Abercrombie & Fitch is one of the newest official partners of the NFL. There’s a sentence that, in 2010, you probably never thought you’d read.

The brand has changed a lot in the past 15 years, including a push into NFL merch that started in 2022 and has now led to Abercrombie being named as an official fashion partner of the league ahead of the start of the current season. According to CMO Carey Collins Krug, Abercrombie’s relationship with the NFL has progressed fairly naturally from the start, with fans, players, and the significant others of NFL players all showing interest in the brand over the years.

As an official partner, Collins Krug said she plans to leverage the sponsorship to promote the overarching brand and its products beyond the team merch to the league’s broad audience, focusing especially on meeting the needs of women football fans.

“It’s a little bit less about slapping a logo on a T-shirt, and it’s more about, ‘How do you get the full look?’” Collins Krug told Marketing Brew. “Particularly from a female perspective, so much of what is out there is with sparkles and pink, but we are actually treating females like the fans that they are. They want gear that is designed specifically for them.”

Continue reading here.—AM

Times are a-changin’. Eighty percent of marketers surveyed think marketing will look completely different 18 months from now, and nearly 90% said that agility is the most important trait for a marketer to have these days, according to a survey conducted by Morning Brew and shared at our annual Marketing Brew Summit in New York last week.

Marketers from Sephora, Duolingo, and more showed up onstage at the summit to talk about how they’re working to stay agile amid the shifts. Below are some key takeaways from panelists on how they’ve adapted their marketing strategies ahead of 2026.

Meeting the moment: Campaigns that take into account the specific audience they’re catering to and/or social trends of the time can boost impact. Take Duolingo, which, while known for its often-viral Duo the Owl mascot, is rolling out an anime series in October after seeing manga lovers drive a spike in the number of users learning Japanese on its platform, Manu Orssaud, Duolingo CMO, said onstage.

“It’s the same thing with Korean. People learn Korean because they’re really into…K-pop,” he said. “It’s connecting language to that cultural affinity they have. Anime is a huge fandom, and it’s also one that really connects to our core offering, which is language learning.”

Relatedly, Audible altered its marketing playbook for the Japanese market after an initial batch of global creative did not perform as well in the market as it did in Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US, Cynthia Chu, Audible’s chief financial and growth officer, said onstage. “We actually had to create the word ‘audiobook,’” she said.

While the team was focused on driving brand awareness, “we had to create category awareness” too, Chu said. With that said, she added, “The consistency is the core of the messaging…That didn’t change, but the execution of that did change marketplace by marketplace.”

Continue reading here.—Jasmine

What started as a way to scroll, laugh, and kill time is now one of America’s favorite shopping malls. A new Mintel study found that 56% of Americans view social media as their primary source for product research. Meanwhile, 31% of both millennials and Gen Z have bought something directly from social media.

But while younger consumers are clearly more engaged with Instagram shopping, there is considerable interest from US consumers across the board, generation no bar.

Haley Ferrini, US analyst of tech and media reports at Mintel, told Retail Brew that there are some key differences between the way each generation shops online.

Younger shoppers, for instance, are more comfortable purchasing directly through an ad on a social media platform. “They have in these spaces the appreciation for convenience, and it’s not just about practicality,” Ferrini said, adding that their peers are likely to further influence their product choices.

Older shoppers, on the other hand, continue to use social media as a research platform. It primarily functions as a source of “gathering information” and validating their choices before they decide to buy something, Ferrini said.

“Social media is still a super useful tool to reach older consumers, but the approach just has to be more about providing them with information rather than pushing a sale,” she said.

Continue reading on Retail Brew.—Jeena

Podcasts have evolved from audio-only to increasingly video-first, opening new opportunities and challenges for creators and advertisers. Video enhances engagement and monetization but complicates measurement across platforms. Explore how the medium is changing, where video fits, and what it means for the future of podcasting.