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Marketing Brew

Jasmine Sheena

marketingbrew.com

LinkedIn logo on an overlapping TV and phone screen

LinkedIn debuts CTV ads and more at NYC marketing summit 

The networking juggernaut is partnering with NBCUniversal on CTV ads.

Ryan Barwick

A gif of the Narrator in Fight Club watching TV

More than half of US TV watchers are cordless, according to report

Streaming continues to take up larger percentages of total time spent watching TV, according to the Video Advertising Bureau. 

'Suits' stars Gabriel Macht and Patrick J. Adams appear in an ad for T-Mobile

Why brands like T-Mobile and e.l.f love ‘Suits’ 

The legal drama’s resurgence on Netflix has won it new fans—and brand interest. 

A TV with a play button on it denoting TV & streaming

TV & Streaming

A cartoon image of Kristina Monllos created by Morning Brew

Kristina Monllos

, this time with a new ad for Netflix’s 

Users of the audio app who encounter the ad can play rounds of golf to reveal Easter eggs from the Happy Gilmore universe, hear clips from the film, and access a personalized “happy” playlist.

The ad is the first time it has created a custom audio gaming experience for an advertiser. That said, it’s not a new ad unit or offering—Spotify has been creating custom experiences for advertisers since 2021. Spotify has previously created experiences for a collaboration between Coca-Cola and Oreo as well as for Amex.

The ad unit is dubbed “the stage,” Kay Hsu, global head of the creative lab at Spotify, said. “It’s an in-app branded experience. It’s usually really interactive. It’s custom-made for each brand, so each experience is very different.”

To create the game, Spotify worked with Netflix on a brief inspired by the character of Happy, and “leaned on a lot of nostalgia, obviously, to develop the design treatment,” Hsu said.

While there has been more interest in gamified ads from marketers like Disney, Amazon, and Discord, as Marketing Brew previously reported, that trend wasn’t the starting point for Spotify. That 

 is about a game made it a natural fit to gamify the ad, Hsu said. The experience was created by Spotify’s in-house team and produced by MiK Studio.

Should advertisers want their own game, that’s something Spotify is game for—Hsu said the platform is up for still more when it comes to immersive ads. “People think of Spotify as just an audio platform, but it isn’t,” she said. “It’s really immersive.”

A mock up of the game Spotify created for Netflix.

Spotify created its first audio gaming ad for Netflix’s ‘Happy Gilmore 2’

The latest edition to the ad gamification trend.

Peacock is stuck in a rut, at least when it comes to subscribers: The streamer stayed flat with 41 million subscribers in Q2, the same number it reported in Q1, according to parent company Comcast’s Q2 earnings call on Thursday.

However, Peacock narrowed its losses to $101 million for the quarter, down from $348 million in the same period last year. In July, it 

 monthly subscription prices by $3 across its Premium Monthly and Premium Plus Monthly tiers. It also made up 

 of the NBCU upfront commitments in a record cycle for the company spurred by its upcoming live sports portfolio.

Revenue for the streamer grew 18% in the quarter to $1.2 billion, despite Comcast’s media division, NBCU, seeing an overall domestic advertising revenue decline of 7%. (In its earnings report, the company said that this drop was “primarily due to lower revenue at our networks, partially offset by an increase in revenue at Peacock.”) And besides Comcast’s upcoming spin-off of its cable channels into a new company called Versant, which Mike Cavanagh, Comcast’s president, said on the call would likely happen later this year or early next, there may be further change afoot at NBCU’s other media properties, he hinted.

As the consumer trend of “moving from the linear ecosystem to the streaming ecosystem continues...we’ll have the chance to rebalance various programming commitments for Peacock and NBC at large,” he said. “It’s also a set of properties and assets that is going to be extremely attractive to the consumer and very well-designed to participate in any of the possible re-bundling of and re-aggregation of streaming services.”

