SOCIAL & INFLUENCERS

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photos: @inter/YouTube, Adobe Stock

This story is part of a series about how marketers for sports teams and leagues around the world approach social media strategy.

Less is more, or so the saying goes. The marketing team at Inter Milan, the reigning champions of the Italian pro soccer league Serie A, certainly found that to be true.

When Luca Adornato joined Inter Milan as its brand and marketing director last spring, the club, which was under new ownership by American investment fund Oaktree Capital Management, was focused on international audience growth.

To achieve that growth, Adornato took a chance. While he made sure Inter Milan maintained a presence on numerous platforms around the world and implemented a different content approach on each, his team also decreased the amount of social content they were posting—by around a third in the past year, he told us.

In that time, follower count across channels increased by 20% YoY, impressions rose by 43%, and video views went up by 33%, according to the club. In early August, Inter Milan surpassed 100 million total followers.

“Working on the strategy and then on the platforms allowed us to drive a quality over quantity approach,” Adornato told Marketing Brew. “Targeting all the content in order to be really distinctive, to be authentic, and to be interesting for the platform and the audience itself, that’s something that really stood out to me in this process.”

Continue reading here.—AM

      

Sponsored By Walmart Connect

Grocery shoppers move between stores, digital, and other touchpoints as they discover products and make purchases. For brands, that means more opportunities to reach customers across every grocery moment.

That’s where Walmart Connect comes in. With omnichannel solutions that span CTV, digital, and in-store experiences, Walmart Connect empowers food brands to reach more shoppers and inspire basket growth. Just look at the numbers:

• Walmart is the #1 grocer in the US.¹
• 34% of Walmart Online Food Grocery customers are new shoppers.²
• 92% of households shop at Walmart for groceries.³

Reaching customers is one thing. Knowing what works is another. Walmart’s first-party commerce signals and connected measurement give Walmart Connect advertisers the insights to optimize performance and prove what drives incremental growth.

Ready to turn shopper intent into basket growth? Reach more shoppers, connect in more ways, and find more opportunities to grow with Walmart Connect.

DATA & TECH

Adobe Stock

AI adoption continues to grow: 82% of global consumers are using AI in 2026, up from 68% last year, according to a report from VML. But it may be a while yet before AI is affecting the shopping journey.

AI engines account for only 3.7% of the inspiration stage for consumers, according to the report, published last week. But don’t count them out: that number is “likely to grow considerably,” the report read.

However, in a rocky economic climate, those same consumers are being cautious with spending. VML surveyed 28,000 consumers in 17 countries, including the US, China, and Australia, between May 22, 2026, and June 9, 2026, for the report.

“For brands and retailers, success in this environment requires balancing emotional resonance with uncompromised transactional performance,” the report read.

Force of habit: While AI use is significant across generations, Gen Z is by far the largest adopter, with 54% reporting they use it, according to the report. And 38% of the silent generation, whose youngest members are 80 years old, reported using AI. The most popular AI platform overall was ChatGPT, which is used by 48% of those surveyed; Google Gemini came in second, at 37%.

Use cases vary: 22% of consumers reported leveraging AI for the purpose of getting answers to “general knowledge questions,” the report read. Otherwise, it’s primarily used as a creative tool, with image creation or editing being a top use case among respondents (18%).

What does this mean for brands? Ensuring that they are visible and represented within AI platforms is important, according to the report. For brands seeking to target older consumers, they can layer AI into interfaces rather than expecting that cohort to proactively use AI platforms like younger generations, including Gen Z and millennials, are. As consumers pick their AI platform of choice, brands may have less ability to influence which platforms consumers flock to.

Read more here.—JS

      

PODCAST

Sending influencers on all-expenses-paid vacations used to be a beauty-industry staple—not anymore.

In this episode of Marketing Brew Weekly, hosts Katie Hicks, Jennimai Nguyen, and Kelsey Sutton dig into how brand trips are evolving beyond their lifestyle-brand roots, and getting messier along the way.

Here’s what we’re tackling in this episode:

• Brand trips vs. brand field trips. Flying influencers somewhere brand new is different from just covering their way into a festival that already exists.
• Tarte wrote the playbook—backlash included. From 2015’s low-key exec trip to this year’s Bora Bora blowout, Tarte keeps getting dragged for the extravagance, and keeps booking the next one anyway.
• Cocokind is betting on customers over creators. Instead of chasing follower counts, the skincare brand flies out its own customers—trading reach for a kind of loyalty an influencer trip can’t buy.
• Waterboy tried both. Mixing paying customers with big-name creators sounds like the best of both worlds, until the content rolls in and, surprise, it’s all about the influencers.
• OpenAI’s nature retreat backfired in a very 2026 way. The company never posted about its own trip. So when backlash hit, it landed on the B2B creators who did, and not on OpenAI itself.

Listen to the full conversation here.

      

Sponsored By Walmart Connect

Reach more shoppers and inspire basket growth. Did you know Walmart is the #1 grocer in the US—and still growing?¹ Walmart Connect helps brands connect with that growing customer base across the shopping journey, with omnichannel solutions designed to drive discovery and turn shopper intent into basket growth.

french press

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

Brainpower: A roundup of priorities, hiring trends, and AI tools from more than a dozen brand leaders at midsize brands.

To buy, or not to buy: How influencers are impacting AI chatbots, which can influence buying habits.

Better together: Data highlighting the value that can come from creator-led collab posts.

^{*A message from our sponsor.}

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photo: Erin Hutchinson

This week’s Coworking spotlight talks brand strategy with Erin Hutchinson—the latest in Marketing Brew’s recurring reader-profile series.

metrics and media

Stat: $3 billion. That’s how much sponsorship revenue Formula 1 is expected to generate this year, per research from Ampere Analysis cited by Digiday, in a story looking at how the sport’s viewership is faring under its deal with Apple TV.

Quote: “Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.”—an internal Microsoft document from 2023, made public via an ongoing copyright lawsuit the New York Times and other publishers have brought against OpenAI and Microsoft

Read: “Can you forget how you feel about Meta?” (The Verge)