and learning is a huge first step—but it’s only the beginning. Once they dip their toes in, they should move toward implementing a persistent presence year-round to keep their brand top of mind for this key audience…Many brands look to build their own game or world, but it’s actually not always our recommended approach, because it is not easy to build an audience on Roblox, and IP-based standalone games struggle to attract players and keep them engaged at scale. That’s why integrating within a hugely popular Roblox game or multiple—where millions of players are already actively engaging every day—tends to be the winning strategy and is a sure way to deliver scale and impact.

Understand the community. Roblox players know what they like and don’t like. Brands must ensure they’re speaking the same language as these Gen Z and Alpha players so they can engage them with authenticity…Delight players: Find the right game with the right gameplay that aligns with your brand values. That’s the way to offer gameplay value to players…invite them to engage with your brand meaningfully while they’re already having fun, and ultimately build fandom.

How Gamefam’s chief business officer is looking to get even more brands on Roblox 

Ahead of the Marketing Brew Summit, Ricardo Briceno shared advice for speaking to Gen Z and Gen Alpha on the platform. 

Kelsey Sutton

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

Olga Denysuik is brand marketing manager at Samsung. She has spent more than 15 years working in marketing and communications, working for agencies like WPP’s MediaCom, Havas, and Dentsu and on accounts for brands like Dior, Louis Vuitton, LVMH, and Stellantis.

 I had the chance to work on is one of my favorite ones. It broke every rule—and that’s exactly why it worked. Starring Margaret Qualley and directed by Spike Jonze, it was surreal, unexpected, and emotionally electric. Strategically, it disrupted the formulaic world of fragrance advertising and redefined how a fashion house could express freedom, identity, and boldness. That campaign didn’t just follow culture—it created it. And it reminded all of us that brand storytelling can be as provocative as it is powerful.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: 

I studied classical piano years back and completed the full program in just five years instead of the usual seven. It was an intense and rewarding experience that taught me the discipline of practice, the power of timing, and how to tell a story without words—all of which I now apply to brand strategy. Great brands, like great music, balance structure with emotion to make a lasting impact.

What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least? 

I’m most optimistic about the evolution of influencer marketing into brand cocreation. The strongest brands today aren’t just hiring creators—they’re building long-term relationships that humanize their message and drive relevance. Influence is no longer a channel; it’s a trust-building system.

I’m least optimistic about trend-hopping without brand fit. When brands jump only on viral moments with no strategic tie-in, they might get attention—but rarely get results. Focus builds equity. Distraction burns it.

What’s one marketing-related podcast/social account/series you’d recommend? 

 with Jim Stengel. It’s a masterclass in leadership, brand-building, and long-term thinking. The conversations go beyond campaigns—they dive into how the world’s top marketers drive growth, build culture, and navigate complexity. For anyone who wants to understand marketing at a strategic level, it’s essential listening.

A portrait of Olga Denysiuk, Brand Marketing Manager of Samsung.

Coworking with Olga Denysiuk

She’s brand marketing manager, Samsung. 

A new ad tax is scheduled to go into effect in Washington State on Oct. 1. Some experts are sounding the alarm about the scope of the law, as well as how it will be implemented.

The legislation, which was signed into law in May, will impose a tax on “all digital and nondigital services related to the creation, preparation, production, or dissemination of advertisements,” according to the text of the legislation. That will include everything from graphic design to search engine marketing, online campaign planning, and site traffic analysis. There are some notable exceptions: billboard advertising, as well as newspapers, publishing, and radio and TV broadcasts, won’t be subject to the tax.

The law reclassifies digital ads (which were previously categorized as a digital automated service) as retail transactions, meaning that digital ads will be subject to the state’s retail sales tax.

The state’s Department of Revenue has been working to 

 the details regarding how the tax will be instituted, but many of those details remain unclear.

Of the bill’s seven sponsors, state senators Emily Alvarado, Claire Wilson, Jamie Pedersen, and Javier Valdez redirected queries to a staffer for the prime sponsor, Sen. Noel Frame, who did not return Marketing Brew’s requests for comment. Senators Frame, Yasmin Trudeau, and T’wina Nobles did not respond to our requests for comment.

With just five weeks left until the law goes into effect, legal, privacy, and marketing experts are voicing their concerns.

“Whether you’re a mom-and-pop business who has an IT consultant who comes in and helps rewire something, or you’re [the] big Amazons and Microsofts, they’re going to be paying tax on these services,” Elizabeth Gray, state and local tax senior manager at the Washington-based law firm Eide Bailly LLP, told Marketing Brew.