 Peacock has had some recent wins, like the immense viewership for Season 7 of 

 the platform’s most-streamed original season during its run, according to the company. Looking ahead, it’s got a notable sports content slate: Peacock will air NBA games starting in October. Next year it’s also got the Super Bowl, the FIFA World Cup, and the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics in its arsenal. (Besides having a record upfront, NBCU notched its highest upfront sports commitment to date: Its client base was up 20% as compared to last year.)

On the studio side, Comcast’s Universal Pictures saw a win in the quarter with 

, which has grossed over $600 million at the box office. Universal also has the Jordan Peele-produced horror movie 

Overall Cavanagh sought to strike an optimistic tone about Comcast’s future on the call.

“When you look ahead now a couple of quarters down the road, after the Versant spin, we’ll then have a media business made up of NBC broadcast, Bravo, Telemundo, as well as Peacock, that are completely symbiotic, leveraging the strengths of the entertainment business,” he said. “That new NBC media segment is really strategically well-positioned to continue to compete…Having a strategy for the future that is going to serve customers in a digital way through Peacock; that wasn’t the case a mere four or five years ago.”

Peacock stayed stuck at 41 million subscribers in Q2

It also narrowed its losses to $101 million for the quarter, down from $348 million in the same period last year.

Jennimai Nguyen

These days, did a movie even come out if there wasn’t a several-month period when the film was embedded in just about every aspect of culture possible?

As Formula 1 fans geared up for the Brad Pitt-led blockbuster to hit theaters this summer, Apple made sure to remind them and newcomers alike of the film through OOH advertising, surprise Pitt-attended events, and—in a manner that only Apple could actually do—directly on their iPhones.

It’s a marketing blitz similar to what 2023’s 

 phenomenon created, but with its own Formula 1–specific advantages that got a big movie audience interested, said Lucy Markowitz, the general manager of US marketplace at Vistar Media, a T-Mobile-owned digital OOH company. The movie, which has already outpaced 

 as Apple’s top-grossing film, is projected to clear $400 million in box-office revenues this weekend, per Box Office Mojo.

“Everyone wants to be a part of something that’s no longer just a movie, [and] part of something that is bigger than just a two-hour film,” she said. “That is partially created by all the buzz that goes around a film. You need social media and paid media in order to fuel that fire. It’s not just gonna happen on its own.”

It was lights off and away we go for the 

marketing team much earlier than a typical movie campaign. The film’s first teaser trailer dropped during the British Grand Prix in July 2024, almost a year before opening weekend, and a significantly longer lead time than the 

 four to six months before a regular movie premiere.

“The idea was to have something where you have a global audience already tuning in, but then you’re also playing up the mark of that calendar, [and]...being really prescriptive,” Markowitz said. “In a way, it was almost like [creating awareness] for another race that was coming up, almost organic in a lot of ways, versus it being [for] a movie about an industry.”

While the yearlong timeframe isn’t the norm, 

 isn’t the only film to try and build hype so far in advance. Christopher Nolan’s 2023 box office hit 

in theaters, released a teaser in theaters nearly 365 days before opening weekend, as did 2015’s 

. Most recently, Nolan’s latest project, 

took it a step further, releasing IMAX tickets a year before the film is set to hit theaters. (Those tickets are now, impressively, sold out.)

In the time between teaser and film release, the 

 team continued to emphasize the film’s authenticity to the real Formula 1 experience, a tactic that Markowitz said helped connect with more potential viewers and made the film feel like a cultural phenomenon. The movie touted its expert involvement, with real-life F1 driver Lewis Hamilton getting a producer credit, and noted its commitment to creating actual race footage rather than using CGI, as well as holding on-location shoots at real F1 races. Pitt also became a walking billboard in the same way many actual drivers are, sporting real brand sponsorships on his costume from companies like Expensify and Mercedes that brought in an estimated 

But in perhaps the most personal of strategies, Apple also used its tech empire to 

 reminders into everyday lives via people’s phones. There were race-location highlights in Apple Maps, ticket discount notifications sent via the Wallet app, and a special haptic engine-powered version of the trailer in the Apple TV app. Though the integrations were creative, Markowitz said, they received mixed reactions because of the potential for feeling invasive.

