Lacey Chabert is harboring a Christmastime secret—and this time, it’s not that the actress is dating a snowman-turned-hot-man, a lá her role in the holiday rom-com Hot Frosty. But if your interest is piqued, you’ll need to watch five short, dramatic episodes to find out what it is.

For Maybelline’s holiday campaign, Chabert reunited with her Hot Frosty costar Dustin Milligan for a story of romance and intrigue told in the microdrama format first made popular in China. The ad, part of a campaign called “Maybe This Christmas,” spotlights Maybelline’s Instant Eraser Concealer as the couple navigates a mystery and deception plot over the course of five episodes, each one clocking in at one minute long.

Alongside a social campaign and placements across premium holiday programming like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade stream on Peacock and Chabert’s slate of holiday films on Hallmark, the microdrama also debuted on ReelShort, a platform dedicated to bite-sized content.

Microdramas are growing in popularity in the US, and parts of Hollywood are betting that the format will be more than a fad, but advertisers haven’t yet widely adopted the genre for their campaigns. According to Yasmin Dastmalchi, president of Maybelline New York, Maybelline is one of the first brands to lean in.

“For us, it’s always about showing up where our consumers are and giving them content in formats that they want to consume,” Dastmalchi told Marketing Brew. “We wanted to give them something super bingeable during this holiday season.”

Continue reading here.—JS

Oakley has been a recognizable brand in the football world since the ’90s, when former NFL players like Mel Gray and Warrick Dunn wore Oakley sunglasses under their helmets before visors were common.

A few decades later, football looks a little different—and not only when it comes to players’ preferred eyewear. Both the audience and the athlete pool of the sport include more women, and the team at Oakley wanted to be a part of that growth, Corey Hill, the brand’s VP and head of global sports marketing, told Marketing Brew. Enter flag football, which, without helmets and visitors, might present an even clearer path for Oakley to promote its brand and products than tackle football.

“In flag, there’s this culture of eyewear already in 7-on-7 boys football that has carried into girls football,” Hill said. “We felt like it’s a great space for us to continue to cultivate that opportunity with a new audience.”

Oakley has spent the past few years supporting flag football organizations and athletes from youth tournaments to national teams, with the ultimate goal of growing both the sport and the brand’s appeal among women and younger consumers, Hill said.

Read more here.—AM

Katherine Naylor Pullman knows the advertising world. She’s had advertising roles at the fan engagement platform Cameo, Reese Witherspoon-founded production company Hello Sunshine, and at the now-defunct streaming platform Quibi, where she spent roughly two years each.

But in her experience, companies didn’t always have the time or resources to invest in team-building or career development, which can lead to stale, impersonal, or even nonexistent networking opportunities. Often, networking could feel like a downright chore.

So she started hosting dinner.

“The whole idea is that I wanted to create a space where women could supercharge their network with friendship,” Naylor Pullman told Marketing Brew. “I just wanted to make girlfriends in the industry, and I realized the best place to do that is over dinner.”

Naylor Pullman’s Media Dinner Club first kicked off in October 2022, and now, she’s building out a larger networking collective for women in media and advertising, including those working within a brand, publisher, agency, or ad tech company. This September, the club got a new name—Our Third Place, or O3P for short—which is aimed at offering shared meeting and networking places for women in those industries, especially those who Naylor Pullman said are in the “messy middle”—not quite at a senior level in the corporate workplace, but not early-career, either.

“These women are the future of our industry and the backbone of our industry at the same time,” she said, later adding that “This age group is when we’re making a lot of hard life decisions: to have kids or not to have kids, to buy a house or not buy a house…There’s so many things that you almost have this permission to just do in your 20s. Then in your 30s and 40s, it’s like you are the adult in the room, and there’s a certain expectation for you, but we’re not giving people the right tools to succeed.”

Read more here.—JS

Marketers love talking about AI, but Susan Nomecos will offer something rarer: a view of how it’s actually being used inside Getty Images. She’ll outline where AI adds value, where it introduces headaches, and how the industry is adjusting. Consider it your updated frame of reference for the future of visual content, pun fully intended.

Who said desk calendars have to be boring? Introducing the Morning Brew 2026 Daily Games Desk Calendar. It’s perfect for desks, nightstands, and kitchen counters, so give yourself (or others) the gift of entertaining coffee breaks.