This week’s marketing winners, losers and newsmakers.
Marketing News & Strategy
Marketing winners and losers of the week
The Savannah Bananas strike a deal and Hims & Hers sees growth skyrocket—plus, why it was a bad week for Boar’s Head and Big Lots
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TNT Sports will air Bananas games.
Credit:
Savannah Bananas
Winners
Savannah Bananas: The Savannah, Georgia-based independent baseball team that has gained national attention with its entertaining brand of baseball will get even more awareness thanks to a new deal with TNT Sports. The Warner Bros. Discovery-owned brand will air Bananas games on truTV for five consecutive Friday evenings starting Aug. 16, it announced this week. The team earlier this month played three games broadcast on ESPN and ESPN2. The team plays a quirky brand of baseball known as Banana Ball with 11 unique rules including one that specifies if a fan catches a foul ball it counts as an out.
Uber: The ride-hailing and food delivery brand posted stellar second-quarter earnings this week, reporting gross bookings of $39.95 billion, up 19% year-over-year, beating Wall Street expectations. It also stated that it will surpass $1 billion in annual advertising revenue, meeting a goal set in 2022.
Megan Ramm, head of Americas, Uber Advertising, said in a statement, “We set an ambitious goal and we’re thrilled to pass it. It’s a credit to our team, but also proof of the value agencies and brands are seeing from advertising on the Uber platform.”
In June, Uber struck a deal with T-Mobile Advertising Solutions and its rideshare media network, Octopus Interactive, that includes putting so-called JourneyTV screens in more than 50,000 vehicles in the U.S. this year. The screens, which display trip maps, allow brands to deliver ads based on Uber’s first-party data.
Hims & Hers: The telehealth company’s second-quarter results soared past expectations. Revenue jumped 52% from a year earlier, to $315.6 million, while net income, at $13.3 million, reversed a year-ago loss. Hims & Hers expects the windfall to continue as it ramps up offerings in trendy categories. Earlier this week, the company said it was buying an unnamed compounding pharmacy that makes knock-off weight loss drugs to further capitalize on the medicine’s popularity.
More: Hims & Hers inserts itself into the weight loss conversation
Losers
Boar’s Head: Days after being forced to recall more than 7 million pounds of deli meat due to listeria concerns, the food company is facing a class action lawsuit over the issue. Consumer Rita Torres, who said she bought contaminated Boar’s Head items, is suing the company, which she claims “deceptively and misleadingly labeled and marketed its products.” The lawsuit was filed in the Eastern District of New York earlier this month.
Big Lots: The retailer said it will close as many as 315 stores, nearly a tenfold increase of the original planned closures. The chain is struggling with a decline in consumer spending, particularly on expensive discretionary products.
Online brokerages: Just when investors needed Charles Schwab, Fidelity and Vanguard the most, they were not there. The brokerages experienced outages on Monday as the stock market tanked, according to the Associated Press and other reports. Things were back to normal by Tuesday.
Quote of the week
“I want my own shoe. I want a sneaker. Ain’t no money in spikes.”—Olympic track and field gold medalist Noah Lyles, when asked about his future plans, according to ESPN reporter Coley Harvey.
Social post of the week
Number of the week
144%: How much more likely consumers were to engage with Walmart’s linear and streaming TV ads than the department store category average in the second quarter of 2024, according to the recent Department Stores Convergent TV Outcomes Report from EDO.
On the move
Thorne, a supplement brand, hired Mary Beech as chief growth officer. Beech, an Ad Age Leading Women honoree, was most recently chief marketing and transformational officer at Scholastic.
Under Armour announced the appointment of Eric Liedtke as executive VP of brand strategy. He had previously co-founded Unless Collective Inc., a zero-plastic regenerative fashion brand, which Under Armour just acquired.
Trax Retail, which uses AI to help retailers with brick-and-mortar planning, promoted Brittany Billings to chief marketing officer from executive VP of global marketing.