“In a lot of ways, I think this was a test,” she said. “I do think this was to get a gauge on the perception, and I do think that from there, [Apple will] continue to augment how they think about reaching people.”

’s efforts added up to a buzzy box-office opening, totaling $144 million globally and marking the biggest opening of Pitt’s career, according to studio estimates 

But was all that hoopla really needed to convince theatergoers to attend? Some theater experts said yes, especially as studios look to appeal to younger audiences.

Manu Singh, chief data and innovation officer at National CineMedia, told us that theater audiences in the 18–34 demographic are particularly interested in making a trip to the movies feel like an experience. That tracks with something Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Kevin Near told us earlier this summer: the more of an event a movie seems to be, the more motivation an audience has to go see it in theaters, rather than wait for it to come to streaming.

, it seems the more eventized a film becomes, the better chance at success it could have.

For Apple, a moneymaking theater run isn’t the only kind of success it’s likely interested in, since 

 is set to make its way to Apple TV+ for a streaming run following its theatrical window. It’s also reportedly in the running to 

 the US TV rights to F1 starting in 2026, with the film serving as a potential scale-tipper.

Markowitz said this next phase of the viewing experience could pave the way for even more marketing to come from Apple, and allow for more opportunities for other brands to get involved, especially with the rest of the real Formula 1 season still going on.

“This is sort of the beginning,” she said. “Who else will want to be a part of this?”

Damson Idris and Brad Pitt in a scene from F1 The Movie. 

How ‘F1 The Movie’ took a page from the ‘Barbie’ marketing playbook 

The Apple-produced blockbuster got major marketing through OOH advertising, buzzy cast appearances—and push notifications straight to iPhones.  

Fresh off of 120 Emmy nominations, Netflix beat analyst expectations and reported second-quarter revenue of $11.08 billion, up 16%.

In the United States and Canada, revenue grew 15% year over year, the company reported in its quarterly earnings on Thursday, despite broader macroeconomic uncertainty. Netflix also upped its full-year revenue guidance to around $45 billion.

This is Netflix’s second earnings report since it stopped reporting subscriber numbers except in the case of significant milestones, and this quarter, it did not provide any updates to its subscriber count.

“Things all look stable,” co-CEO Greg Peters said on an earnings call Thursday. “Big picture, entertainment in general and Netflix specific[ally] have been historically pretty resilient in tougher economic times.”

Netflix’s ads tier, which the company said 

 had 94 million monthly active users, continues its build-out, and its “US upfront is nearly complete,” according to a company shareholder letter. Overall, the company expects ad revenue to “roughly double” this year, CFO Spencer Neumann said on the call.

The streamer’s ad-tech offerings are also continuing to roll out. Peters confirmed on the call that its in-house platform, Netflix Ads Suite, is now fully available in all countries that offer an ad tier. To offer increased options for ad buyers, Netflix also inked a deal 

 Netflix users spent over 95 billion hours streaming programming in the first half of 2025, according to an engagement report published on Thursday, and some of that time spent is thanks to Netflix’s increasingly global footprint. More than a third of that time was spent on non-English-language titles, and of the 25 most-watched series in the first half of the year, 10 were in a language other than English. As it continues to build its international portfolio of content, Netflix inked a deal with French broadcaster TF1 

 to bring more live and on-demand programming to the platform.

Of course, the streamer continues to focus on live programming, including sports and reality. That includes a reboot of the unscripted talent show 

, Ted Sarandos, co-CEO, said on the call, and two Christmas Day NFL games. And earlier this month, it livestreamed two sporting events concurrently for the first time: the Katie Taylor vs. Amanda Serrano boxing match and WWE SmackDown.

“If you look at our current capabilities around live, we are in just a completely different place today compared to when we first started,” Peters said.

 On the product side, Netflix in May unveiled a 

 designed to promote discoverability and shareability. It marked the first time the streamer had made significant changes to the interface in 12 years, and execs emphasized that the changes reflect the company’s ambitions to own more TV time.

