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Marketing Brew

Alyssa Meyers

marketingbrew.com

Why ‘inserts,’ aka the ads slipped into packages, are having a moment

The channel is experiencing a “renaissance,” perhaps due to the current economic climate, one marketing exec told us. 

Katie Hicks

Pete Davidson saying, "It's pronounced stonk market"

Q4 results show advertisers are pulling back spend—but there are exceptions

McDonald’s, for one, said its marketing was a particular driver of revenue and digital growth last year.

Minda Smiley

Responses from our Super Bowl reader survey

No one’s looking for a sappy Super Bowl ad, apparently: Most of you said you prefer humorous over heartfelt commercials during the game.

Brand text billboard coming out of coffee mug

Advertising

A cartoon image of Kristina Monllos created by Morning Brew

Kristina Monllos

The idea for the latest 30-second ad from pet product maker Whisker was simple: Do nothing. Well, almost nothing.

“When you look through your feeds or you’re watching something, ads are in overdrive: poppy music, fast cuts, super dynamic,” said Joe Ciccarelli, head of creative at Whisker, the maker of the self-cleaning litter box Litter-Robot. “This one was like, ‘Let’s do none of that.’”

Instead, for an ad that ran on Fox, CNN, C-Span, and Bloomberg as well as YouTube, Whisker had a single shot of a cat sitting in the company’s litter box, seemingly doing its business for nearly the full 30 seconds of the ad, while elevator music plays.

“It’s a cat just sitting there looking at you, and then paying it off at the end by saying, ‘Hey, we just gave you that because we care about you,’” Ciccarelli said.

Whisker’s in-house team of creatives is among a contingent of marketers looking to scale back and do less with their ad creative.

During broadcast and cable election coverage late last year, mental health app 

 offered viewers 30 seconds of silence as a respite from the breakneck coverage. During the Super Bowl broadcast in February, toilet-paper brand 

 gave viewers a break from the game (and the ads) by telling them to use their 30 seconds to head to the bathroom—complete with a countdown clock and soothing music.

For some brands, it’s not a matter of budget or altruism driving them to do less with their allotted time. Instead, there seems to be a recognition that, at a time when consumers are inundated with more advertising than ever before, positioning a brand as a pressure relief valve can be powerful.

“It’s a bit of a counter-trend,” Allison Arling-Giorgi, head of brand for advertising shop Method1, said. Given the “information overload” that people are experiencing today, she added, brands and marketers that take this approach are “expressing a level of empathy and humanity to consumers.”

It’s not exactly a new idea for brands to seek out ways to be a relief rather than a burden, but tapping into that sentiment can be particularly powerful in an age of the endless scroll.

“The [idea that] we all need a break… that idea is something that has existed forever in some way or another,” Amanda Skudlarek, executive creative director at M+C Saatchi Clear, said. “That idea of, life is hectic and life is busy, and let’s take a break from that, or your feed is busy and you’re being pelted by communications—that’s going to continue.”

For many brand marketers, upping the ante can take many forms, whether that’s pulling celebrity PR stunts, picking fights with other brands, or displaying 

 head-on. Generally, Arling-Giorgi noted, “It’s quick hooks, loud sounds, eye-catching visuals [that] break through the feed, break through the clutter.”

For Whisker, positioning its own quiet ad as a moment of advertising relief (which itself serves as a reference to the cat’s use of the Litter-Robot device) seems to be resonating with audiences, at least when looking at its performance.

“Almost 50% of people are watching this all the way through,” Ciccarelli said. “I think [the] industry standard is like 15% or 18%, and it’s way higher than our other ads.”

For brands taking the less-is-more approach, the current cultural landscape makes for a ripe opportunity.

“Almost everything in society is anxiety-inducing right now,” Mike Hayward, chief creative officer and partner at creative agency Copacino Fujikado, said, adding that marketers should look to respond to cultural cues. “You’re supposed to fear for the economy, for democracy. You’ve got global crisis, humanitarian crisis. Is your job going to be there in a year?”

That’s having a profound effect on the American consumer. In 2024, the American Psychiatric Association’s 

 found that 43% of adults felt more anxious than the previous year, up six percentage points from 2023.

