This weeks winners, losers and newsmakers.
Winners
Roblox: Could the gaming platform become the next hottest spot for TV viewing? A first-time partnership with Spin Masters’ popular anime TV show “Bakugan” positions the platform as a video distribution vehicle. The show’s young fans will be able to catch episode 317 of the third season of “Bakugan: Geogan Rising” within the Bakugan hub on Roblox on Sept. 8, a week before it lands on Netflix on Sept. 15. “By merging our collective audiences, we are able to offer the Roblox community as well as ‘Bakugan’ fans new and unique ways to connect and experience entertainment together within the Roblox metaverse,” says Roblox’s VP of Brand Partnerships Christina Wootton in a statement.
Delta Air Lines: There is a lot of talk in marketing circles about how brands can be more “human,” which is often just meaningless jargon. But Delta this week showed how companies can truly act with empathy in a meaningful way. After a mother of a 3-year-old girl named Delta tweeted about how it is a challenging time to have that as a name (given the COVID variant), the airline responded by sending her a care package. It included an airplane-shaped Delta backpack, Biscoff cookies, a model plane and a handwritten note reading: “It’s the name for people who were meant to fly.”
New York City: Despite all the chatter about people fleeing big cities in the pandemic, the nation’s largest city remains as popular as ever, according to U.S. Census data released this week. The Big Apple added 629,000 citizens in the past decade, bringing its population to 8.8 million, the Associated Press reports. “Many people were concerned that there had been an exodus of population. And that’s clearly not the case,” Steven Romalewski, the director of CUNY Mapping Service at the Center for Urban Research, told the AP.
Losers
Traditional sports media: Anyone who wanted to see the first big interview with Lionel Messi after he signed with Paris Saint Germain F.C. had to head over to Twitch, where the soccer superstar spoke with Ibai Llanos. More than 317,000 people watched the exclusive interview, according to Bloomberg. (Read more here about Messi’s star power.)
Reebok: Adidas acquired the brand for $3.8 billion in 2006, but sold it this week to Authentic Brands Group for $2.5 billion, showing how far it has fallen. “Part of the issue was a lack of clarity around what Adidas wanted Reebok to be. As a result, it was neither seen as the go-to brand for sporting professionals nor for those looking for athleisure fashion and style,” Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail, said in note to clients Thursday, according to CNN.
Nielsen: The company put its Media Rating Council accreditation for national TV measurement on hiatus amid complaints that it is undercounting audiences, particularly among minority households.
Tweet of the week