“Bluntly, the previous experience was designed for the Netflix of 10 years ago, and the business has evolved considerably since then,” Peters said. “We got a wider breadth of entertainment options. We got TV and film: more of those, of course, from around the world, but now also games and live events. If you think about the discovery experience that’s best suited for these new content types, it’s…helping our members understand that there’s a really good reason for them to launch Netflix and tune in at 7pm on a Friday night versus just showing up whenever they were free.”

a large red N from the Netflix logo outside of an office building 

Netflix execs say ad sales revenue is set to double this year

The streamer, which has nearly completed its upfront, grew overall revenue 16% in the quarter, it announced Thursday.

A few months ago, NBCUniversal ad sales chief Mark Marshall 

 of Radio City Music Hall to pitch advertisers during upfronts week.

Seems like that high-wire act made an impact.

NBCU announced this week that it had wrapped the 2025–2026 upfront season by hitting its highest ad sales volume ever. The company attributed some of that growth to its stacked sports lineup that includes NBA games for the first time in more than two decades, the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, the 2026 Super Bowl, and the FIFA World Cup, as well as the media giant’s efforts to court small- and medium-sized businesses and boost its programmatic offerings.

Overall, categories such as retail, auto, and travel each saw growth of about 12%, according to the company. In a statement, Marshall described this upfront season as the “most successful…in our company’s history,” but the company did not disclose total revenue or rates.

“In a year set to redefine industry benchmarks, ad-supported reach remains the most influential force in media,” Marshall said in the statement.

 The company said this was also its best sports upfront ever, seeing a 20% growth in its advertising client base compared to last year Even excluding tentpole events like the Olympics, the Super Bowl, and the World Cup, NBCU saw a 45% growth in volume YoY. When it comes to those upcoming tentpoles, they also made records: NBCU’s Telemundo, which 

 to the Spanish-language broadcast of the World Cup, reported its “best upfront to date” and record World Cup revenue with 10 months still to go.

On the broadcast side, NBCU touted 15% YoY growth, which it said was due in part to the NBA, where over a quarter of advertisers will be first-timers to broadcast. (As part of a rights deal inked last year, NBCU has the rights to a significant number of WNBA and NBA games through 2036.)

 has seen “steady growth over the past five years” in terms of NBCU’s overall entertainment demand across broadcast and cable, the company said. And streaming platform Peacock, which also houses plenty of live sports streams, saw over 20% YoY growth, accounting for almost a third of NBCU’s total upfront dollars. Overall, Peacock had its “largest digital upfront in history,” according to the company.

The cable channels that are soon to be housed under Versant, the planned spin-off company that will include properties like CNBC, MSNBC, and USA, saw an almost 10% bump in clients. (NBCU is set to continue handling ad sales across the Versant properties for the next two years as part of an agreement announced in May.)

 According to NBCU, many of the ad dollars committed to NBCU this season came from the 30% net-new SMB clients it picked up this cycle. On the programmatic side, almost 60% of investments are “now transacted on advanced audiences,” signaling a move beyond the more standard demographics like age and gender.

The results from NBCU indicate the potential that advertisers are still prepared to spend big, especially on live sports, despite broader economic headwinds that have threatened to put a damper on advertiser upfront commitments. No wonder there’s such an intense fight for sports rights between traditional TV giants and streaming platforms.

Live sports rockets NBCU to record upfronts ad sales volume

Peacock accounted for nearly a third of advertiser commitments.

In the weeks leading up to the premiere of Season 33 of 

 last September, Anna Delvey’s casting set the internet aflame.

While the fake heiress and convicted felon’s controversial dancing debut drummed up fresh interest in the decades-old show at the season’s start, it may have been her pro partner’s internet savvy that helped carry engagement in the season to record-breaking levels.

That pro partner is Ezra Sosa, a 24-year-old ballroom dancer that joined the 

 cast as a troupe member in 2021 before being promoted to a pro dancer partnered with contestants in 2024. Delvey was his first ever celebrity partner, and while there was great fanfare, it was short-lived: the duo was the first pair to be eliminated. But their short run gave way to a long tail of viral moments on both TV and phone screens, and even after the pair was voted out, Sosa’s TikTok account became a go-to destination for newer fans to engage with the show.

