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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

Streaming rivals Netflix and Amazon are teaming up.

Netflix advertising inventory will be available on Amazon DSP starting in Q4, the companies announced Wednesday in a press release. The inventory will be available in 

 of the countries in which Netflix has an ad tier, including the US and UK, France, Spain, Mexico, Canada, Japan, Brazil, Italy, Germany, and Australia. It won’t extend to South Korea, where Netflix has an ads tier but where Amazon DSP doesn’t serve ads.

“Our goal is to remove the guesswork for advertisers by making it simple to manage all of their TV planning and buying with Amazon Ads,” Paul Kotas, Amazon Ads SVP, wrote in a statement.

Through the deal, advertisers will be able to use Amazon DSP to purchase ad inventory on Netflix. Amazon, which also operates its own streaming service, Prime Video, already has deals with Peacock parent company NBCUniversal, Paramount+ parent company Paramount, and HBO Max’s Warner Bros. Discovery to carry those streamers’ inventory on its DSP. Amazon has also made inroads in ad-free streaming, partnering with free streamers Roku and 

 earlier this year to make both streamers’ inventory available on its DSP.

For Netflix, the deal is the latest move to make its ad inventory more ubiquitous and accessible across DSPs. Earlier this year, the streamer 

, and it also manages partnerships making its inventory available on platforms including The Trade Desk, Google’s DV360, and Microsoft.

“This partnership with Amazon perfectly aligns with our commitment of bringing advertisers even greater flexibility in their buys to achieve their marketing goals,” Amy Reinhard, Netflix’s president of advertising, said in a statement. “By integrating Amazon DSP and enabling even more advanced capabilities together over time, we’re making it easier than ever to connect with Netflix’s global engaged audience.”

 monthly active users were on its ad-supported tier.

Old TV set with red screen and buffering circle

Netflix and Amazon ink DSP partnership

As part of the deal, Netflix ad inventory will be available on Amazon’s platform starting in Q4.

While media giants like Comcast and Warner Bros. Discovery gear up to spin off their cable businesses, ad-tech platform Tatari is emphasizing that there is still power in running linear TV ads.

At Tatari’s Forward 2025 event in New York on Thursday, marketers assembled to discuss the evolving TV advertising space. Execs from Reddit, mental health app Calm, and more got on stage to discuss how ad spend on TV can complement marketing efforts on other platforms.

 Reddit may be an online platform, but it has a “symbiotic” relationship with TV, company CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman said onstage. For one, 94% of Reddit users are TV service subscribers, he noted, and the platform has 50,000 communities dedicated to topics like TV and streaming, demonstrating that there is an appetite among users to discuss that type of content in online spaces.

“Entertainment is our No. 1 largest category on Reddit. It’s absolutely massive,” he said.

Huffman said he disagreed with the idea that mobile phone screens are the “second screen” to TV viewership, noting that they serve different purposes for TV viewers at different times.

“I think that’s nonsense,” he said. “I think what’s really important is not what’s the second screen, it’s the idea that there are two first screens. First you enjoy the product, the show, the movie, the game, and then you go to your other screen to talk about the thing. In this regard, the two screens complement each other in a very powerful way.”

Reddit’s not the only brand recognizing the ongoing power of TV. Calm initiated a longer-term media buy on TV in the run-up to the the 2024 presidential election that culminated with a 

 that aired during election night news coverage that aimed to “give folks a little bit of calm in the midst of all the chaos,” Mavis Brefo, Calm’s growth director, said onstage. The stunt seemed to work: organic social mentions of the brand increased 600% compared to other days in 2024, Brefo said, and the Calm app also jumped about 100 spots on the App Store at the time.

Calm is balancing linear TV buys, where it has identified opportunities to build frequency, with streaming buys, where it can be more difficult to build frequency, Brefo said onstage. To do that, the brand monitors audience overlap and relative frequency across both channels.

 As some brands seek a more integrated cross-platform advertising approach, Tatari debuted several new platform features, including more buying tools for publishers and more advanced measurement options.

