If you’ve listened to even a single podcast, there’s a chance you’ve heard of Athletic Greens.

The company sells AG1, a $99 bag of green powder designed to serve as “comprehensive nutrition and gut health support in one daily drink.”

• Since 2015—but especially in the past few years—it’s been promoting the product in part by sponsoring podcasts with big-name hosts like Armchair Expert’s Dax Shepard and Monica Padman, as well as business author Tim Ferriss, who pitch AG1 to their listeners.

Big picture: These days, Athletic Greens works with “hundreds” of podcasters at any given moment, CRO Jonathan Corne told Marketing Brew. In fact, it’s the third-largest podcast advertiser by total show count (behind BetterHelp and Manscaped) in the last year, according to podcast transcription and analytics service Podscribe.

Athletic Greens’ podcast ad strategy is all about “playing the long game,” Corne said. To do it, the brand has an in-house partnerships team of five that’s in part dedicated to leading its podcast investments.

We talked to Corne about how the brand chooses partners, its approach to measuring podcasts, and more. Read the full story here.—AM

While most marketing professionals work to inspire others to act, a new non-partisan group is turning the tables, hoping to boost voter turnout among young people in the industry.

Ashley Swartz, chair of the Voting Maven (which stands for “media and advertising voters engaging now””), said she and others in the industry were inspired to create the group to get young people, who tend to turn out at the lowest rates during midterms, and women, who Swartz noted are “underrepresented in our government at every level,” to vote given industry demographics.

“As employers and as leaders in the media and advertising industry, we recognize that our workforce skews younger than average,” Swartz said, noting that the industry is around 60% women as well. “And we also recognize that we have a role to play in our society as storytellers and in conveying information and motivating people to take action.”

She also cited a recent study by MTV and the Ad Council Research Institute, which found that young voters are in need of “more focused educational content on the midterm elections.”

• On its website, Voting Maven provides consolidated information on registering to vote, polling places, and why voting matters.
• It also provides participating employers with a playbook on how to be a member of Voting Maven, from taking the pledge to participating in the group’s email and social campaigns and ideally providing employees with time off to vote.

“This is really about creating a resource that is by our industry, for our industry,” Swartz said.

Zoom out: To date, Swartz told us 14 members have signed on, including the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s), Horizon Media, and Publicis Media.

The group does not plan to try to track registration or turnout numbers given privacy concerns, but Swartz said the hope is to “measure and quantify the impact we are having on our democracy and in our country and our culture” in the future.—KH

Each year, like clockwork, we are reminded that brands still can’t get enough of the Super Bowl.

Some commercial slots for next year’s Super Bowl have reportedly cost more than $7 million, a record high.

Do you think paying upward of $7 million for a Super Bowl ad is worth it? We asked Marketing Brew readers this question earlier this week, and more than 1,000 responded. Most of you, it seems, would choose to spend your money elsewhere (if you had millions of marketing dollars lying around, that is).

• 62% said no
• 38% said yes

Since its 2015 peak of 114 million viewers, Super Bowl viewership has seen declines as low as 96 million, though last year’s game pulled in 112 million. But Super Bowl ad prices, for the most part, have continued to go up in recent years.

• In 2022, some advertisers were paying as much as $7 million, according to several reports.
• In 2020 and 2021, brands were paying around $5.5 million.
• In 2019, the price tag was closer to $5 million.

So, how do brands determine if their game-day investment was successful? Turns out, it’s complicated.

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Test and learn: New research determines the ideal length of an Instagram Reel caption.

Express yourself: Adobe dropped its “2022 US Emoji Trend Report” this week.

DIY: Walmart is making its Search Brand Amplifier a self-serve tool next month.

No cookies? No worries: Contextual targeting lets marketers take control of their campaigns and drive successful results. Learn more about how contextual advertising can save the day in a cookieless future with StackAdapt’s report.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}

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While it’s technically still summer for another week, Deloitte is already out with its 2022 holiday retail forecast. Holiday sales are expected to increase this year, but not at quite the same level as they did in 2021.

Slow your roll: Holiday retail sales are on track to rise between 4% and 6% this year, according to Deloitte’s projections, totaling $1.45 to $1.47 trillion from November to January.

• In 2021, holiday sales increased by more than 15% during that same timeframe.
• As usual, we have inflation and the looming economic downturn to blame for the slowdown, according to Deloitte analysts.
• “Retail sales are likely to be further affected by declining demand for durable consumer goods, which had been the centerpiece of pandemic spending,” said Daniel Bachman, Deloitte’s US economic forecaster. “However, we anticipate more spending on consumer services, such as restaurants, as the effects of the pandemic continue to wane.”

E-commerce: Deloitte also projects that sales from online shopping in particular will increase year over year.

• E-commerce sales will rise between 12.8% and 14.3%, according to Deloitte, totaling at least $260 billion.

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• Meet Penguin Random House’s head of social media, Alyssa Castaneda
• IAB warns ad legislation is coming
• Lawsuit against Kochava raises serious questions about location data