Copacino Fujikado, which works with Visit Seattle, has made slower-paced spots, as well as ASMR-style ads highlighting the potential for visitors to relax in the city, Hayward said.

“It’s more about recognizing what as people makes us feel good, too, and [being] more singular in our messaging,” he said.

For marketers interested in doing more with less, though, agency execs stressed the importance of doing so in a way that makes sense for their brands—and recognizing when it might not work.

“Only so many people can use that message in a way that’s relevant before it feels just ridiculous,” Skudlarek said.

A photo composite of ads from AngelSoft, the Calm app and Litter-Robot

Would you watch this ad where nothing happens?

Brands like Whisker, Calm, and Angel Soft are using ad breaks to offer moments of relief from overstimulation.

Ads are loud, flashy, and in-your-face. Except these ones 

An all-too-literal guillotine league. Chainsawed sandwiches. A moshpit diaper.

Those aren’t just random words jumbled together to test your reading comprehension—they’re the outcome of recent brand collaborations with Liquid Death.

The canned-beverage brand has been inking more than 

 in the last year, striking deals with a bevvy of other big names, including Yahoo Sports (the aforementioned guillotine league), Sheetz (chainsawed sandwiches), and Depends (moshpit diaper), all of which are shown off in splashy social posts.

“We hope to be one of the better things in your feed,” Dan Murphy, SVP of marketing for Liquid Death, told Marketing Brew.

While collaborations are nothing new, the strange humor that’s a feature of Liquid Death’s brand mashups certainly

stands out. To understand what goes into partnering with Liquid Death, Marketing Brew caught up with Murphy to get a sense of the process.

 stage,” according to Murphy, who said that he has some 73 brands interested in partnering currently in his inbox. “We’re going to go into the Liquid Death world,” Murphy said of the reasoning he sees, “and we’re going to get exposed to this new audience.”

For interested brands, Liquid Death has a big stage to offer. Since its founding in 2018, the brand has built a dedicated fanbase on social media, with 7 million followers on TikTok and 7.3 million followers on Instagram. Murphy says the brand regularly earns more than a billion media impressions each month, all while keeping costs relatively low.

“We’re very much an influencer,” Murphy said. “We ended [2024 with] over 30 billion [earned media impressions], and that was on a spend of—I’m talking every production dollar, every talent fee, because we work with celebrities too—that was under $2 million.”

While the details of each brand partnership deal vary, Liquid Death’s typical arrangement when partnering with a brand is to contribute whatever creative that its five-person, in-house team lands on. The company generally asks that its brand partner cover “hard costs” of production, as well as the marketing budget and media resources that could include anything from influencer spend or light paid spend behind the campaign, Murphy said.

When considering partners, the most important factor is if the brand looking to link up is “aligned with our creative sensibilities,” Murphy said.

That likeminded spirit was what attracted Sheetz, a convenience store brand that operates its own irreverent social presence, to promote its recent partnership with Liquid Death, Ryan Sheetz, executive vice president of marketing and supply chain at Sheetz, told Marketing Brew.

“We have a lot in common, right? Both very bold brands, both very high energy brands, but both brands who really like to have a lot of fun,” Sheetz said.

For one day in late July, the brands offered Sheetz customers a new, if unconventional, way to slice their sandwiches: with a chainsaw. And no, it wasn’t just a lark just for social media; some 150 patrons in Cranberry, Pennsylvania, got to see their sandwiches chainsawed in half.

The whole endeavor required an unconventional setup.

“It took a lot of preparation and planning to make sure our store teams were well set up and we had all the proper safety and organizational measures in place,” Sheetz said. “We had a brand-new kind of food-safe blade that was put on the chainsaw, and we used food-grade lubricant instead of petroleum-based oil. I learned a lot about chainsaws that I never thought I would need to know.”

Jeremy Ekes, VP client strategy and services at January Digital, said Liquid Death’s built a reputation for unique partnerships where marketers are willing to take a leap, making its particular creative sensibility stand out in a landscape where 

“Generally, there’s probably few and far between in the industry,” Ekes said. “Probably a handful of brands you can think of that have the right to own that space, Liquid Death being one of them.”

