As if 162 regular-season MLB games per team weren’t enough, every February, players head to Florida and Arizona for two months of spring training before the official start of the season.

They’re not the only ones packing their bags. Some teams bring along their content, creative, and social media crews to post from spring training and stockpile content for the rest of the season, squeezing in shoots around game and practice schedules.

“It’s one of my favorite times of the year,” Tyler Thompson, director of game entertainment and experiential marketing at the Seattle Mariners, told Marketing Brew. “The mark of the start of baseball for me, even more than opening day, is getting to go down to spring training, hearing the bat and the mitt, and just starting to ramp up to hopefully what’s going to be a great season.”

Sprint, not a marathon: Most of the Mariners production team spends around two weeks in Arizona for spring training, and for as long as the team is there, there’s at least a photographer, a videographer, and the team’s senior director of digital marketing and social media, Tim Walsh.

Planning starts as early as the summer, Ben Mertens, VP of creative and content services, said, and prep kicks into higher gear once the season ends, Thompson said. At that point, staffers start discussing what kind of content they want to film and scheduling shoots.

Once they touch down for spring training, it’s off to the races—or should we say bases?

“It’s an all-out sprint, kind of a hurricane,” Thompson said. “We come in, we try to get everything that we need for the season across all of our various sets, and leave no trace, because we know that our club is preparing for baseball.”

Continue reading here to learn about what sports marketers get up to at spring training.—AM

Marketers haven’t fully bought into gaming, but that’s not for lack of trying.

Despite there being some 190 million gamers in the US, according to the Entertainment Software Association, gaming is still just peanuts in the eyes of some advertisers, making up just 5% of total digital advertising spend, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), which hosted its fourth annual PlayFronts conference Tuesday.

That’s down a touch from the 6% of spend it accounted for back in 2022, but executives are optimistic that the tides could be turning.

“It definitely can be discouraging because it is a small percent, but we’re seeing a shift,” Zoe Soon, VP of the IAB’s Experience Center, told us.

At PlayFronts this year, platforms like Unity, Zynga, Activision Blizzard Media, and Discord showed off new wares. At the event, the gaming industry pitched the basics of the category—one executive used their time onstage to show slides detailing exactly what a mobile gaming ad looks like and where it runs—something that’s perhaps hard to imagine happening in other sectors, like television.

“It feels like it’s been the same narrative for 10 years…The disproportionate ad spend is still real,” said Amanda Rubin, chief revenue officer at Wildfire, an agency that manages what she described as “basically influencer marketing, but for Discord.”

Continue reading here about what platforms pitched at Playfronts and how investment strategies are shifting.—JN, RB

College basketball isn’t the only sport that’s in season at the moment—although it may seem that way for those who can’t stop checking their March Madness brackets.

And while MassMutual, like many other brands, wanted to tap into the growing fandom around women’s college hoops, its marketers were also looking to put together a campaign with staying power beyond the tournament as part of a broader push into women’s sports.

That’s why the insurance and financial services company tapped athletes across three sports for “Stay Ready,” a campaign that marks the brand’s first big push into women’s sports since teaming up with Deep Blue Sports + Entertainment last year.

“We have been sort of circling around this, and we’ve been in the women’s sports space for a number of years…so I really felt that it was important for us to get a focus and land a real strategy that would be something that would have more legs to it,” Jennifer Halloran, MassMutual’s CMO and head of marketing, told Marketing Brew.

The campaign, which stars LSU guard Flau’jae Johnson, Angel City FC forward Christen Press, and Australian Open champion Madison Keys, kicked off during the NCAA tournament, Halloran said, and additional elements are planned for the rest of the year.

Read more here about the strategy behind the campaign.—AM

Executive moves across the industry.

• Yum Brands, the owner of QSR brands like Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and KFC, is on the hunt for a successor to CEO David Gibbs, who plans to retire in 2026.
• Yahoo hired Paramount Global’s former global chief brand officer, Josh Line, as CMO.
• PepsiCo promoted Mark Kirkham, PepsiCo North America’s SVP of sparkling beverages, to US beverages CMO.
• Stagwell appointed former Microsoft exec John Kahan to serve as its first chief AI officer.
• The NBA’s chief DEI officer, Lesley Slaton Brown, will leave at the conclusion of the NBA season in June, per Adweek.
• Vanity Fair editor Radhika Jones, who has helmed the publication since late 2017, is stepping down.