Now between seasons, Sosa is managing a budding personal brand while still representing 

’s newly modernized image—a perception that he says is a result of both his work on social and the show’s clever casting efforts.

“They’re like, ‘Okay, we have a convicted felon. Okay, let’s give her to the twink who has a good social media presence. Let’s go. Let’s make the most out of this,’” Sosa told Marketing Brew. “What a lot of the pros really started to get into this season was bringing that awareness to the show. We brought people to the show, but they stayed to watch the show. It came hand in hand. If the show wasn’t good, we wouldn’t have the fan base.”

’s most recent season, Sosa had about 70,000 TikTok followers and 90,000 Instagram followers. Today, those numbers have jumped to about 571,000 and 272,000, respectively, with an average engagement rate of 100 million views per month, a result that he credited to strategic posting, he said.

For those previously unaware of him or his role on the show, Sosa might have popped up on feeds for a clip filmed after his and Delvey’s elimination, where she was asked what she learned from her experience on the show. Delvey deadpanned “nothing” —and a meme was born instantly. Sosa took the moment and ran with it: he got a 

 mashing up Delvey’s line delivery with the chorus of Whitney Houston’s “I Have Nothing,” and incorporated the moment into several of Delvey’s appearances in 

Beng in on the joke is key to his social media presence, he said, and it’s something that he believes sets him apart and helped lay the groundwork for how the show puts social media to use.

“When I joined the show, I was posting TikToks, and [the other pros were] like, ‘We don’t want to do TikTok,’ so I’m like, ‘Wait a couple years. Just give it a little bit. [The show is] going to get into it, I promise you,” he said. “And now we’re all doing TikToks.”

Sosa’s posts gave fans access to their favorite stars beyond what aired on TV, and later in the season, it became more official when he was tasked with cohosting a 

-official TikTok Live during the Instant Dance Challenge’s ad breaks. The challenge involved the remaining couples coming up with an entire routine in the minutes between the live broadcast, and the TikTok Live showed fans more of the process against the backdrop of Sosa’s commentary.

 had done a livestream, but Sosa said previous versions had been on YouTube. The TikTok version, which Sosa described as “wildly successful,” reassured him that his online activity was not only approved, but encouraged.

“I knew what I was posting was not the norm,” he said. “So when they told me that, I was like, ‘Wait, maybe they’re appreciating my social media presence.’”

The show has plenty else to appreciate. During Season 33, fan voting records were broken several times over, peaking at 32 million votes during the finale, and 6.4 million people tuned in to watch the finale, the show’s highest Live+Same Day viewership since 2020. Much of that growth was in the 18–49 demographic, where viewership was up 70% YoY, per 

Where does Sosa go from here? He’s gearing up for Season 34, which will premiere in September and includes conservationist Robert Irwin and social media star Alix Earle among the celebrity dance partners. Before then, he is balancing the show’s recent live tour, making appearances during Pride, and bolstering his social presence that’s increasingly featured brand deals. (Recent collabs include Skittles, beauty brand Sol de Janeiro, juice brand Naked, and allergy medicine Allegra.)

Even with a wide range of partnerships, Sosa says he is strategic about how and when he posts brand deals, and he prides himself on being easy to work with.

“I’ll never double-post a brand deal,” he said. “I have to make sure that it’s sandwiched in between a video that I know will go viral, because my job, when I’m getting these brand deals, [is] to make sure that I can get it to as many people as possible.”

Sosa said he knows that as he grows his personal brand, people engage most with content related to 

, which means he is tasked with playing the dual roles of influencer and reality TV star. That delineation can be blurry, he said, but he also views it as giving him a bit of an edge.

“We are very recognizable people, but we’re not, like, A-list,” he said. “I’m not like, freaking Jay-Z up in this. I’m just shaking my booty cheeks on national television.”

Ezra Sosa headshot surrounded by screenshots from his TikTok account.