Those kinds of out-of-the-box partnerships and unexpected creative aren’t solely for entertainment. Through all of its partnerships, Liquid Death is aiming to continue to boost its brand awareness—while educating consumers about what the brand offers, especially as its product lineup expands.

“We are talking more about product benefits than we have ever before,” Murphy said. “I think we found we had this great awareness number, and especially being a young company, but at least a third of those people still thought we were a beer or maybe an energy drink, so we had to work a little harder to make sure that message comes through.”

A woman holds a Liquid Death X Sheets branded chainsaw that she's just cut a sandwich with and it's splattered sauce on her face.

Want to partner with Liquid Death? Get in line 

The beverage brand’s strange humor and social fanbase has dozens of brand marketers vying to partner up, its SVP of marketing said. 

If your TikTok feed looks anything like ours, you’ve probably seen videos of 

 with tickets to the Oasis reunion tour since it was first announced. Now that the tour is officially underway and brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher are performing together again, said dads are 

 and having emotional experiences watching Oasis perform—as 

Simply put: The Oasis reunion can’t be ignored, making it no surprise, then, that brands quickly got involved.

In June, Adidas announced a collaboration with the band that included a 

 as well as an apparel collection featuring 26 co-branded pieces to be sold online and at tour stops. Also in June, Amazon debuted its 

 with exclusive merch and limited-edition items in tandem with a curated Oasis playlist from Amazon Music.

Spotify got into the mix in mid-July with its own campaign, “This is…An Oasis Fan,” a fan portrait series that was used for out-of-home ads in Manchester, London, Edinburgh, and Dublin, as well as a 

 of fans talking about how much the band means to them. Just this week, Oasis announced the locations of fan store 

 in North America ahead of the first gig on the continent on August 24 in Toronto.

For marketers and agency execs, the Oasis reunion presents a unique opportunity to tap into a tour that’s become a rare cultural force, even while the famously volatile relationship between the Gallagher brothers could present potential challenges for companies tying up with the tour. But working with artists is no easy feat, marketers told us, and can take months of special consideration to determine whether there’s a genuine fit.

“It’s not just any reunion, right? It’s like the biggest reunion in the last decade,” Billie Baier, co-head of marketing, Spotify UK and Republic of Ireland, told Marketing Brew.

Baier said the Spotify campaign isn’t without a level of uncertainty, considering the Gallagher brothers’ tumultuous history and 

. But that’s all part of the fun, making the reunion more enticing for fans; it comes with the potential for a curveball.

“With any campaign, there’s always a risk,” Baier said. “Anything could happen at any time, but you’ve got to take the risks that you believe in.”

Paul Furia, who previously worked in entertainment marketing at talent agency William Morris and now serves as head of content and creative packaging at Media by Mother, said that to mitigate that risk for brands, agencies and talent representatives likely negotiated with that in mind.

“This is where the recovering agent in me would answer: You will have strong protections in your contract,” Furia told Marketing Brew. “If anything were to truncate this, you would get your money back, or you would get your money back plus penalties.”

Spotify’s Oasis campaign was in the works for roughly six months, Baier told us, and the marketing team decided to focus its efforts on celebrating fans of the band. Spotify then worked with Oasis’s label and management teams, which provided archived footage, video, and memorabilia to support a one-day immersive gallery activation in London dedicated to Oasis in late July, Baier said.

The company declined to share its overall media spend for the campaign, but Baier noted that it was one of its biggest marketing moments for the year for music in the UK.

“Oasis is a British story. It’s a Manchester story, and it travels around the world,” Baier said. “The strength of the anticipation and the reach of the Oasis fandom globally makes [it] a super exciting story for us to tell from a UK perspective, especially in celebrating those fans and putting them in front of and center.”

Oasis’s management team and Adidas did not respond to requests for comment. Amazon declined to comment.

In general, marketers looking to advertise around a musical act’s tour will start by finding the best fit for their brand rather than aiming for the biggest possible get, Furia explained. Questions about the artist like, “Do they align with your audience?” and, “Do they share your values?” will come first followed by considerations like scale, reach, price, notoriety, and venue size.

In the case of Oasis, there’s particular value that the “cultural zeitgeist” of the tour comes from “artists of their age,” said Rick Faigin, executive vice president for Acceleration Brand Advisory—value that could help the tour stand out with brands looking to target slightly older audiences.

