SOCIAL & INFLUENCERS

Dove Men+Care

Throw a dart at New York Comic Con (NYCC), and you’re likely to hit an anime lover, comic enthusiast, cosplayer, gamer, TV superfan—or one person who’s all of the above, walking among a crowd of roughly 250,000 others just like them.

Turns out, that kind of person is exactly who many brand marketers want to build relationships with.

Since 2006, the Javits Center has been home to NYCC, welcoming fans of all kinds to gather and engage with their favorite pop culture stories. Home to everything from celebrity panels to exclusive screenings to artist and merch booths, the event has long been a natural place to bring new and enduring entertainment properties to life. This year, fans could immerse themselves in Peacock’s Camp Crystal Lake experience, which brought the Friday the 13th prequel series Crystal Lake to life, or marvel at a 10-foot-long crocheted Appa toy, part of Paramount Games’s launch of the video game Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game, to name just a few options.

As NYCC celebrated 20 years over four days of action, shows old and new still found the convention to be a prime place to introduce and stoke fandom. But alongside the expected entertainment properties were also non-endemic consumer brands like body-care brand Dove Men+Care, which found the fervor of NYCC fandom too strong to resist.

• Dove Men+Care first showed up at NYCC last year, mainly showing up at the event with product samples.
• This year, the company dedicated efforts to a digital OOH campaign and creator collaborations in addition to a show-floor booth experience.

“We decided if we’re coming back again and we’re entering this sacred space, that we really wanted to provide extra value to the community,” Lindsey Lapin, associate director of marketing for Dove Men+Care at Unilever, told us.

For more details on the brand’s fandom-first approach and why the brand’s marketers aim to have the brand showing up to solve consumer pain points, continue reading here.—JN

      

Sponsored By Roku Ads Manager

Streaming TV now owns more of the average day (3.5 hours) than social media (2.8 hours). And in the US, 47% of that TV streaming time starts on Roku.

It’s no wonder that 70% of advertisers say they’re raising CTV budgets in 2026, with much of it being pulled straight from social. And many of those advertisers are taking their budgets to Roku (aka the top smart-TV operating system in the US).

The scale of the platform alone speaks volumes. Roku reaches 100 million households, and the average user streams 4.3 hours a day across 100+ premium, ad-supported apps.

Plus, Roku Ads Manager lets advertisers own their data, go live in minutes with no DSP fees, and measure everything in-platform.

Meet your audience on the big screen.

AD TECH

Thomas Simonetti/Getty Images

Data centers aren’t just taking over local communities. They’re invading political ads, too.

Last month, spending on political ads that discussed data centers increased 61% month over month, according to data compiled for Marketing Brew by market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. (The firm analyzed US political ad spend encompassing ads involving data centers in creative text keywords.)

Data centers, the construction of which Americans largely oppose, have increasingly factored into political ad campaigns, according to Sensor Tower, as candidates, their advertising teams, and PACs use the controversial political issue to reach voters ahead of the US midterm elections.

• The number of US political ad campaigns that mentioned data centers has roughly quadrupled since June, according to Sensor Tower. While five campaigns included related messaging in June, that figure increased to around 20 by last month.

Overall, ad spend this election cycle is projected to reach $11.6 billion, according to AdImpact, making it the most expensive on record.

For more on the phenomenon, plus how anti-data-center messaging is showing up in non-political ads, read more here.—JS

      

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COWORKING

Raqib Sheikh

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

Raqib Sheikh is chief strategy officer of Super Nice. He has also worked at Dagger, VML, and R/GA.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? Working on Walmart and P&G meant I got to do a lot of in-home ethnographies of shoppers across the country. For an immigrant, third-culture kid, it was an amazing experience to see firsthand how a homemaker knew the price of ketchup at Walmart compared to Kroger off the top of her head because her family was saving for their dream home. That balance of the practical and the dream stayed with me. It’s when I realized great strategy is always an act of brutal empathy.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? Of all things, it’s a 20-year-old print campaign for a Portuguese news magazine, Grande Reportagem, called “Meet the World.” (So snobby, I know!) Each ad is a full-bleed national flag with a legend in the corner assigning a stat to every color. Some examples: on the US flag, red means “in favor of the war in Iraq,” white means “against the war in Iraq,” and blue means “don’t know where Iraq is.” I’m a sucker for a brilliant visual or copy solve for a deeply researched topic. Honorable mention goes to The Economist’s headline-only campaign, with lines like, “Lose the ability to slip out of meetings unnoticed.”

For more on what marketing trends Sheikh is optimistic (and not-so-optimistic) about, continue reading here.

      

Sponsored By Fox Advertising

These folks don’t just watch. Fans are the ones who lean in, follow along, and act on what they see. But how can advertisers turn their passion into performance? New FOX Advertising research has the answers. It breaks down fandom into five signals that separate real fans from casual viewers. Explore the research.

french press

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

October baseball: An analysis of MLB sponsorship revenue per attendee to compare teams of different sizes.

Card-carrying: Details on LinkedIn’s upcoming “digital business card” that users can add to their digital wallets.

Face time: An update on the best times for brands to post on Facebook, based on an analysis of millions of posts.

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Jobs

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JOINING FORCES

Mergers and acquisitions, company partnerships, and more.

• Viral Nation is exploring “strategic partnerships,” equity deals, and external investments, according to Ad Age.
• Volkswagen of America renewed its sponsorship of US Soccer.
• Expedia inked a multiyear deal with the NHL.
• Foot Locker was named the official athletic footwear retailer of the New York Knicks.
• H&R Block signed on with the Kansas City Chiefs through the 2030 NFL season.
• Honey Baked Ham is working with Kylie Kelce on its holiday campaign.