How Ezra Sosa’s personal brand helped modernize ‘Dancing with the Stars’ 

The TikTok and competition-TV star pumped out behind-the-scenes content during the show’s most recent season, which broke viewership and voting engagement records.

How Ezra Sosa’s personal brand helped modernize ‘Dancing with the Stars’

If an ad is going to interrupt someone’s hours-long binge of

their favorite TV show, it better be worth their time.

Lucky for Levi’s, Noom, and Red Lobster, their ads were just that, at least according to EDO, which found in a report that the brands produced some of the most effective TV ads of 2025 so far.

To evaluate effectiveness, the measurement platform looked at national spots that aired across convergent TV in 15 categories and ranked them by strongest consumer engagement in online activity like branded search and site visits. EDO says that kind of engagement is proven to predict future sales—and seemingly, might make the media spend, which hit an estimated $22 billion in the first six months of the year, all worth it.

Here’s a closer look at what made these spots the most effective TV marketing plays, according to EDO.

 tour hit stadiums across the world, fans have shown up in their best Levi’s jeans, as instructed by Queen Bey in both her hit song and official collab with the denim brand itself. “Pool Hall,” an ad that put a new twist on an iconic 1991 advertisement from the brand, pulled in 113 million impressions and a 373% engagement rate over 93 total airings in the apparel category, meaning that the ad was seen as being that percentage more effective at driving consumer engagement compared to the category average.

That score landed Levi’s the No. 1 spot in the apparel category, EDO found.

It wasn’t the only celebrity-boosted spot to earn high marks. Skechers landed in the top 10 of the same category with an ad featuring Snoop Dogg, while beauty brands No7 and Lancome called on Elizabeth Banks and Julia Roberts, respectively, to convince customers to engage.

 Ads for GLP-1s dominated the diabetes- and weight-management category with eight of the top 10 most effective ads. Seven of those eight were from Noom, while the No. 1 slot went to Hims for an ad boasting the confidence effects of GLP-1s. It’s not the first time that Hims has put its pennies behind weight-loss drugs: the brand also dedicated its 

 to a PSA-like ad highlighting America’s obesity crisis and positioning GLP-1 drugs as a potential solution.

Confidence-as-marketing wasn’t limited to pharmaceutical ads, either. In the beauty category, EDO found that Dove had four of the most effective ads, including the No. 1 position for its “One Small Drop” spot, which shows off its newest body-wash formula. The No. 2 spot in the category, Dove’s “Keep Her Confident,” which promotes the brand’s Body Confident Sport program, saw a 248% engagement rate and 448 million impressions across 773 airings.

 Across several categories, sports and athletes were well represented. New Balance’s two versions of “Hoops,” featuring NBA and WNBA stars Kawhi Leonard, Tyrese Maxey, and Cameron Brink, and No. 1 NBA draft pick Cooper Flagg, performed well, EDO found, while Red Lobster had the top five most effective ads in the casual dining category, including a spot promoting Lobsterfest that features former NBA star Blake Griffin.

When it came to effective credit-card ads, athletes were all but essential. Capital One nabbed six of the top 10 spots and the top three most effective ads in the category, with its best performer airing during March Madness and featuring Samuel L. Jackson, Spike Lee, and Charles Barkley. American Express and Discover got their heads in the game too, with their most effective ads calling upon the NBA sports fan experience and NHL legend Wayne Gretzky, respectively. 

Beyonce wears a rhinestoned denim outfit with her hands on her hips in an ad for Levi's called "Pool Hall"

TV & Streaming

Spotify created its first audio gaming ad for Netflix’s ‘Happy Gilmore 2’

Peacock stayed stuck at 41 million subscribers in Q2

How ‘F1 The Movie’ took a page from the ‘Barbie’ marketing playbook

Netflix execs say ad sales revenue is set to double this year

Live sports rockets NBCU to record upfronts ad sales volume

How Ezra Sosa’s personal brand helped modernize ‘Dancing with the Stars’

The TV ads that did their jobs best so far this year: report

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