Once artist and brand details align, marketers and agency partners usually suss out how the partnership can be beneficial for fans of the act, whether that’s serving as a utility (like a brand sponsoring power-charging banks at festivals like Coachella for example) or providing something more integral to the story of the tour.

“You also don’t want to be a logo slap, right?” Furia said. “A lot of times, when you speak directly with the talent or the manager or the promoter, there’s usually a story that goes along with the tour…and if you can align yourself with the narrative of what that show is going to be, that’s a multiplier.”

For bigger tours, marketers could work a year or more in advance of when a campaign will roll out, but the timeline can depend on when in the tour cycle the brand activates their marketing. Brands that have more experience sponsoring tours may get involved with as little as a few weeks ahead of time, Faigin said.

“If you are a brand that you know it’s important for you to be part of the announcement of the tour and part of the offer you need to be much further upstream,” he said, adding that financial services brands offering early access to ticket sales typically need to button up details early.

Cost may vary depending on terms including exclusivity, length, territories, sponsorship level, original content creation, total number of assets, media days with the artist, and exclusive experiences. Faigin estimated that the cost could range anywhere from low six figures to seven figures or even eight figures for some artists.

“Part of it depends on what your value [is as a brand], what you’re bringing to the table from a value standpoint for the artist,” Faigin said. “If you are selling your tickets, they like that. If you’re putting advertising behind the offer or behind the tour, they like that, too. So you may pay less in a sponsorship fee and say, ‘Look, we’re going to put $500,000 or a million dollars into working media around the tour,’ and, depending on the artist, that might be very attractive.”

That said, he noted, brands typically believe there’s more benefit in sponsoring festivals like Lollapalooza or Coachella compared to an individual tour.

For brands, the cultural interest in the reunion has already had an effect. Following the reunion’s first show on the weekend of July 5, Oasis streams were up 400% in the UK and 320% globally on Spotify, according to internal data shared with Marketing Brew. It’s not just relegated to Gen X and millennial dads: the platform also found that there have been over 16.6 million “user discoveries” of Oasis so far in 2025, with more than 50% of those from Gen Z users.

The Adidas collection initially sold out, but has been restocked, and some of the hottest items (read: the bucket hat) have sold out multiple times. Tickets for the reunion tour have also been notoriously difficult to get: In North America, tickets were 

The hype, combined with continued uncertainty of how long the Oasis reunion might last, likely makes it all the more appealing for brands to show up and celebrate along with die-hard fans.

“Reunions sell, nostalgia sells, this one specifically because it was one of those bands that none of us thought would get back together,” Furia said. “That scarcity element is so important.”

An image of Oasis along with Adidas merch and a ticket. 

Inside the reunion tour marketing machine

Brands like Spotify, Adidas, and Amazon are getting involved in the Oasis tour—even though “anything could happen at any time,” one marketer said.

Jasmine Sheena

The Federal Communications Commission is in the process of reviewing a cap prohibiting entities from owning broadcast TV stations that reach more than 39% of the national TV audience.

Some experts argue that a repeal of the cap, which was passed by Congress in 2003, could intensify consolidation and control over the media landscape, but others, including industry trade groups like the NAB, claim the rule could help broadcasters modernize in a landscape dominated by streaming.

“This should have been done five to 10 years ago,” Steven Schiffman, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University who specializes in media studies and digital media, said. “Broadcasters definitely have a place in the media landscape. But…broadcasters’ role and relevance within the media ecosystem, certainly in the United States, is significantly lower and less relevant than it was 10 years ago.”

The comment period on the proposal runs through the month of August.

 The cap was put in place to prevent networks from wielding disproportionate influence on viewers, according to Schiffman. Today, in a media landscape where broadcast is less relevant, he said, there are still major broadcasters like Fox, ABC, NBC, and CBS, but many consumers find news or content through social media or streaming.

Executives in broadcast, according to Schiffman, might argue that lifting the cap could help make broadcast, which has seen regular declines, more relevant and could position networks to capture younger viewers, who generally stream more.

Reversing or increasing the cap could also help broadcasters gain critical ad revenue, Rick Kaplan, chief legal officer for the trade association the National Association of Broadcasters, told Marketing Brew.

