There are a few things that are hard to miss in Prime Video’s hockey romance series Off Campus: shirtless workout montages, nostalgic musical moments, and Liquid I.V.

The hydration brand has a sweeping sponsorship deal with the show spanning ads, events, a landing page, and a four-episode integration into the plot. Main character Garrett Graham sips a Liquid I.V. at a bar; he and his teammate John Logan appear in an ad campaign for the brand, and ads for Liquid I.V. show up on the boards of their hockey rink at the fictional Briar University.

It’s product placement dialed way up, and it’s not the first time a brand has had a major integration into a sports streaming show this year. In April, Jake from State Farm appeared as a character in Netflix’s basketball comedy Running Point.

Naturally, the buzziest shows are exactly where brands want to be, and these kinds of integrations can lead to the cultural relevance marketers dream of. With steamy, heartthrob marketing campaigns experiencing something of a revival, the team at Liquid I.V. is betting that their embrace of all aspects of Off Campus will pay off among fans.

“Sometimes, things like brand safety and guardrails get in the way of participating in culture, and brands sometimes can get in their own way,” Aaron Jones, chief digital officer at Liquid I.V., told Marketing Brew. “It’s the No. 1 show globally right now [on Prime Video], and it’s being talked about like crazy, so you have to jump right in.”

But brands that wade knee-deep into a fandom—especially one born on BookTok—may also find themselves on thin ice.

Continue reading here.—AM

Video produced by AI was once a novelty—sometimes impressive, but more often populated with off-putting human distortions and spectral graphics. But in the last year or so, rapid technological progress and new professional workflow tools have made video AI much more useful, experts told us—and finally able to yield output good enough for, say, a Carl’s Jr. TV spot.

At creative agency AKQA, AI now plays a role in most early-stage creative experimentation, a relatively new development within the last eight months, according to AKQA CTO Ben Royce.

In fact, Royce said the quality of video AI tools reached an inflection point this year. Output long ago graduated from the extra fingers and distorted faces of early offerings, and Royce said the software now seems to better understand the jargon and needs of video editors (AKQA mostly uses an internal tool from parent WPP that’s powered by various video models).

“The tools are finally at the bare minimum to start working with reliably,” he told Morning Brew.

So what does the agency bring to the table in a world where creative AI models have reached that level of sophistication?

“[Clients] are paying for the skill and the talent to be able to use [AI] effectively at their brand’s quality or higher, and they’re paying for taste,” Royce said. “It’s easy to produce slop…The difference is we know how to structure, create lots of assets that are good enough on the first pass or require minimal editing. That’s hard, right? That’s actually a craft.”

Although OpenAI scrapped its video platform Sora to free up resources earlier this year, progress in the field of video AI has continued apace. Other experts agreed that it turned a corner in the past year, both in terms of the usefulness of the tools and thorny legal issues.

Read more here.—PK

Banana Boat, the sunscreen brand whose brightly colored bottles have filled beach bags since its founding in Miami in 1976, is known for its playful and fun persona. But in the last five years, it’s gone quiet.

Over that time, it’s hardly faded from public consciousness—the brand sold 29 million units last year and has 84% brand awareness—but consumers were largely buying the brand “on autopilot” and its retailers were looking for the brand to “find our voice,” Jennifer Campbell, its senior brand manager of strategy, told Retail Brew.

It’s a common pitfall for legacy CPG brands (or as Campbell likes to call them, “iconic brands”) owned by large conglomerates. Banana Boat’s parent is Edgewell Personal Care, whose portfolio also includes Hawaiian Tropic and Schick.

“You’ve been given this tremendous voice and power and knowledge and ability to speak to people because they know you, and we really weren’t doing anything with the voice,” Campbell said.

Now, the slightly sleepy sun care staple is getting back on board with its marketing, introducing its first campaign in five years, “Get Outside Stat,” and debuting a new line of sunscreen it hopes will appeal to consumers even when the weather cools down.

Read more on Retail Brew.—EC

What do tacos and soccer have in common? Honestly, they’re both showing up to the Marketing Brew Summit on September 30. Join Taco Bell’s Luis Restrepo and Major League Soccer’s Radhika Duggal for a conversation on brand strategy, innovation, customer engagement, and the realities of modern marketing leadership.

Executive moves across the industry.

• Whataburger hired former UnitedHealthcare SVP Melissa Ehresman as VP of digital experience.
• Yum Brands’s COO and chief people and culture officer, Tracy Skeans, is retiring.
• Woworks, which owns brands like Saladworks, tapped Subway vet James Walker as chief growth officer.