Tom Holland probably isn’t toasting his recent engagement with champagne. Instead, the actor’s non-alcoholic brew brand, Bero, seems to be a likelier choice—and if we somehow get invited to the royal wedding, we’ll be sure to investigate how he and Zendaya are stocking the bar.

Holland is one of the most recent celebrities behind non-alcoholic beverage brands, following in the footsteps of Bella Hadid’s Kin Euphorics, Katy Perry’s De Soi, and Blake Lively’s Betty Buzz (though there is also a boozy version, called Betty Booze). It’s a marked pivot from A-listers of yore who in the past threw their might behind alcohol brands, á la George Clooney’s Casamigos tequila or Ryan Reynolds’s Aviation gin.

Bethenny Frankel, most well-known as a cast member on The Real Housewives of New York City, is no stranger to the beverage industry, either. She founded Skinnygirl Margarita back in 2009, and now she’s taking her libations expertise to the non-alcoholic sector as both an investor and spokesperson for Mingle Mocktails.

Though Laura Taylor, founder of Mingle Mocktails, “eats, drinks, sleeps, breathes this whole space,” she sees a partnership with Frankel as an opportunity to take Mingle to the next level.

“On my vision board, I have Bethenny Frankel images twice,” Taylor told Marketing Brew. “Why would I not leverage the success she’s had in business in my own?”

Continue reading here.—JN

Target, which nearly a decade ago became the first big retailer to support transgender people using restrooms and fitting rooms of their choice in its stores, is now one of the latest companies to drop its DE&I programs.

On Friday, just a few days before the start of Black History Month, the company announced that it would conclude its DE&I goals and its Racial Equity Action and Change (REACH) initiatives first established in 2020, which included efforts to hire and promote more women, people of color, people with disabilities, and veterans. Beyond that, the company also said it would no longer share diversity-related data with external sources like the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index.

In response to the news, some customers have called for a boycott. Twin Cities Pride, which hosts the Pride parade in Minneapolis where Target is headquartered, announced that the company would not be involved in the 2025 parade after years of sponsorship.

The move comes months after the company began backing away from in-store DE&I efforts. Last June, Target drew headlines for reducing its in-store Pride displays and being less outspoken overall in its corporate LGBTQ+ allyship in response to a right-wing pressure campaign that began in 2023.

Not so committed? It’s not just Target. In the last month, Meta announced it would end its DE&I programs, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying he wanted more “masculine energy” in the workforce during an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. McDonald’s also rolled back its DE&I commitments in January, swapping mentions of “diversity” for “inclusion,” joining companies like Walmart and John Deere in their pullback.

Read more here.—KH

This story is the tenth in a series about how marketers for sports teams and leagues around the world approach social media strategy.

Druski, Tee Grizzley, Kai Cenat. Recognize any of these names?

Those who do probably are Gen Z, which might mean they get sports news from the sports media company Overtime—or have at least come across its content on social media.

In addition to creating content, Overtime operates basketball, football, and boxing leagues, whose athletes are also largely on the younger side: its boxing platform features mostly fighters in their 20s and basketball and football players who are predominantly teenagers. Gen Z also helps run the show on Overtime’s social accounts, CEO Dan Porter said. Both keeping that young audience in mind and hiring them has helped the company’s content game since it was founded in 2016, he told Marketing Brew.

“When we started, you had to look at who the competition at that point was, and it might be an ESPN, or a SportsCenter, maybe a Bleacher Report,” Porter said. “You have to say internally, ‘We should never publish a post that those guys would publish, because we can’t compete with them.’ The only way that we can compete with them is knowing our audience segment, which is younger people, and talking to them in their voice.”

How do you do, fellow kids? Overtime’s target demographics are between the ages of 13 and 24, Porter said, and over 81% of its audience is under the age of 35. Porter, who is in his fifties, isn’t afraid to admit he doesn’t always speak their language.

“Five years ago, Druski was making fun of me because I used to shake his hand, and he’d be like, ‘That’s the guy who doesn’t dap me up,” Porter said.

Overtime’s accounts have a combined 100+ million followers across seven platforms, and the company says it sees upward of 3 billion views per month. The goal across social is not to teach Porter and his fellow Gen Xers what “dapping up” is.

Continue reading here.—AM

Stories we’re jealous of.

• Business Insider reported that Meta is offering TikTok creators deals worth as much as $300k to post on Reels.
• The Wall Street Journal wrote about recipe-sharing and other exchanges between Chinese and American users on RedNote.
• The Atlantic wrote about the underlying forces behind Starbucks’s new focus on “community.”