This year, Major League Soccer has a rare marketing opportunity. When the FIFA World Cup comes to North America over the summer, soccer fandom, which has been growing in the US for years, has the potential to hit peak levels.

The league, which kicked off its 31st season last month, is looking to capitalize.

Major international events tend to bring huge spikes in fandom—look no further than this year’s Olympic hockey phenomenon. But attention spans are short, and when those events end, some people forget their fandom as fast as they found it—which is why MLS, along with some of its sponsors, has already mapped out its marketing playbook for the rest of the season with the goal of converting every-four-years fans into die-hard viewers.

“Leading up to the World Cup, during it, and after it, we’re trying to pull every lever at our disposal,” CMO Radhika Duggal told Marketing Brew. “Consumers who are so excited about soccer, so excited about the World Cup energy of 2026, we want them to realize we play that same game here in North America all season. We think if we can connect our teams—our players—to the World Cup, they’ll realize they should give us a try.”

Star power: In the months leading up to the World Cup, players will be front and center in MLS marketing materials, Duggal said. The goal is to make them, and soccer in turn, feel more accessible, while underscoring that some of the national team members also play domestically for much of the rest of the year.

“People fall in love with other people,” Duggal said.

Continue reading here.—AM

To the marketers, filmmakers, creators, and AI enthusiasts headed to South by Southwest, howdy!

I’m attending the annual festival in Austin, Texas, for the first time this year, and it’s already shaping up to be a fun few days. I will be making every effort to get into Steven Spielberg’s keynote session and live podcast taping of The Big Picture—a first-time event that Claudette Godfrey, SXSW’s VP of film and TV, told me made her stop and think, “Damn, this is my job.”

Speaking of inaugural happenings, SXSW is introducing its first-ever filmmaker’s jacket, made in partnership with the plastic-free clothing brand Unless Collective. The mechanic’s jacket, featuring a bespoke design, will be initially available to filmmakers whose work is premiering at the festival as part of a limited, 350-item run, with more released for additional crew and production members at a later date, Godfrey said.

The festival’s film and TV team has wanted to create a jacket for many years, but Godfrey said the right partner hadn’t emerged until Unless Collective came along.

“Our whole Unless proposition is like, how can we scale this regenerative idea?” Tara Moss, CMO at Unless, told me. “We’re not trying to patent the lack of plastic. We want storytellers. We want creatives. We want the cutting edge of innovators to adopt this and scale it across different businesses, or even help us out with storytelling.”

Having an eye-catching jacket isn’t bad marketing for SXSW, either. While Godfrey said the jackets will help filmmakers spot each other in the crowds, the jackets’ design will eventually be expanded to other merch available to the larger public. Who doesn’t love a walking advertisement with cultural cachet?

Read more here.—JN

In 2023, fast-fashion company Shein invited a group of creators to tour its manufacturing facilities in Guangzhou, China, in response to allegations of employees dealing with long hours, low wages, and other potential labor abuses.

“I went in there not expecting the best conditions for the workers,” Destene Sudduth, a lifestyle influencer, said in a video Shein posted to its brand channels. “But I was pleasantly surprised by how clean it was. Some of the workers were waving at us and smiling.”

Audiences were…not convinced. The behind-the-scenes testimonies and footage from creators on the all-expenses-paid trip led to further backlash and plenty of parodies online, and some creators from the trip ultimately deleted content from their trip or terminated partnerships with the brand. In a statement to NPR at the time, Shein said that it was “committed to transparency” and that the factory visit enabled creators “to share their own insights with their followers.”

Cristel Russell, professor of marketing at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio Business School, told us that, generally speaking, it’s a “terrible idea” to use behind-the scenes (BTS) content as a crisis response, calling what happened with Shein a “perfect example” of what not to do.

“People are going to be cynical coming in, and you open yourself up to even more criticism because they’re really looking at whether you’re showing the real thing,” she said. “The backlash [can be] even greater.”

But there are cases where pulling back the curtain can have positive brand-building effects. We spoke with Russell, who recently conducted research on brand backstories and transparency, about the best ways to execute BTS content.

Continue reading here.—KH

Real jobs shared through real communities. CollabWORK brings opportunities directly to Marketing Brew readers—no mass postings, no clutter, just roles worth seeing. Click here to view the full job board.

• Digital Marketing Manager at True Homes
• Digital Marketing Executive at Invest Puerto Rico
• Account Manager at State Farm
• Brand & Marketing Manager - Multi-Restaurant Group at Soya Sushi Bar Of Florida LLC
• Communications Content Manager at Museum of African American History

Big plans for 2026? Take 60 seconds to tell us which industry events are on your radar so we can plan how the Brew shows up — and where we should connect.

Stories we’re jealous of.

• The Wall Street Journal profiled the “power broker” agents fueling today’s creator economy.
• Bloomberg wrote about dirty soda brand Swig and how it’s using TV and TikTok to expand its presence beyond its home state of Utah.
• The Hollywood Reporter analyzed how YouTube is poised to become the world’s largest media company this year.