BRAND STRATEGY

Coterie

The golf industry may be ready for a change. A diaper change, that is.

Coterie, a baby-care brand that sells products including diapers and wipes, is breaking into the sport with a PSA-style campaign about parental mental labor starring six-time PGA Tour winner Max Homa.

The centerpiece of the campaign is a print ad on the back cover of Golf Digest, which declares that “You never see diaper ads in golf magazines.” The text-only ad goes on to highlight the importance of changing the “status quo” of moms being treated as the default parent. The final line: “This is for the dads who can help us change things—diapers included.”

The campaign comes at a tumultuous time for the golf industry, which has for years been trending toward inclusivity and pushing to attract a younger crowd, but has also faced setbacks. Earlier this year, golf retailer and media company Good Good Golf released a controversial ad showing its male co-founder shoving a female creator to the ground; the spot prompted a wave of dialogue about how far the sport still has to go.

Coterie’s ad, while not a direct response to the Good Good scandal, is “more relevant than ever” as a result of the timing, Brittany Deems, Coterie’s VP of brand marketing, told us. It’s meant to raise awareness of the fact that mothers still do the majority of cognitive household labor—while simultaneously growing the brand’s reach among dads of young children.

“We didn’t think of this as a reaction in any way, but we thought of it as a way to justify the importance of talking to men, and in a way that really supports women,” Deems told Marketing Brew. “It was really [about] doing our part in how we can shift that narrative.”

For more on how Coterie’s sports marketing strategy is designed around shifting that narrative, continue reading here.—AM

      

Sponsored By The Ibotta Performance Network

Probiotics aren’t the only pros in the yogurt business.

Danone used Ibotta's LiveLift™ to optimize promotions while the campaign was still live, instead of waiting until it ended to judge results. That way, they could identify where promotional investment worked most efficiently and adjust their approach before the flight ended.

The results speak for themselves:

• In the five-week pilot, the campaign moved 1.5m+ incremental units and returned more than $3 in incremental return for every $1 in promotional investment.
• Mid-flight adjustments to offer values on Oikos and Activia made cost per incremental dollar (CPID) 30%+ more efficient over the following 10 days.
• Circana’s third-party measurement showed Oikos’ sales lift beat the yogurt category benchmark by 1.4x, and Light + Fit’s featured 4-pack beat its benchmark by 4.8x.

Learn how in-flight optimization can drive profitable growth for your brand.

AD TECH

Amelia Kinsinger

There’s a plethora of answer engine optimization (AEO) tools on the market. How is an advertiser to make sense of them all?

AEO platforms, which offer tools aimed at boosting brand visibility in AI platforms, are touting various capabilities as they vie for business from brands and agencies. However, as agencies evaluate the tools on the market, factors like a platform’s ability to measure multiple LLMs and its data collection methodology are among the most important in helping a client choose a platform, agency executives told Marketing Brew.

Agencies look at other metrics, like how often the AEO platform refreshes its data, more strategically.

“This is not a lift-and-shift from the success that we’ve had for the last 20+ years in running both paid and organic search programs,” Michael Sondak, Omnicom’s North America SVP, head of search, told Marketing Brew. “It’s wildly different: Different orchestrators, different technology, different dependents, different teams, [and] different talent.”

For more on how agencies are evaluating the different AEO platforms on the market and how they perform, continue reading here.—JS

      

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COWORKING

Allison Varone

Each week, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.

Allison Varone is head of marketing at Campari America. She previously worked at LVMH.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? Last year, we brought the “Summer of Aperol Spritz” to life in New York City with a colorful experiential moment celebrating the social summer aperitivo ritual. To kick off the season, we sent a fleet of orange Vespas and a hundred Aperol-branded waiters across streets, parks, happy-hour spots, and subway areas for a citywide “spritz blitz.” The teams wore Aperol-branded uniforms with QR codes that unlocked offers, at-home cocktail recipes, nearby Aperol Spritz partner bars, and digital perks like Uber credits. It came together quickly and was logistically challenging to pull off in a city like New York, but we had a lot of fun running around the city and spreading joy through this “orange wave”—which is precisely what Aperol stands for.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? Most recently, I really admired KitKat’s 2025 “KitKat Heist” campaign, which won several Cannes Lions awards this year. The brand turned a real challenge and a marketer’s nightmare—the theft of 12 tons of KitKat bars—into a smart, highly shareable campaign that became a global news story and engaged millions of consumers around the world. KitKat flipped the narrative, leaned into the brand’s hallmark wit, and invited consumers into the story in a playful way. The campaign also gave the media a compelling narrative to follow, transforming a serious incident into an intriguing mystery. It was witty, culturally relevant, and sparked genuine dialogue with consumers—the kind of cultural currency, virality, and affection that paid media alone can’t easily replicate.

For more on what Varone is optimistic about in marketing, read the rest of our interview here.

      

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french press

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

Black Friday: Ideas, stats, and strategies to implement during BFCM.

Red, white, and blue: How sausage brand Johnsonville tapped into the midterms with a bipartisan approach.

Golden opportunity: An analysis of existing and potential sponsorship opportunities with WNBA champions the Golden State Valkyries.

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Jobs

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JOINING FORCES

Mergers and acquisitions, company partnerships, and more.

• Fox completed its $22 billion acquisition of Roku.
• Anthropic signed its first-ever content licensing agreement with the Associated Press.
• Dick’s Sporting Goods and Foot Locker signed Caitlin Clark to a multiyear deal, making her the first individual athlete partner for both brands.
• Mars brands Cheez-It, Pringles, Club, Town House, and Combos will be the “official salty snack providers” of LA28 and Team USA.
• Supreme, with permission from Elliott Smith’s estate, is releasing a line of merch celebrating the late singer-songwriter’s career that includes work jackets, beanies, and T-shirts.