Over the years, broadcasters have lost revenue to platforms like Google and Facebook at the same time that TV advertising has declined as consumers cut cords. Pay TV and linear TV advertising was down from $146.9 billion in 2020 to $126.1 billion in 2024, according to data released last month by the consulting firm PwC. In contrast, OTT ad-supported tiers generated $22.8 billion in the US in 2024, a number that is expected to grow to $37.3 billion by 2029.

“We are now, as I think everyone realizes, competing with so many sources that are not just even national, but really global,” Kaplan said. “Especially with the advent of streaming, it's just untenable to keep going with regulations that just only target over-the-air broadcasters.”

In July, the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit struck down an FCC order that stated that an entity can’t own more than one of the top four TV stations in a specific market in terms of audience share.

 Ad dollars aside, a potential cap reversal could have political implications. In 2003, when the cap was set, the 39% figure represented a compromise between mostly Democratic lawmakers, who advocated for a 35% cap, and Republican lawmakers, many of whom had pushed for a 45% cap.

Raising the cap further could pave the way for influential figures like billionaires to consolidate and control more media, according to Melissa Ryan, CEO and founding partner of media firm Inviolable.

Even without a cap reversal, that’s already happening, she said, citing Jeff Bezos’ and Elon Musk’s respective purchases of the Washington Post and X, as well as the Skydance-Paramount merger involving billionaire Larry Ellison and his son, Skydance CEO David Ellison, as just a few examples. She also mentioned Sinclair Broadcast Group, which has consolidated local news stations in recent years and has been 

accused of spreading right-wing disinformation

“It just allows for even more of a trend that we are already seeing playing [out] across legacy media and social media,” Ryan said.

A potential change to the ownership cap comes at a time when media and advertising are being affected by the more mainstream conservative influence of the second Trump administration, Ryan said.

“During the first Trump administration, it felt like the popular culture was broadly out of alignment with where the Trump coalition was, and certainly you saw that in the kinds of advertising you saw and the way companies were reacting,” she said. “Now where we’re at, we’re in a very different place culturally. I would say that the right has, if not cultural dominance, a lot more impact and influence on the culture.”

Amid the changing domestic landscape, conservative groups rallied together in May to send FCC chairman Brendan Carr, appointed by President Trump, a letter declaring support for eliminating ownership rules. Many Republicans are often in favor of federal deregulation, and broadcast stations that favor conservative views could stand to gain ground, potentially negotiating deals with more established broadcasters if the cap is reversed, 

Thanks to the June confirmation of FCC commissioner Olivia Trusty, the FCC, which is tasked with developing rules to implement laws passed by Congress, now has a conservative majority.

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr testifies in a hearing

How the FCC’s potential overhaul of a 20-year-old rule could affect TV advertising

The commission may change a rule that stops entities from owning TV stations that can reach more than 39% of the national audience.

The outdoors aren’t all sunshine and roses. There’s snakes, storms, and vultures—and even deep canyon crevices you could fall into and maybe have to 

At least, that’s the story of the outdoors that Columbia Sportswear tells in the company’s latest 

The new campaign, called “Engineered for Whatever,” is an “intentional swing” for the brand to portray the unpredictability of the outdoors this way, Columbia Sportswear’s SVP and head of marketing, Matt Sutton, told Marketing Brew. The spot, from adam&eveDDB in London, has been in the works for the last year, Sutton told us, and it’s an effort for the brand to stand out from other outdoor apparel category brands, which often embrace classic outdoor imagery.

“Our brief was a slide with six images from competitors on a slide,” Sutton said. “You block out the logos and they all looked like they were from the same brand: Perfect sunny sweeping vistas, pristine conditions, very serious models. And the insight in our brief was that over the past 20 years, the outdoor category has kind of converged, and all follow each other and do the same thing.”

 To cut through the sea of sameness, Columbia took inspiration from the brand’s past work by Gert and Tim Boyle, the mother-son duo behind the company, and who formerly starred in ads that tested product quality in extreme, zany situations in the ’90s and early 2000s. In one ad from that time period, Tim hangs from a cliff clutching the brand’s jackets; in another, he trudges through a carwash wearing a parka and a fleece.