“We’re focused on…areas where we can illuminate a blind spot you may currently have,” Benjamin Heaton, senior director of product management at Tatari, said onstage.

an illustration of TVs with green checkmarks next to them

TV is still powerful, according to brands like Reddit and Calm

At Tatari’s Forward 2025 event, took the opportunity to debut new features for its TV ad platform.

Brands talk a lot about evolving marketing to keep up with the speed of culture, but how are they updating their measurement capabilities?

For Lindsay Vogelman, NBCUniversal’s SVP of strategic partnerships and partner marketing, platform distribution and partnerships, measuring impact and navigating growth is central to her work helping to boost streamer Peacock along with partner brands. Ahead of Vogelman’s participation in a panel at the 

 on September 10, she shared more about her approach and how there’s still room for improvement in the measurement world.

Responses have been lightly edited for clarity.

What trends have you noticed in recent years in regards to the fragmentation of content, especially in the streaming landscape, or changing consumer behavior that may be affecting measurement?

Viewers are no longer just watching—they’re engaging, dual-screening, shopping, and sharing in real time. The act of viewing has become layered, with audiences moving between screens, platforms, and conversations. The value of content is no longer only measured by who tunes in, but also by the actions their tune-in sparks. The real challenge is capturing this broader definition of engagement across an increasingly fragmented landscape.

How is NBCUniversal leaning into these trends?

 We’re evolving our approach to meet audiences where they are. 

 on Peacock is a great example of a cultural moment that drives appointment viewing and invites fans to actively participate. Our Megan Thee Stallion partnership was seamlessly integrated with a viral in-show appearance that sparked online conversation, making the show shoppable and drastically extending the life of the episode.

Our success metrics have also shifted accordingly. We’re focused on both qualitative and quantitative measurements, including daily usage, share of time on platform, and community and fan engagement.

For us, it’s about building daily habits, giving fans more of what they’re already doing, and finding ways to participate in those activities on our platform.

What core KPIs are you using to measure impact? Any new KPIs you’ve focused more on in recent years?

 We’ve expanded our KPI framework to reflect both business outcomes and audience behavior. Some of our key focus areas include incremental acquisition, churn reduction, daily active users, and time spent, as well as community impact by building fandoms around our IP through a qualitative lens. Revenue performance remains at the core of how we evaluate success.

What further evolution would you like to see in the measurement landscape?

 We’re seeing major strides in measuring paid media, especially when it comes to incrementality, but we still see room for improvement around how all our marketing works together to drive performance and are increasingly focused on the relationship between paid and earned media across our partner ecosystems.

How NBCU’s Lindsay Vogelman focuses on marketing metrics that matter

“The real challenge is capturing this broader definition of engagement across an increasingly fragmented landscape,” Vogelman, who will be speaking at the Marketing Brew Summit, told us.

Kelsey Sutton

Advertisers still can’t get enough of football.

NBCUniversal, which has the rights to next February’s Super Bowl, has entirely sold out ad inventory during the big game, it announced Wednesday, a day before the start of the NFL regular season.

Beyond that, the media company said that 90% of its non-Super Bowl NFL inventory for this season, which includes the 20th consecutive season of 

In terms of the Super Bowl, CPG, entertainment, finance, and alcohol brands continue to be the top categories, the company noted in a press release, while pharma, entertainment, and QSR brands are all increasing NFL spend. There are more than 150 partners signed onto this season’s 

Advertisers are also increasingly eyeing digital Super Bowl opportunities. NBCU, which will stream the Big Game on Peacock, clocked a 20% increase in digital investments compared to the last Super Bowl that it had the rights to in 2022.

All in all, this NFL season is already NBCU’s “highest grossing to date,” according to Peter Lazarus, EVP, NBC Sports and Olympics, advertising and partnerships.

“Coming off of the strongest sports upfront in our company’s history, Super Bowl LX has generated extraordinary interest from brands and allowed us to sell out of our ad inventory earlier than ever,” Lazarus said in the press release.

“With a monumental year ahead, we are proud of the incredible momentum thus far and are excited to offer both fans and brands an unrivaled slate of sports programming starting with NFL kickoff.”

