Academic cheating is an age-old concern. But while students used to peek at classmates’ Scantron sheets to see which bubbles were filled in, there are new tools that some say could supercharge cheating: generative AI. That’s not stopping GenAI brands from marketing themselves to not just college students but also faculty this school year.

As the fall semester kicks off, companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are pushing their tools as vehicles to promote learning rather than impede it and pitching themselves as educational collaborators to colleges and universities, many of which are in the midst of creating policies to address GenAI use.

At the same time, some of the players in the AI race are targeting students more directly through campus clubs and ambassadorships to get them further integrated with their brands.

“This year, it really has just exploded,” Evan Levine, senior director of IT services and support at Duke University’s Office of Information Technology, told Marketing Brew. “There’s so many tools and offerings, and there’s very little understanding of what the differences are, or how to use these things effectively, or what that means…This summer, we were faced with a major educational challenge…We want people to come back [in the fall] to this amazing suite of tools and services and ways of doing things that they didn’t necessarily have before, but also, how on Earth are they going to know how to use them?”

Corner the market: To understand how GenAI companies are marketing themselves to colleges and students, it’s helpful to understand the needs they say they’re aiming to address. Ahead of the school year, Duke held four GenAI workshops to help educate students on how to use related tools earlier this summer, Levine told Marketing Brew.

Continue reading here.—Jasmine

When the US women’s national soccer team got its start in 1985, the players didn’t even have their own jerseys, as Michelle Akers, a member of the team and a FIFA Women’s Player of the Century, remembers it.

“We just came in with these men’s jerseys that we had to sew patches on, [that] didn’t have our names on [them],” she told Marketing Brew. “Our sweats were pink and white and blue.”

Ever since then, Akers said, it’s been a dream of hers to see the team in jerseys of their own. Now, the 17 players who made up the ’85 team have founded an LLC and partnered with sports memorabilia company The Realest to correct that, creating and selling the merch that didn’t exist when they first represented the US on the international pitch.

With demand for women’s sports merch growing and supply struggling to keep up, the ’85ers jerseys sold out in less than two weeks, according to The Realest Founder and CEO Scott Keeney, and he, Akers, and the rest of the team are now planning to do even more to help fill the market.

Coulda, woulda, shoulda: Keeney told Marketing Brew that he first met the team through Jaymee Messler, a sports exec who co-founded the Players’ Tribune as well as Storied Sports, the content studio that helped set up The 85ers LLC.

Continue reading here.—AM

It is universally agreed upon that the old “I’m sorry you feel that way, but *insert arbitrary excuse*” chestnut pretty much counts as a non-apologetic way to apologize. So when Swatch issued a statement in somewhat the same vein apologizing for “any distress or misunderstanding this may have caused,” following the backlash for its recent controversial ad, a lot of consumers weren’t having it.

“You’re not apologizing for anything,” Scott Markman, founder and president of the global branding agency MonogramGroup, told Retail Brew. “But you’re addressing the issue and potentially owning it and turning it into a positive.”

Social media users echoed Markman’s sentiments, perceiving the apology for the ad, which many considered racist, as hollow and lacking accountability. Still, it’s difficult to speculate what would be the best way to approach the issue for Swatch, which got us thinking: What makes a good brand apology? We asked some experts to weigh in.

It’s not what you say; it’s how you say it: While brand apologies are usually a measured marketing response by the company, it’s still important to choose your words carefully and execute it in a way that feels sincere.

Continue reading at Retail Brew.—Jeena

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Stories we’re jealous of.

• The New York Times wrote about the tech industry’s big bet on AI and how the amount of money being spent may not be translating to comparable gains.
• The Washington Post wrote about why Jerry Greenfield, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s, resigned from the company after saying it was being “silenced” by parent company Unilever.
• Fast Company wrote about how Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, is quietly acquiring media control through the Paramount Skydance merger, a possible bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, and now a potential stake in TikTok’s US operations.