Columbia’s new 30-second ad is designed to serve as a table-setter to reintroduce the brand ethos, but Sutton said Columbia created new product tests spots similar to the ones the Boyles’ previously made. Those spots, which put gear up against a helicopter drop, a snowplow, and a massive snowball, will roll out later this month and into the fall.

For the brand reset, Columbia polled target audiences to find the consumer insight that even professional athletes are anxious about what can go wrong outdoors, be it extreme heat, wet, rocky or slippery terrain, or something else altogether.

Rather than ignoring those fears, the company aimed to address them head-on with new work touting the capabilities of its products.

“That insight to us was like, ‘Oh, this is an opportunity for us to establish the problem that you’re talking about and show how you can triumph with our product,’” Sutton said.

In its first quarter 2025 earnings, Columbia reported that it would withdraw its financial outlook for the full year amid tariff uncertainty. Even so, Tim Boyle, chairman, president, and CEO said in a statement at the time that Columbia was “committed to increasing investments in demand creation” with new products and a new marketing campaign.

While Sutton declined to share ad spend figures for the new brand campaign, he noted that “it’'s a meaningful increase in our overall marketing spend.” The company is also shifting more ad dollars to spend on brand marketing and is making “probably our most significant investment in five years in brand,” Sutton said.

The investment during a challenging year for many retailers is a recognition that the company can’t change the way that people see its brand without making a meaningful investment in brand marketing and storytelling.

“Our intent with this is to reintroduce and shift consumer perception of Columbia,” Sutton said. “We have a really strong performance marketing business, but we can’t shift perception with performance marketing. We have this first shot in nearly a decade of having a defined brand and a voice. And so we’re using it as an opportunity to reset and challenge new and existing customers’ expectations of Columbia.”

Outdoorsman Aron Ralston is featured in Columbia's new brand campaign

Why Columbia leaned into Mother Nature danger to reintroduce the brand

The brand took inspiration from ads from the ‘80s and ‘90s where zany stunts proved product durability.

Ryan Barwick

If you’re serving ads 35,000 feet in the sky, it helps to have internet.

Starting next year, United Airlines plans to bring free, satellite-powered wi-fi to flights through a partnership with Starlink that was first announced in September. The connectivity will “supercharge” the airline’s newly created advertising business, Kinective Media, Richard Nunn, CEO of United’s loyalty program MileagePlus, told Marketing Brew.

United claims to be the first airline to stand up an advertising business, and Kinective Media will target passengers with personalized ads served across the airline’s in-flight entertainment screens, as well as on its app and website. Thanks to Starlink, those capabilities are accelerating, Nunn told us, allowing the airline to strike new deals with media partners with the aim to target passengers mid-flight in real time.

“It will allow us to be programmatic in the sky,” Nunn said.

That effort is also expected to bring in more revenue for the ad business. Today, the airline is “developing agreements” with streamers and media companies that could see the airline getting a cut of revenue generated from 

 or serving its own ads directly, said Nunn, who led Comcast’s digital and linear ad-tech platform before he joined United.

When Kinective Media debuted in June, United joined an increasingly fragmented retail and commerce media category. Retailers like 

 have stood up advertising businesses designed to exchange their customers’ first-party data and eyeballs for advertising revenue. The retail media category is estimated to reach $166 billion by 2025 and is expected to be responsible for 20% of all digital media spend this year, according to 

Kinective Media is built on some 100 million unique ID built off of data United collects to book tickets, Nunn said. When they purchase a flight, passengers share what he described as “golden data points,” including their date of birth; United uses this data to build audience segments for advertisers, 

 where travelers are heading to and where they live to age groups and demographics. The airline has even more data for its MileagePlus loyalty members that allows for more granular targeting.

Advertisers are already getting on board. Luxury fashion brand Bottega Veneta and scotch brand Macallan used Kinective to target United’s first-class passengers, Nunn said, and Macy’s, IHG Hotels & Resorts, Norwegian Cruise Line, and TelevisaUnivision have all worked with the platform, according to a company press release.