 The announcement was a long time coming. In June, Variety reported that NBCU’s Super Bowl inventory was 

 a sell-out, and Super Bowl ad inventory seems to 

 faster every year as advertisers scramble to lock in pricey ad inventory that’s largely seen as one of the few remaining ways in media to reach huge audiences.

Still, September is particularly early for a sell-out. Fox, which had the rights to this year’s Super Bowl, announced last November it was mostly sold out of Super Bowl ad inventory, although it hung onto a bit more inventory before announcing a complete sell-out a few weeks before the game.

Prices for Super Bowl ads also continue to be sky-high. Peak prices for Fox’s game exceeded $7 million for a 30-second spot, with 

right before the game going for as high as $8 million; NBCU has sought 

Illustration of a football wrapped in $100 bills

NBCU sells out of Super Bowl ad inventory ‘earlier than ever’

The media company said 90% of its other NFL inventory is also sold out.

A cartoon image of Kristina Monllos created by Morning Brew

Kristina Monllos

Lots of advertising agencies say they make short films. Often, those short films are just ads by another name—more artful ads, perhaps, but ads all the same.

Social content shop Portal A isn’t one of those agencies. This year, Portal A has been on the film-festival circuit with its first narrative short film, Five Star, directed by Kai Hasson, the agency’s executive creative director and one of its co-founders. After premiering at the RiverRun International Film Festival earlier this spring, the short, a 14-minute comedy-horror starring Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, nabbed the Golden Space Needle Audience Award for Best Short Film at the Seattle International Film Festival, and it has continued its run at festivals like the LA Shorts International Film Festival and the Asian American International Film Festival.

 isn’t a secret ad. It’s a narrative effort that’s the latest project to come out of an internal program designed to get Portal A back to its creative roots of making “weird stuff on the internet,” Jacob Motz, the agency’s director of original projects, told Marketing Brew.

“Two or three years ago, I remember we were sitting around, and the partners were like, ‘We want to just kind of give ourselves the ability to make stuff without worrying about gatekeepers, for the sake of creativity, for the sake of innovation,’” Motz said. “We want to be able to always take risks with the content we’re making online, so we need to have a program that allows us to do that.”

To do it, in February 2023, the agency rolled out Moonshots, a creative research and development lab funded by the company with the goal of distributing creative projects regularly. 

 is its first narrative short film, although Hasson and several Portal A employees previously worked on another short film, 

, in 2019, before Moonshots was established. Other Moonshots projects have included 

,” a social series that takes an anthropological look at fashion.

Portal A is one of a number of agencies getting involved in indie production as a way to carve out some creative freedom in the industry. Others, like SRH, Six+One, and Revery, have dabbled in indie movies and documentaries, endeavors that they believe will help them experiment and stretch creatively, AdAge 

As for Portal A, “the value that we’re getting from this isn’t monetary,” Motz said. “There’s a lot of things we look at as real value. There’s culture internally at the company. People internally at the company go like, ‘Wow, we’re really, we’re taking money, and we’re putting it in creative endeavors for creative sake, and that’s fun and cool.’ And we’re also including everybody at the company to take part in it. So it becomes highly creative projects that people get to go on little adventures with.”

At the same time, having narrative short films under an agency’s belt could also come in handy when pitching marketers. As Marketing Brew has 

, brands like Bilt, Tower 28, Oatly, and Bratz are all creating their own short scripted projects for their social channels.

“More than ever, being able to sharpen your craft and be able to tell stories in a short-form way is where the future is headed regardless,” Motz said. “In 10 years, I feel like the vast majority of people are going to be experiencing scripted in shorter formats.”

Update 09/03/25: Kai Hasson's title has been updated.

Screenshots from the trailer for Five Star, a horror movie short film.

Why one agency made an indie short film

Portal A wanted to get back to its creative roots and make stuff without “worrying about gatekeepers,” its director of original projects told us.

No, not the romantic kind: Several companies that operate streamers, e.g., NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. Discovery, are separating their linear and streaming assets.

