No risk, all reward?

As many brands have pulled back on or devalued their consumer rewards programs in recent years, T-Mobile is doubling down.

This month, the brand is celebrating 10 years of T-Mobile Tuesdays, its customer appreciation program that started as a way to thank all users, Mike Belcher, SVP of partnerships and growth marketing at T-Mobile and the creator of the program, told us.

“We felt at the time that most loyalty programs were really complicated [or] required customers to have to earn their status,” Belcher said. “We set out to change that…It’s really become a defining part of who we are as a company.”

The program is accessed through the brand’s T-Life app, which counts more than 25 million monthly active users, and through it, customers can claim discounts and receive free gifts at T-Mobile stores each Tuesday. To date, the mobile brand has provided its customers with around 1.4 billion perks from 500-plus brands, Belcher said. To celebrate the 10-year anniversary, T-Mobile is bringing back fan-favorite parks, giving out swag, and hosting events like a T-Pain concert as part of what it’s calling Member Month. The brand is also relaunching T-Mobile Travel, which offers discounts on hotels and rental cars, as part of the broader T-Life app.

Customer centrality is a big component of T-Mobile’s “un-carrier” brand strategy, which positions it as a lifestyle brand and seeks to differentiate it from other wireless providers that may focus on the more technical aspects of their services. The program has helped create some brand envy among customers of other providers, Belcher said, but the focus remains on driving T-Mobile customer engagement and satisfaction.

“We want to be famous for how we appreciate our customers,” he said.

Continue reading here.—KH

It takes more than vibes to advertise a vibe-coding platform.

A year ago, the website-building platform Wix acquired the vibe-coding platform Base44, which allows even non-tech-savvy users to build apps, for about $80 million.

In the first quarter of the year, Wix marketed the platform aggressively in an effort to capture “robust top-of-funnel demand,” Nir Zohar, Wix’s president, said on an earnings call last month. That has included splashy TV buys, like a Super Bowl ad earlier this year, along with a presence on less-conventional platforms like Discord, a wide net that is aimed at heightening brand visibility and capturing a broad audience of people at various stages of AI adoption, Omer Shai, Wix CMO, told Marketing Brew. Base44 is also promoting itself through academic partnerships with higher-education institutions to help students with AI usage skills in a difficult hiring climate.

“If we stop people in the street and we ask them about Base44 and a solution like us, most of the people of the world are still not familiar with it. This is the opportunity that we have for the future,” Shai told us. “On one hand, [it can be a] really robust, comprehensive, in-depth, [and] data-oriented application. On the other hand, it can be also something that I’m doing with my friends. This is the reason that it’s such a broad audience.”

In Q1 2026, Base44 generated about $150 million in annualized recurring revenue, up from the $100 million figure shared during the previous quarter. We had Shai take us into Base44’s marketing strategy to understand how the brand is looking to stand out on and off the screen.

Read more here.—JS

Each week, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.

Brian Kotlyar is CMO of Hightouch, a customer data platform. He was previously SVP of marketing at New Relic. He has also worked at B2B companies like Sprinklr and Intercom.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? Most recently, we did a fun airport takeover in Las Vegas to talk about how Hightouch can help you do “brilliant marketing with a little help from your agents.” It’s just so fun to come up with contextual advertising. Probably the best copy line we came up with was, “Launch an ad campaign before baggage claim,” which ran above the escalators en route to baggage claim. I just love exploring the interaction between physical space and your ad copy/creative.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? I’ve always gotten a kick out of Visit Oslo’s self-deprecating campaign. It’s my kind of humor and a super effective ad. Plus, I’ve spent some time in Scandinavia, and it’s absolutely gorgeous. The ad worked on me!

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: I’m an avid but also terrible vegetable gardener. My hours-of-effort-to-tomatoes-actually-eaten ratio is appalling.

Continue reading here.

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Mergers and acquisitions, company partnerships, and more.

• Fox is set to acquire Roku in a deal worth $22 billion.
• OpenAI announced a partnership with LiveRamp as the ChatGPT owner continues to lean into its ads business.
• Electronic Arts is debuting a new in-game ad platform, with partners including Visa, State Farm, and Red Bull.
• TikTok is partnering with trading card company Panini for a digital World Cup collection.
• Electrolit signed on as the official electrolyte beverage of the US Open.