It’s been a big year for women’s sports. At the college level, the major women’s basketball and softball tournaments broke viewership records. Meanwhile, the NWSL has been expanding, with more teams to come, and the US Women’s National Team is gearing up for a World Cup that’s expected to be the most-attended women’s sporting event ever.

Over the past few years, sports marketing execs have taken note of the increased interest, and several have started companies aimed at helping brands capitalize. But it isn’t always easy.

“My peers were like, ‘Sara, I could do a Monday Night Football deal for three times the amount of your WNBA deal, and it takes 5% of the work that you’re doing,’” Sara Gotfredson, who last year founded women’s sports media advisory group Trailblazing Sports Group after 18 years at ESPN and Disney, told Marketing Brew. That’s when she thought to herself, “I think there’s a big need for more folks with advertising and sponsorship backgrounds to be out there talking to brands about investing in women’s sports.”

For some early entrants, business wasn’t always exactly booming. But in the past year or two, they’ve started to experience growth and notice a shift in the types of conversations brands are having about opportunities with women athletes.

Read more about the growth of sports marketing agencies centered on landing women athletes brand opportunities.—AM

Brands evolve by nature…but that sometimes sudden evolution can lead to fragmented brand management. Take Caribou Coffee, for example. With assets and products stored in different spots, variations led to confusion, and they needed more than a coffee break to get organized.

That’s when Frontify stepped in.

By acting as a single source of truth for brand assets and guidelines and fostering the ability to scale as biz needs grew, Caribou Coffee’s new brand portal—built with Frontify—is now used daily to access imagery, share assets with stakeholders, and build marketing materials seamlessly.

Yep, Frontify did that, and they can do it for your brand too. Across teams and departments, Caribou Coffee now saves 5+ hours a week, thanks to their self-service brand portal.

Learn more in Frontify’s case study.

Not a great day to be the king.

Google, the world’s largest advertising platform, charged advertisers for “premium” advertising but actually placed those ads on sites that didn’t meet Google’s “standards for monetization,” according to research the Wall Street Journal first reported on.

Though Google manages all the ad inventory for YouTube, the company also lets advertisers buy video ads on third-party websites. It was on those sites where Google allegedly violated its own standards about 80% of the time, overcharging advertisers for “muted, auto-playing, [and] mis-declared” ad inventory, according to research from the ad tech auditing firm Adalytics, which reviewed and analyzed billions of impressions from more than 1,100 brands between 2020 and 2023.

“This is an unacceptable breach of trust by YouTube,” Joshua Lowcock, global chief media officer at ad agency UM Worldwide, told the Journal. “Google must fix this and fully refund clients for any fraud and impressions that failed to meet Google’s own policies.”

Google’s response: In a blog post, Marvin Renaud, Google’s director of global video solutions, called the report “extremely inaccurate.”

“Advertisers are only paying for ads when they are viewed,” he wrote, adding that Google prohibits made-for-advertising (or MFA) content. (In 2021, Marketing Brew found that Google was serving many of the ads on MFA sites, while a recent report from NewsGuard reached a similar conclusion for “unreliable” sites generated by AI.)

Murky waters: Insider Intelligence estimates that programmatic advertising will be a ~$149 billion business in 2023, but it has long had a transparency problem. A recent transparency report published by the Association of National Advertisers found that 23% of all programmatic ad spend is wasted on low-quality sites that are largely clickbait.

Lawmakers circling: In January, the Department of Justice and eight states sued Google for allegedly operating an adtech monopoly.—RB

Ads for big brands are showing up on “low-quality AI-generated sites” and are primarily served by Google Ads, according to a report from the publisher-rating tool Newsguard.

In May and June 2023, ads from 141 brands appeared on 55 AI-generated websites, NewsGuard found. According to the report, analysts examined 217 websites categorized by NewsGuard as “unreliable AI-generated news” and identified 393 programmatic ads from major brands on 55 sites with content that it described as “low-quality or apparently plagiarized.”

Google Ads served 356 of the 393 ads NewsGuard reviewed, or more than 90%, analysts found. While NewsGuard did not identify the blue-chip brands whose ads analysts observed on these websites, the company did reach out to 40 of those brands (of the four that responded, all declined to comment), as well as Google, which had not returned requests for comment by the time of the report’s publication.

Big fish: According to Matt Skibinski, general manager of NewsGuard, the report is focused on larger companies instead of smaller businesses, which “probably aren’t paying for any brand safety protection,” he said.

“In the case of these large companies with significant revenue and therefore, most likely, significant marketing teams and marketing budgets, they’re already paying for technology that is allegedly supposed to protect them from appearing on these kinds of sites, and it’s not working,” he said.

A bigger problem? Skibinski said the report “almost certainly understates the scale of this problem.” And as AI tools grow in popularity, efforts to prevent ads from appearing alongside this kind of content are just getting started, Skibinski said.

“We’re probably still in the first inning of this problem, in the sense that generative AI is a relatively new technology,” Skibinski said. “We expect that the publishers are going to get more and more sophisticated as this technology becomes more widespread and people become more familiar with it.”—JS

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

Dark side: An explainer on dark social (aka “private, untraceable human-to-human communication” like texts), and how brands can track it.

ABCs: Lessons in experimenting with paid media from a growth marketer who ran more than two dozen A/B tests in Google Adwords.

Challenge accepted: A breakdown of the TikTok Creative Challenge, the platform’s latest option for brands and creators to collaborate.

Curiosity piqued: Dig into tons of award-winning, original documentary films, shows, and series on Curiosity Stream. New content drops weekly, and you can stream on any device. Brew readers get 25% off.*

Pay it forward: A business’s payment processes must be secure and ready to scale. See how these small businesses partnered with Paysafe to simplify $$$ and build the vital customer trust they want and need.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}