This year, streamers are navigating splits alongside tough macroeconomic conditions, and they continue to battle it out over live sports rights as they face the ongoing challenge ofgrowing saturation. After the summer earnings season, Marketing Brew took a mid-year look at the state of the major streamers and their parent companies.

 Netflix had a stellar Q2. Its revenue in the US and Canada grew 15% year over year, according to the streamer’s Q2 earnings call in July, and executives upped full-year revenue guidance to about $45 billion.

Its ad tier saw similar success: Netflix’s upfront is officially complete, the company announced earlier this month, and it more than doubled US ad commitments. As its ad-supported tier grows, the streamer is also building out its ad tech, including an integration 

 that was first announced at Cannes Lions in June.

Netflix viewers spent more than 95 billion hours streaming programming in the first half of 2025, according to the Q2 earnings release, and in an effort to make content more discoverable, the streamer 

Looking ahead, Netflix’s content strategy promises a focus on live content, particularly on sports. In July, Netflix livestreamed 

 and the Katie Taylor vs. Amanda Serrano boxing match concurrently, and it’s also got two NFL Christmas games in the pipeline.

“If you look at our current capabilities around live, we are in just a completely different place today compared to when we first started,” Greg Peters, company co-CEO, told investors.

While Netflix stopped regularly reporting subscriber numbers this year, it last reported 302 million subscribers 

 it had 94 million monthly active users on its ad-supported tier.

 Peacock struggled to take flight in Q2, with subscriber count flat at 41 million from the prior quarter. It’s still losing money, but it decreased its losses to $101 million (compared to $348 million in the same period last year), according to its Q2 earnings call. Perhaps to help cut its losses, Peacock hiked prices on its Premium Monthly and Premium Plus Monthly tiers in July.

There were some bright spots. Peacock grew its revenue 18% in the quarter to $1.2 billion, and about a third of NBCU’s upfront commitments were tied to Peacock, the company said. That’s partly due to the wide roster of live sports content it has coming up, like NBA games, the FIFA World Cup, the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, and the Super Bowl, the company said.

 Disney streamer Hulu will get folded into Disney+ next year, despite both streamers contributing to growth in Disney’s DTC division, which saw a 6% bump in revenue in the quarter. The merger announcement came as Disney forecast that both Disney+ and Hulu would add around 10 million subscribers in Q4, mostly due to Hulu. Disney will follow Netflix’s lead and stop reporting streaming subscriber data each quarter, but its last reported subscriber count was 128 million for core Disney+ subscribers, 55.5 million Hulu subscribers, and 24 million ESPN+ subscribers as of August.

Domestic average monthly revenue per paid Disney+ subscriber only grew from $8.06 to $8.09, while Hulu’s SVOD-only average revenue per subscriber grew from $12.36 to $12.40. At ESPN+, average revenue per user dropped from $6.58 to $6.40.

That doesn’t mean Disney’s streaming ambitions are limited. The company released a new streaming app called ESPN on August 21, just in time for football season, ahead of which it acquired NFL Network, the linear rights to NFL RedZone, and NFL Fantasy from the NFL. (For its part, the NFL acquired a 10% equity stake in ESPN.)

“I’ve talked about it being one of the most important steps ESPN has taken really since they went from half a season to a full season of the NFL back in 1987,” CEO Bob Iger told investors.

 more than 130 million US viewers watching on its ad tier, began airing Nascar races that same month as part of a seven-year agreement inked with Nascar, and has seen races 

 about 2 million viewers, according to executives, as well as the youngest audience Nascar broadcasts have drawn in over a decade. The streamer’s upcoming sports slate includes NBA games this fall and a Christmas Day NFL game.

Prime Video is also making some inroads on the ads side, bringing in an 

 $433 million in advertising revenue in 2024, according to research from S&P Global Market Intelligence Kagan cited by TV Tech. (That number is projected to grow to $806 million in 2025.) Amazon Ads also inked an ad-tech partnership with Roku that seeks to increase addressability across properties including Prime Video and The Roku Channel.

