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Salesforce Workers Circulate Open Letter Urging CEO Marc Benioff to Denounce ICE
Employees at Salesforce are circulating an internal letter to chief executive Marc Benioff calling on him to denounce recent actions by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, prohibit the use of Salesforce software by immigration agents, and back federal legislation that would significantly reform the agency.The letter specifically cites the “recent killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis” as…
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Inside Vita Coco’s ‘super fluid,’ organic-first social strategy
Affiliate marketing has grown up. The new report from impact.com breaks down the five pillars of partner sophistication, shows how top teams measure creator performance with precision, and explains what actually drives revenue beyond the…
OpenAI Abandons ‘io’ Branding for Its AI Hardware
OpenAI will not use the name “io” for its forthcoming line of AI hardware devices, according to a Monday court filing.The motion is part of a trademark infringement lawsuit filed last year by audio device…
Creators showed up at this year’s Super Bowl ‘more than ever’
Affiliate marketing has grown up. The new report from impact.com breaks down the five pillars of partner sophistication, shows how top teams measure creator performance with precision, and explains what actually drives revenue beyond the…
Budweiser won the Super Bowl
Budweiser made like the Seattle Seahawks on Super Bowl Sunday and decisively declared victory over its rivals.The AB InBev beer brand scored a record 10th win on the USA Today Ad Meter, and its second…
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This Super Bowl, the ads are in the toilet. Literally
During the Super Bowl, advertisers aim to leave a lasting impression with viewers. This year, some hope to do it…
Why the Cadillac F1 team is unveiling its race-car livery in a Super Bowl ad
Crossover Formula 1 and NFL fans, fasten your seatbelts.The Cadillac F1 team, which is set to make its debut on…
After Minneapolis, Tech CEOs Are Struggling to Stay Silent
It was November 12, 2016, four days after Donald Trump won his first presidential election. Aside from a few outliers…
How Deloitte went from behind the scenes to front and center with McLaren
McLaren has been on a hot streak in Formula 1, winning back-to-back Constructor’ Championships and a Drivers’ Championship this year.…
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The Tech Elites in the Epstein Files
“I had very little correspondence with Epstein and declined repeated invitations to go to his island or fly on his ‘Lolita Express,’ but was well aware that some email correspondence with him could be misinterpreted and used by detractors to smear my name,” Musk said in a post on X…
‘He Gets Us’ wants to be more than ‘the Super Bowl ad about Jesus’
Every Super Bowl there are a few advertiser wild cards—the ads or brands that make you go, “Huh, why’d they do that?” And then there are the Super Bowl staples—often the beer, beverage, and snack brands that show up every year without fail.Sometimes, though, an advertiser makes the jump from…
A Yann LeCun–Linked Startup Charts a New Path to AGI
If you ask Yann LeCun, Silicon Valley has a groupthink problem. Since leaving Meta in November, the researcher and AI luminary has taken aim at the orthodox view that large language models (LLMs) will get us to artificial general intelligence (AGI), the threshold where computers match or exceed human smarts.…
How longtime Olympic sponsor Samsung keeps its campaigns fresh
How do you keep a relationship exciting after almost four decades? Just ask Samsung Electronics and the Olympic Games.Samsung has been involved with the Games since 1988, when it served as a local partner the year the event was hosted in Seoul, South Korea. A decade later, the tech giant…
Coworking with Jim Freeze
Each week, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.Jim Freeze is the chief marketing officer of Anaplan, a scenario planning and analysis software platform. Prior to joining Anaplan, he was the chief commercial officer of Vetro FiberMap, and he’s…
ICE Asks Companies About ‘Ad Tech and Big Data’ Tools It Could Use in Investigations
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is asking companies to provide information about “commercial Big Data and Ad Tech” products that would “directly support investigations activities,” according to a request for information posted on Friday in the Federal Register, the US government’s official journal for agency notices, rulemaking, and other public…
‘The year of Hershey’s’: Inside the confectioner’s first brand platform in 8 years
Some brands refresh campaigns annually. Others take a little more time off.It’s much easier, of course, to take a pause between campaigns when the brand in question is already a household name. That’s the case for Hershey’s, which is rolling out its first new brand campaign since 2018 this month,…
TikTok Data Center Outage Triggers Trust Crisis for New US Owners
TikTok is currently experiencing a widespread service outage in the US, causing disruptions for millions of users only a few days after the company officially transferred control of its American business to a group of majority-US investors.The technical issues led many TikTok users to speculate about whether the app’s new…
Behind Instacart’s ‘bananas’ Super Bowl ad
Sometimes the obvious answer is the right answer. Case in point: If you’re making an ad about bananas, that ad should probably be, well, bananas.That’s what the team behind Instacart’s second consecutive Super Bowl ad was thinking when they cooked up a 30-second spot that will air during the first…
No Phone, No Social Safety Net: Welcome to the ‘Offline Club’
On cue, the room fell silent. A man seated to my left at a long wooden table began to scratch at a piece of paper with a coloring pencil. To my right, another guy picked up a book. Across the way, someone buried themselves in a puzzle. We had gathered…
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Some ad-tech companies are pivoting amid open web ‘contraction’
Is ad-tech still committed to the open web, or anticipating its so-called demise? It all…
Moltbot Is Taking Over Silicon Valley
Dan Peguine, a tech entrepreneur and marketing consultant based in Lisbon, lets a precocious, lobster-themed…
Meta’s ad revenue climbs amid immense AI push
Advertisers just won’t quit Meta.The company’s ad revenue increased 24% year over year to $58.1…
Brands are using generative AI to make fun of generative AI
Have your slop and eat it, too. At least, that seems to be the strategy…
China’s Renewable Energy Revolution Is a Huge Mess That Might Save the World
Indeed, the greatest beneficiaries of China’s renewables revolution may, in fact, be consumers, both inside…