One question heading into October is how the tax will impact small businesses compared to larger ones like Amazon and Microsoft, both of which are headquartered in the state. Debbie Reynolds, founder, CEO, and chief data privacy officer at Debbie Reynolds Consulting, which has clients with business interests in Washington, said it’s possible that big businesses may have an easier time complying. Small businesses, on the other hand,may not have the same kind of infrastructure or resources to understand the tax’s impact on them and how to navigate it, she noted.

Some experts believe the tax may encourage some businesses to explore moving their operations elsewhere. “I do believe there will be businesses that will move out of Washington because of this, sadly,” Michelle Strom, principal, president, media at Washington-based Strom & Nelsen Strategic Marketing, Inc., told Marketing Brew.

Amazon declined to provide a comment. Microsoft declined to comment.

Washington’s impending tax is somewhat similar to a digital advertising tax that passed in 2021 in Maryland, which taxes digital ad businesses that accrue at least $100 million in global annual gross revenue. The law, which marked the first of its kind in the country, is tied up in the courts after multiple businesses sued, claiming that it violates the federal Internet Tax Freedom Act (ITFA), which restricts states from taxing e-commerce businesses if similar services aren’t also charged.

 similar digital taxes, including California, Louisiana, Nebraska, New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia.

Some experts say there could be an argument that Washington’s law violates the ITFA.

“A lot of states will watch to see how this plays out and see if this is even possible,” Reynolds said. “The internet doesn’t have borders like states have physically.”

There are plenty of other questions. In a document 

 in July by the state’s Department of Revenue summarizing public sessions held to discuss the law, some advertisers express concern about the difficulty of determining, say, audience geography or how the tax stands to affect existing contracts with clients.

Collecting data on digital ads for tax implementation purposes could also potentially run afoul of other laws already on the books, Reynold said, pointing to Washington’s 

, which restricts some location-tracking that could relate to healthcare data. The potential privacy implications of data collection could introduce one more thing businesses will have to navigate, which Reynolds said could potentially impose a larger burden on small businesses.

“It’s a tight-wire act at this point,” she said.

Looking ahead, Strom said she expects businesses to begin to build the tax into their marketing budgets, which could ultimately mean they have less to spend on advertising itself.

“When a business decides to cut their marketing, it hurts them because they have less exposure,” she said. “It impacts the businesses and brands themselves, and it impacts the agencies, and also it impacts media outlets, because there will be less media purchase because of this tax.”

multiple white piggy banks in front of a green background

Breaking down Washington’s upcoming digital ads tax

Legal and privacy experts say there are questions about how the law will be implemented and how it may intersect with existing data-privacy legislation.

Washington’s digital ads tax goes into effect on Oct. 1. What could go wrong?

Didier Bizimungu is head of performance marketing, SMB, at Reddit, and has spent a decade working in digital marketing and media, including at software companies like Matterport and Community Brands.

 One of my favorite projects was promoting a niche enterprise software with a total addressable market of just ~200 organizations. We had to get scrappy, from joining Facebook groups to showing up at camping events, to reach the right people. Success was defined by securing just one or two new logos per year. But those wins felt massive because it was truly a full-funnel, team-driven effort. It made me feel connected to every part of the journey—from first touch to closed deal. That’s not typical in my field.

I’m absolutely obsessed with Liquid Death’s content. Their 

 is a masterclass in creative chaos, and is the kind of campaign that reminds you how far the boundaries of advertising can actually stretch when you let imagination lead.

I spend most of my 4am mornings either in a pool, on a trail, or out riding my bike. I’m currently training for a triathlon.

AI—on both fronts. I’m excited about how it can help marketers become more well-rounded and productive. But I’m skeptical of the hype that it’ll reach AGI levels and become a plug-and-play “team member.” We’re not there…yet.

 podcast is a go-to for me. As I spend less time hands-on in-platform, this podcast helps me stay sharp, reminding me of the fundamentals while also highlighting new features and strategies worth testing.

A portrait Didier Bizimungu, Reddit’s head of performance marketing in front of a light green background.

Coworking with Didier Bizimungu

He’s Reddit’s head of performance marketing, SMB. 

MKBR-GenAI in SEO audio embed

Google is all in on AI in its search results. For marketers who have long leaned on SEO best practices to show up in front of internet users, the old rules no longer apply.

“The guidelines that people were publishing even a year ago may not be relevant that much longer,” Simon Poulton, EVP of innovation and growth at the agency Tinuiti, told Marketing Brew.

Google users who are served AI-generated overviews at the top of their search results clicked on search-result links significantly less often than users who did not encounter AI summaries, according to a Pew Research Center 

 released in July. This shift, in which Google has essentially cut off search traffic to third-party sites, has been 

 “Google Zero” and is upending search and creating some major challenges for brands that have used SEO as a way to drive traffic and maintain engagement.