And so far, it’s been a pretty good summer for the streamer: The third season of its hit young-adult drama 

 25 million worldwide viewers in the week after its premiere, 40% higher than the first-week viewership of the show’s second season in 2023.

While writing this, we had to remind ourselves it’s no longer Max, but HBO Max. While the streamer has had a difficult time deciding on its 

, Warner Bros. Discovery has had an easier time 

 its streaming business, adding 3.4 million streaming subscribers in the quarter and growing revenue to $2.8 billion, up 8% (excluding foreign exchange). The company reported 125.7 million global streaming subscribers (57.8 million of which are in the US), and the company said it expects to clear 150 million streaming subscribers by the end of next year.

With that all said, domestic streaming average revenue per user decreased 8% to $11.16, and the streamer plans to 

 its password-sharing crackdown beginning in September as a way to potentially reverse that trend.

The company is gearing up for its upcoming split into two businesses, Warner Bros. and Discovery Global, the former of which will house HBO Max. In July, WBD set the leadership for Warner Bros., which will include David Zaslav as president and CEO and Casey Bloys as chairman and CEO of HBO and HBO Max.

 Although Paramount’s much-scrutinized merger with Skydance (which was recently approved by the Trump administration and may include $20 million in free ads for Trump, depending on who you believe) has dominated the headlines for the last few months, its streaming business has continued to chug along. Paramount+, which last reported 77.7 million subscribers at the end of June, saw total revenue grow 23% year over year, according to its July earnings call, and it 

 a seven-year deal with UFC for exclusive domestic streaming and broadcast rights domestically starting next year.

Global average revenue per user on Paramount+ grew 9% YoY, according to the company, but DTC ad revenue (which includes Paramount+) dropped 4%, which the company attributed to lower CPMs and increased CTV ad supply.

Looking ahead, it doesn’t look like the media giant will look to join the spinoffs party.

“We’re thinking about...the cable networks, not as declining linear assets that we need to spin off or deal with somehow,” Paramount Skydance President Jeff Shell 

 at a media event this month. “We’re thinking of those brands that we have to redefine.”

Logos of streaming services on stacked old tv boxes.

How the streamers stacked up, midyear edition

Everyone’s breaking up (their businesses).

MSNBC is rebranding to MS NOW, which stands for My Source News Opinion World, as the cable news channel prepares for a corporate split from NBCUniversal.

According to an internal memo sent to company employees on Monday obtained by Marketing Brew, the rebrand is designed to “accelerate the distinction between the MSNBC and NBC News organizations” as part of NBCUniversal’s move to spin off its cable brands, including the channel soon to be formerly known as MSNBC, CNBC, E!, and USA, into a new company called Versant. As part of the shift, MS NOW’s logo will not incorporate a peacock, a symbol that has long been associated with NBC properties (and has been the centerpiece of the MSNBC logo for years) and is a prominent part of Peacock’s branding.

“The peacock is synonymous with NBCUniversal, and it is a symbol they have decided to keep within the NBCU family,” Versant CEO Mark Lazarus wrote in the memo. “This gives us the opportunity to chart our own path forward, create distinct brand identities, and establish an independent news organization following the spin.”

In a separate memo, Rebecca Kutler, president of MSNBC, noted that the rebrand “now allows us to set our own course and assert our independence as we continue to build our own modern newsgathering operation.” To support the new branding, Kutler said there would be a “broad-based marketing campaign unlike anything we have done in recent memory.” 

MSNBC’s rebrand to MS NOW marks a reversal from earlier this year, when Lazarus 

 that the name would not change, and it’s just one of several branding changes set to take place ahead of the spinoff, which is expected to be complete by the end of this year.

While sister brand CNBC will retain its name, it is prepping a new logo, according to Lazarus’s memo. Other brands will also get new logos and some structural changes: USA Network’s sports programming will merge with that of the Golf Channel under a new moniker, USA Sports. (Both entities are also getting new logos.) SportsEngine, a sports management platform, is also dropping the peacock in a new logo.

Despite the branding changes, Lazarus stressed in the memo that it would be business as usual.

“Regardless of the iconography, each of our businesses will remain true to their charge,” he wrote.