A couple of years ago, B2B tech brand Neat had a pair of customers in the sports space: the NBA’s LA Clippers and Red Bull Racing, the Formula 1 team that’s home to four-time World Drivers’ Champion Max Verstappen. Now, Neat, which makes video conferencing devices, is much more than one of their tech providers—it’s a sponsor of both teams.

B2B brands are becoming plentiful in certain sports, especially ones that offer VIP-level experiences to business decision-makers. Unlike consumer-facing brands, Neat didn’t get into the sports game to generate mass awareness and sales, but instead to expose the brand to specific audiences, VP of Marketing Priscilla Barolo said.

When execs recognize the brand name, it can make or break a sale, she said, and once the deal is done, sports sponsorships can be integral to maintaining those relationships.

“It’s B2B marketing, but those are still people,” Barolo told Marketing Brew. “Brand exposure is important, and particularly if you can get to those audiences where there’s more decision-makers in key markets like Los Angeles, it’s a good idea.”

Continue reading here.—AM

Lots of advertising agencies say they make short films. Often, those short films are just ads by another name—more artful ads, perhaps, but ads all the same.

Social content shop Portal A isn’t one of those agencies. This year, Portal A has been on the film-festival circuit with its first narrative short film, Five Star, directed by Kai Hasson, the agency’s executive creative director and one of its co-founders. After premiering at the RiverRun International Film Festival earlier this spring, the short, a 14-minute comedy-horror starring Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, nabbed the Golden Space Needle Audience Award for Best Short Film at the Seattle International Film Festival, and it has continued its run at festivals like the LA Shorts International Film Festival and the Asian American International Film Festival.

Five Star isn’t a secret ad. It’s a narrative effort that’s the latest project to come out of an internal program designed to get Portal A back to its creative roots of making “weird stuff on the internet,” Jacob Motz, the agency’s director of original projects, told Marketing Brew.

“Two or three years ago, I remember we were sitting around, and the partners were like, ‘We want to just kind of give ourselves the ability to make stuff without worrying about gatekeepers, for the sake of creativity, for the sake of innovation,’” Motz said. “We want to be able to always take risks with the content we’re making online, so we need to have a program that allows us to do that.”

Read more here.—KM

The design landscape is changing rapidly. In some ways, it’s more accessible than ever as AI tools flood the market and AI companies pitch consumers and businesses alike on its ease of use. In others, it’s becoming more difficult to balance the need for personalization, the myriad touchpoints, finding ways to stand out amid the onslaught of AI slop, and more.

To understand how brands are managing this shift, Marketing Brew caught up with Kiser Barnes, chief creative officer and partner at Red Antler, who is set to speak about that topic at tomorrow’s Marketing Brew Summit.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

You joined Red Antler last year as partner and chief creative officer. Tell us about what you’re doing. What I’ve been doing over the past year is really helping to evolve Red Antler into the new era of what brand building means. Brand building now is much more multidisciplinary in terms of the touchpoints that it needs to impact, the touchpoints that it needs to affect.

How so? There are two things that are happening. One is [that] tech and marketing are merging. Tech brands are becoming marketing brands. Marketing brands and agencies are becoming—are being forced to become—tech brands. And the tools are accelerating the speed at which we need to get to market. They’re also accelerating the ability to personalize and customize brands in ways that it’s never been before…The second part of that is about social and the idea that people are interacting with brands in very fragmented ways and multi-touchpoint ways around social. …In order to be a brand expert and a brand builder, now you have to be able to think about how you orchestrate across all of these different touchpoints.

Continue reading here.—KM

Mergers and acquisitions, company partnerships, and more.

• Therabody named Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen, an investor in the company, as its first performance advisor.
• SoFi also announced a partnership with the 2024 NFL MVP.
• Pepsi, too, tapped Allen, as well as Baltimore Ravens wide receiver Justin Jefferson, for a campaign that shows the players crashing tailgates.
• The NFL entered into a content licensing deal with Front Office Sports shortly after partnering with sports media outlet The Gist.
• Dunkin’ is now the official coffee and breakfast partner of US Ski and Snowboard.
• Thorne, a supplement company, is working with Grammy winner Ciara for a campaign promoting its creatine.