As a result, SEO marketers find themselves looking to engineer new ways to keep users engaged and revisit what metrics are best in a new era of search.

“The entire industry is going through a relearning process right now,” Poulton said.

Google’s AI Overviews, powered by its GenAI model Gemini, first rolled out widely in the US in May 2024, providing AI-generated summaries pulled from news articles or other sources on the web. While AI Overviews appeared on only 6.49% of Google searches in January, by May they showed up on nearly one-fifth of them, according to data compiled by the marketing platform Semrush.

That has had a considerable effect on web traffic for all kinds of sites, including publishers. At Business Insider, traffic dropped 55% from April 2022 to April 2025, according to Similarweb 

 cited by the Wall Street Journal; the “extreme traffic drops,” according to CEO Barbara Peng, were the impetus behind a significant staff cut in May, when the company laid off around 20% of its workforce. At the time, Peng also said the publication was committed to going “all-in on AI.” (Business Insider’s parent company, Insider Inc., is a subsidiary of Axel Springer, the same company that owns Morning Brew.)

Those traffic drops are also affecting brands that rely on search traffic to help drive their businesses. At agency Mediassociates, clients in verticals like healthcare and financial have seen drops in their organic traffic anywhere from 20% to 50% since May 2024, Tim Lathrop, VP, platform digital, said. For now, he said, the agency is advising clients to lean on paid search to complement organic search results.

Poulton echoed this sentiment, noting that there could be a convergence of paid media and organic media, which were once seen as separate.

“Organic is going to be influencing the future of paid and the quality of those experiences, because ultimately, Google’s going to try and drive what gets revenue, and it’s going to be the most related ad to the answer, not the query.”

For marketers looking to improve their SEO results amid the shift to AI Overviews, there are a few strategies that experts recommend. It may be helpful for brands to refresh the content on their website more often—Lathrop suggested at least once a month—and adjust content based on the information people are currently looking for, encouraging users to click through to their sites.

Lathrop also recommended that brands continue building or strengthening their structured data, which Google Search uses to understand the content of a page and can lead to improved search results. If a web page has a recipe listed on it, for example, providing more detailed information, like ingredients and cooking time, can make it more likely that users will click on the link while also making it easier for Google to understand the content on the page.

These existing SEO best practices can be useful for sites seeking good positioning in Google Search results, but also in its AI features, according to a Google Search Central post.

The AI Overview presents the real estate that may be the new frontier for SEO marketers to lay claim to, as brands look to appear in those overviews and provide guidance to users on specific products or services. Poulton predicts that future SEO marketing will focus more on driving overall awareness of a brand or product (what he called “influence and sentiment”) rather than “clicks and rankings.”

“That’s what the future of SEO is. It’s not ‘black hat’ or ‘white hat,’” he said. “It’s purely ‘How do we influence opinion with multiple types of information,’ be it reviews, be it content we’ve created, be it what other folks have said.”

As SEO marketers look to master AI Overviews, there are still yet other challenges Google’s AI may present. For example, the content Google generates in an AI Overview may not always be suitable for a brand—especially if it suggests information that could lead consumers to develop a negative opinion of a brand, Poulton said.

Another challenge is measurement. Some users prefer to read the AI Overview instead of directly clicking on a search result, and measurement platforms are still evolving to gauge web performance with fewer users directly clicking through, Lathrop said.

“In the past, you’d be able to look at clicks to your website and [use]…analytics to understand the engagement of content,” he said. “Now we’re in this era of basically zero-click advertising and just zero-click in general, where people are just reading [the AI overview]...versus clicking and engaging.”

A search bar with colorful digital squares filling it up with AI stars surrounding it

How GenAI is changing the SEO marketing playbook, one AI Overview at a time

We spoke with experts to hear strategies for improving SEO results and the challenges that lie ahead.

WhatsApp once promised to have No Ads! No Games! No Gimmicks!” on 

. Last month, the news that ads were in fact coming to WhatsApp, which parent company Meta 

 at Cannes Lions, prompted plenty of questions about user privacy and concerns about how user data could be used for ad targeting. (Meta has said that ads on WhatsApp will be targeted based on user details like location, language, followed Channels, and interactions with other ads.)

There are plenty more questions about ads on WhatsApp—but advertisers are already thinking about ways to leverage the new channel.

“The holistic ecosystem is evolving to connect different ways to interact with brands,” Grant Parker, president of ad-tech platform Innovid, told Marketing Brew. “This is just another addition to that that I think needs to be obviously threaded very carefully, in terms of the needle, between relevancy and offering value to consumers versus making sure that they feel really good about their personal communications remaining private.”

