It’s March Madness for chubby bears, and it’s a viral sensation.

Last week marked the start of the twelfth annual Fat Bear Week at Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska. What began in 2014 as a one-day event called Fat Bear Tuesday, in which viewers online compared how much the bears in the park grew over the summer, has evolved into a March Madness-style bracket competition on social media that draws more than a million votes each year, Matthew Turner, social media specialist at the National Park Service, told us. There’s even a Fat Bear Junior competition for younger bears now. This year, Bear 32, also known as Chunk, took home the proverbial crown after the competition wrapped last night.

“Fat Bear Week, no pun intended, gets bigger and bigger every year,” he said. “In the last five to six years, it really exploded into this really huge viral phenomenon.”

Each year, the NPS, which oversees more than 400 national park sites, ranging from Yellowstone to the Statue of Liberty, helps the park staff at Katmai, the Katmai Conservancy, and the media organization Explore.org amplify Fat Bear Week content. It’s just one of the ways that the service combines fun with environmental facts in what Turner calls an “edutainment” strategy, which has allowed the service to amass more than 10 million followers across Instagram, Facebook, and X.

“It’s not fat-shaming the bears,” he said. “It’s to educate the public.”

Continue reading here.—KH

Disney and Hearst are reportedly exploring a sale of A+E Global Media, a joint venture between the two companies that operates cable networks A&E, History, and Lifetime, according to a July report from Deadline. But whoever might be interested in buying up the joint venture is likely to find a struggling cable business.

Disney recently reported that income from equity investees (which denotes income made from what a company invested in) in Disney Entertainment’s linear networks segment decreased by $90 million in the nine-month period ending June 28, from $440 million to $350 million. That was due, according to the filing, “to lower income from A+E attributable to decreases in affiliate and advertising revenue.”

The disclosure, from a quarterly filing in August, comes as other media giants like Warner Bros. Discovery and NBCUniversal look to shed their cable businesses. Disney, on the other hand, has made fewer such moves, which executives have defended as a strength.

“As many others exit that business, it gives us a stronger hand to stay in that business,” Disney CEO Bob Iger said in a June interview on CNBC. “We will have, interestingly enough, a linear television business that’s paired with a streaming business. When you think about it, these spinoff companies won’t have the assets from a streaming perspective that we will have.”

Read more here.—JS

American football has among the largest rosters in sports, and with hundreds of college football teams across the country, the number of athletes for brands to sponsor is big enough to make anyone’s head spin.

In the NIL era, marketers have an opportunity to predict the next sports star before they go pro, teaming up with athletes with sizable followings during their college years. To narrow this massive roster of potential partners, SponsorUnited compiled a list of 10 of the “most marketable stars in college football” for brand strategists to watch this season.

Man(ning) up: Of the players on the list, which SponsorUnited’s marketing and business intelligence teams chose based on factors including media visibility, on-field performance, brand deals, and social metrics in the past year, six are quarterbacks.

At the top of the list is perhaps the most talked-about college athlete of the moment: Arch Manning. The redshirt sophomore, who plays for the Texas Longhorns and is the nephew of Peyton and Eli Manning, had an engagement rate of 16.5%, higher than any other player on SponsorUnited’s list, and 4x higher than the average for college football players, according to the report.

• Manning’s 522,000 social followers put him at No. 9 on the list of most-followed college football players, and his follower base has increased by 45% in the last year, SponsorUnited found.
• He’s made 10 branded posts in the past year, and his endorsers included Raising Cane’s, Red Bull, and Uber.
• Manning and the Longhorns’ Week 1 game against Ohio State is the most-watched Week 1 college football game in history, having averaged more than 16.6 million viewers.

Continue reading here.—AM

Strategic pitching and storytelling can help your brand secure a spot in holiday gift guides. Learn from PR expert Lauren Kleinman and Mavely CEO Evan Wray about connecting with editors, pitching creators, and reaching consumers to boost your brand’s holiday visibility.