You might not watch an entire 72-hour live stream. But you might watch clips of it.

That’s something TBWA\Chiat\Day Chicago’s Skittles team understood when planning a content strategy around a recent effort involving the “Skittles Gaming Flute,” a branded flute video game controller. The candy brand sent the controller to gamers who then livestreamed themselves learning how to play the instrument-come-controller over the course of a weekend in March. One streamer, PointCrow, even conducted a marathon stream that stretched over multiple days.

As the livestreams continued on, the team reviewed the footage in real time, picking out segments to clip and highlight on Skittles’s social channels.

“You look at politics and sports, it’s how a lot of people consume,” Brian Culp, group creative director at TBWA\Chiat\Day Chicago, told Marketing Brew. “So, man, if we can make brand experiences that are worth sharing like that—then it’s how a lot of people are going to experience it.”

Clipping, which refers to taking short bites of content and distributing it across the internet, has become a common practice that mainstream marketers like Skittles are dabbling in. The process is, according to Forbes, already used by fintech and crypto brands to promote their founders.

Some brands are considering clippable output when concepting creative content strategies. Last fall, Kendall Tucker, head of creative experimentation at the B2B expense management platform Ramp, told us the company realized that one camera wouldn’t provide enough clippable content for a planned seven-hour livestream with The Office star Brian Baumgartner, so the company ended up using five dedicated cameras for more interesting and varied clips.

Slicing and dicing a lengthy livestream into dozens or even hundreds of clips that post across as many accounts is just one approach as brands venture into clipping. The goal is often to generate buzz and attention, and it comes amid a rush of AI-generated content and bot farms that can generate manufactured discourse for just about everything under the sun (maybe even the latest hot indie band.)

Whether that will translate into real appreciation is another story—but many marketers are betting that it will help them stand out in an ever-crowded digital landscape.

Continue reading here.—KM

Meta’s push into vertical video continues to seem like it’s paying off. Reels now account for a third of all Instagram ad impressions, although the push has driven down pricing growth on the platform, according to a new report from the marketing agency Tinuiti.

Across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google Search, and Amazon’s Sponsored Products ads, ad spend growth is all mostly trending higher, with all but Facebook seeing growth in the double-digits in the first quarter of the year, Tinuiti found.

The report, released earlier this month, assessed anonymized performance information from the advertising programs the agency manages, which encompass more than $4 billion in annual digital ad spend. Only samples from programs that were active and employed a consistent strategy across the time periods Tinuiti evaluated were considered, and the report took into account same-client growth across all figures represented.

Read more here.—JS

Kay Hsu is global head of Spotify’s creative lab. She’s set to speak at Marketing Brew’s upcoming event, The Next Phase of Social & Creator Marketing, on May 12.

Ahead of the event, we caught up with her to hear what she believes are the biggest growth drivers of creator marketing.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What signals do you evaluate to determine whether creator partnerships are successful? For me, it always starts with, Did it feel right? That sounds fuzzy, but I mean it seriously. If you put a brand next to a creator and it feels forced, if the audience can tell it’s transactional, that’s a failure regardless of what the numbers say in the short term.

Beyond that, we’re obviously looking at brand lift, engagement, and whether it drove real downstream action for the partner. But I always want to start with the qualitative gut check before I get into the data.

Another thing we look at is if we’ve leveraged the power of the creator. Did we use their creative and storytelling abilities to connect their fans with brands? Or did we merely treat the creator like a mouthpiece for the brand without using the magic dust creators bring to the table?

Continue reading here.

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Mergers and acquisitions, company partnerships, and more.

• PayPal became the official peer-to-peer payments partner of the NFL.
• Spotify will serve as the official music partner of the New York Liberty under a multiyear deal.
• Celsius tapped soccer players Weston McKennie, Declan Rice, and Hirving Lozano, as well as Diplo, Lisa Rinna, Rob Rausch, and Dixie D’Amelio, for its new summer soccer campaign.
• Gotham FC worked with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to drop 1,000 $5 tickets to the NWSL team’s upcoming match against Boston Legacy FC. They sold out in under an hour, according to Gotham.
• Goodway Group inked a deal with data platform Optable to up the indie agency’s use of AI tools for planning and measurement.