 With limited targeting options available on the platform, Parker said that brands looking into the channel will likely put “a lot of emphasis on the creative message, because there's going to be less understanding of who the person is.” He also recommended advertisers consider contextual factors, including time of day or whether target users are on the desktop or mobile versions of WhatsApp, to inform ad campaigns in the absence of more granular audience data.

As is often the case with newer channels, there may be some brand hesitation, especially given users’ privacy concerns, Parker told us.

With that said, some early adopters are piloting ads on the platform while others wait to see how public perception continues to shake out, he said. Clients in the retail, tech, and telco space usually show interest in testing ad offerings like this.

According to two media buyers, CPMs for WhatsApp Status ads, which show up in the Updates tab on the platform,

“An irrelevant ad is actually worse than an unviewable one,” Parker said. “You’re going to have brands trying to connect with consumers in WhatsApp without a lot of understanding of who that person is...Brands are really going to have to get their creative right.”

Shatesha Scales, paid social supervisor at Rain the Growth Agency, said that while WhatsApp ads could potentially be useful for targeting users by location, Scales sees it as potentially being a more valuable channel for branding, building upper-funnel awareness for a brand, and generating leads and traffic.

She compared WhatsApp ads to sponsored messaging on Snapchat, saying the agency has been leveraging more conversational ad formats.

 While WhatsApp may have some ad targeting limitations, it does present a new opportunity. It’s embracing AI agents, which brands can use to directly engage with consumers, and Parker said that he expects AI agents to grow in use among consumers, presenting a potential opportunity for brands.

“As these AI agents start to become a source of heavy communication with consumers, there’s an opportunity for brands to create relevancy again, but it has to be a great value exchange for consumers to find that to be something that they’re willing to trade for.,” he said. “I think we’ll see this continue to evolve, where brands are looking for ways to be relevant in those spaces.”

Meta is leaning into WhatsApp AI agents, announcing a test of Business AI in WhatsApp earlier this month. The AI agents are designed to make personalized product recommendations and direct users to brands’ sites, all while communicating with consumers within a WhatsApp chat.

 Parker expects the platform’s ads operations to get more sophisticated over time. Likewise, he said, as the platform’s monetization grows, “there’s going to be, ultimately, demands from advertisers to measure and capitalize on it,” to get a better understanding of engagement.

“There will be evolution, as you’ve seen from all of Meta’s offerings over time,” he said.

How advertisers are approaching ads on WhatsApp

The platform’s limited targeting capabilities mean that brands are putting “a lot of emphasis on the creative message,” an ad-tech exec told us.

The venture-capital world seems to be betting big on generative AI creative tools, and it wants adland to buy in, too.

A number of buzzy, AI-related startups have gotten financial backing from major VC firms. However, with an influx of tools that claim to make ad creation easier, some agencies are approaching them with caution.

“On the one hand, we have a lot of enthusiasm, and our creatives are always very excited to try out these new tools,” Michael Horn, global head of AI at Omnicom Advertising Group, said. “Then we have a lot of responsibilities from an ethical, regulatory, and privacy perspective.”

 What are some of these tools? Look no further than Cartwheel, a generative AI tool focused on 3D animation that was started by OpenAI and Google alums and is backed by Khosla Ventures and Jeffrey Katzenberg’s firm WndrCo. The company 

 a cool $10 million in May. Or Captions, an AI video startup that’s 

 over $100 million from VC firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, which debuted a set of advertising tools called Mirage Studio last month that can create video content from scratch.

“[For] pitches you don’t have a big budget, and you need to do it fast, and you need to try a bunch of stuff quickly. Speed is what Cartwheel is designed for. 3D character animation is the type of animation we’re doing, and that’s the most expensive type of animation,” Jonathan Jarvis, Cartwheel co-founder and CEO, said. “The director will have an idea, and they’ll assign something to an animator. The animator goes away for three days or a week, animates it, and comes back to the director. The director gives notes, repeat, repeat, repeat. That’s a big reason why it’s so expensive.”

While startups like Cartwheel may be buzzy, performing due diligence is key, Horn said. For context, Omnicom already has agreements in place with what he called “hyperscalers” like OpenAI and Google, he said, “and we have indemnification agreements with those companies.” Tools from those companies are made available across the agency. The agency has also already put out work for clients like McDonald’s and Nike that was created with the use of AI.

For the new wave of emerging GenAI creative tools, Omnicom only plans to work with “companies that can offer indemnification [and are] not going to generate material that is trained on copyrighted inputs ,” Horn said. Newer tools can also be leveraged more to fulfill bespoke client needs. Creatives are allowed to test them, but Omnicom is more selective when it comes to choosing which ones to use for clients.

“We are simultaneously evaluating literally dozens of these types of new generative tools, and each of them have their special sauce,” Horn said. “At the same time, we have a very rigorous governance process before we can use any of this on commercial work.”