United is selling ads on in-flight screens, as well as in its lounges and on digital boards in airports, Nunn said. Ads are served to all flights that take off and land within the US

Unlike retailers who might not see much business from brands they don’t carry on their shelves (as in, you likely won’t see Jeep or Ford advertising through Sephora), Nunn said he doesn’t think United should be limited to pitching travel advertisers.

“We are active in delivering relationships and ads across multiple verticals,” he said. “The launch partners were very specific; we can touch every single vertical based on the scale and quality of our audiences.”

In fact, he expects retail media networks—which he calls “commerce media” because, he noted, “we’re not a retailer”—to begin to collaborate. “I think there’s an opportunity for the commerce media space to work together as one, because ultimately we’re trying to get [market] share off of Meta, YouTube, and Amazon,” Nunn said.

Though the business remains in an “investment phase,” United CFO Mike Leskinen told investors during the airline’s Q3 earnings call that Kinective could make “a little bit of money” next year and could “really start to accelerate in ’26 and beyond.”

 How brand-safe is the stratosphere? Well, in late October, one person claimed in a post on X that they were 

 an ad for a phone-sex line while watching the seat-back TV on a United flight. Nunn said that the airline’s in-flight TV partner, DirecTV, was responsible for serving the ad.

“Hey, it’s not on our systems,” he said.

Correction 11/4/24: This story has been updated to correctly attribute a quote from United's Q3 earnings call.

A United Airlines flight takes off on the runway in front of an air-traffic controller.

United’s ad network is flying high

A Starlink partnership will "allow us to be programmatic in the sky,” an executive said. 

So far this year, the sportswear brand is being outperformed by competitor Adidas when it comes to national TV ads, according to data from measurement company EDO. While Nike has run more spots than Adidas and spent roughly four times the amount, Adidas is seeing higher engagement per dollar.

Adidas’s ads have outperformed Nike’s on TV by 23%, according EDO. That means Adidas has seen more engagement per dollar spent, according to Laura Grover, EDO’s SVP and head of client solutions. For this research, EDO defined engagement as online searches for the brand that occurred in the minutes after their ads were seen.

Adidas aired 488 national TV ads in the first half of 2024, per EDO, while Nike aired about 1,100.

Though Nike took up more airtime, Grover said Adidas has been allocating a larger share of its ad spend toward live sports in particular—85% to Nike’s 65%—which could explain why Adidas is seeing higher engagement.

“We see time and time again that live sports is a fantastic environment to be airing,” she told Marketing Brew. “In general, people are more engaged, and more engaged with ads, in live sports…With that concentrated buy in live sports, Adidas is really driving up their per-impression impact, or engagement rate.”

Both Nike and Adidas have been scoring in women’s basketball, but again, Adidas outperformed Nike on that front, EDO found.

Adidas’s ads featuring women’s basketball players outperformed Nike’s women’s basketball ads by 25% so far this year, according to EDO.

About three-quarters (73%) of Adidas’s overall estimated TV ad spend this year has gone toward women’s basketball spots, Grover said, compared to 8% from Nike.

Adidas aired 376 women’s basketball-focused ads in the first half of the year.

Despite being outperformed by Adidas, Nike’s women’s basketball ads are still shining against its other campaigns:

Nike women’s basketball ads have outperformed its new “

Nike’s WNBA campaign, which includes ads spotlighting 

, is its best-performing campaign of the year.

Soccer is working even better than basketball for Adidas. Viewers were 22% more likely to engage with Adidas’s 

 than with its women’s basketball ads, according to EDO data:

Adidas ads that aired on Fox and FS1 during the UEFA European Championship outperformed Adidas’ average for the first half of the year by 71%, EDO found.

During the Copa America championship, Adidas saw 49% stronger engagement than average, Grover said. Ads in the earlier rounds of that tournament were 25% stronger.

“Similar to women’'s basketball, I feel like there’s just been a groundswell around 

, in the US, so [those ads have] done really well,” Grover said.

Nike’s “Winning Isn’t For Everyone” campaign, narrated by Willem Dafoe, has generated 

 within the ad industry, but ultimately won the USA Today 

The campaign includes 10 different creatives featuring different athletes, some of which have performed better than others. A 

 starring wrestler and MMA fighter Zion Clark are the only two that have beaten Nike’s year-to-date performance benchmark since the campaign debuted last month, according to EDO.