This week’s marketing winners, losers and newsmakers.

Winners

Crime podcasts: Whodunits are stealing the show in the podcast industry, at least when it comes to ad revenue. Ad spending on crime-themed podcasts surged by 26% in the first seven months of the year, compared with the same period in 2022, reports ad intelligence firm MediaRadar, which found that HelloFresh, Progressive and SimpliSafe are some of the advertisers contributing to the rise. Pods luring these ad dollars include  Last Podcast On The Left, Cold Case Files (from A&E), and Small Town Murder.

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AMC: Though new movies are slower to roll out amid the ongoing Writer’s Guild and actors’ union strikes, consumers will still have a reason to visit a theater. AMC, the movie theater chain, signed a deal with Taylor Swift to showcase her hugely successful New Eras concert on the silver screen. “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” concert film will begin airing Oct. 13 at thousands of AMC and other movie theater locations; ticket sales begin this week. Also coming to a theater near you: more college football games. ESPN this week announced a deal with Theater Sports Network to show Atlantic Coast Conference college football games at movie theaters.

Caleb Williams: The University of Southern California quarterback and 2022 Heisman Trophy winner is this season’s marketing star. He appears in new campaigns for Nissan and Dr Pepper, adding to his endorsement haul that already includes Beats By Dre, AC+ION Water, Neutrogena and PlayStation.

Read more: Inside Nissan’s Heisman House campaign

Losers

Farmers Insurance: The brand said it will lay off 2,400 workers, or 11% of its employees, as it tries to streamline and simplify its structure amid higher costs and industry changes. President and CEO Raul Vargas cited “the existing conditions of the insurance industry and the impact they are having on our business” as a factor in the cuts. Climate change and higher costs have caused many insurers to introduce cost-cutting moves.

3M: Following legal allegations that faulty 3M combat earplugs contributed to hearing loss for military personnel, 3M said it would pay $6 billion from now until 2029 to settle the 300,000 lawsuits. Yet a press release on 3M’s website noted that the payout is “not an admission of liability.”

McDonald’s: The fast feeder is being called out for offering a Dollar Menu that lacks items that cost a dollar. Technically, it’s called a “$1 $2 $3 Dollar Menu” (which has its own grammatical issues) but that still did not go over well with a TikToker who called the Golden Arches out in a video that generated nearly 8,000 likes and more than 100 comments—and caught the attention of Insider, which did its own research and found that “dollar items appear to be vanishing” across the country. 

There is one place you can still get something for under a dollar, at least temporarily—Dairy Queen is selling Blizzards for 85 cents from Sept. 11 to Sept. 24, to celebrate the ice cream treat’s 1985 debut year.

Social post of the week

Quote of the week

“If you allow machine learning to identify patterns in real-time that are unobservable to the human eye, and point that technology to neuroscientific data, the opportunities are infinite.” -J. Brooks, founder and chief executive of marketing firm GlassView, on how neuromarketing and AI are strengthening ad campaigns.

Number of the week

55%: Percentage of consumers who plan to buy alcohol for Labor Day this weekend, led by 74% who will purchase beer, according to market research firm Numerator. 

On the move

The University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication hired alum Yoel Roth as a Knight Visiting Scholar at the Center for Media at Risk. He had been head of trust and safety at Twitter. 

Mars Wrigley promoted Stéphanie Domange to chief customer officer of Europe, Central Eurasia, Belarus and Turkey. She was previously general manager at Mars Wrigley France.

The Bel Group promoted Béatrice de Noray to chief growth officer from general manager of Bel France.