Four years ago, the women’s NCAA tournament wasn’t even technically called March Madness. Fast-forward to last year, and the women’s championship game had more viewers than the men’s for the first time, as players like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, Kamilla Cardoso, and Cameron Brink became household names over the course of the tournament.

Then, as college seniors tend to do, they graduated.

Even though this year’s rosters look a little different than last year’s, brand interest—and ad prices—seem as high as ever. Players like Paige Bueckers, Flau’jae Johnson, and JuJu Watkins remain in high demand in ad campaigns, and marketers are also betting on other athletes representing the next generation of talent.

“It’s about freaking time,” Jeff Kearney, global head of sports marketing at Gatorade, told Marketing Brew. “What is coming through, especially with women’s basketball, is the personalities, the human elements…People don’t talk about Celtics/Lakers, they talk about Bird/Magic, so adding those names and those personalities is just really incredible and invaluable to making people care and pay attention.”

Continue reading here.—AM

Google is getting deeper into gaming.

The ad giant is partnering with the gaming platform Roblox in a deal that will let advertisers more easily buy Roblox gaming inventory, the companies announced Tuesday ahead of the IAB PlayFronts, an annual industry event centered on highlighting advertising opportunities in gaming.

More specifically, Roblox is bringing its inventory to Google’s ad-buying platforms. Google will also handle the gaming platform’s programmatic inventory, although Roblox will still maintain a direct-sales team.

“This partnership allows us to scale to meet the demand that we both feel and see regularly out there,” Stephanie Latham, VP of global brand partnerships and advertising at Roblox, said during a press roundtable ahead of the announcement.

So what? Advertisers know gaming is a lucrative business—in-game advertising is expected to bring in $11.5 billion annually by 2028, according to eMarketer—but they haven’t always found ways to easily make inroads into the medium.

Roblox has considerable scale, currently claiming 85 million daily active users, with more than 61% of them 13 years old or older. Latham said that users tend to spend a lot of time on the platform, making it an ideal place for advertisers.

Read more here about the deal and how it could bring more advertisers to the platform.—RB

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, is Snow White not the fairest after all?

When Disney’s latest live-action princess film hit theaters last week, it wasn’t the smash hit that fans might have hoped for. The movie opened to $42 million at the domestic box office and $87 million globally—only making a small dent in the film’s reported $250+ million budget.

Even before the disappointing opening weekend, controversy has surrounded the project almost from the beginning. In 2021, when star Rachel Zegler was cast in the titular role, right-leaning critics decried the choice to cast the Colombian American actress, citing the original story’s description of Snow White as someone with “skin as white as snow” as reason enough to cast a white actress.

Since then, Zegler has also suggested the original 1937 film was outdated, while political differences between Zegler and costar Gal Gadot have fed the rumor mill. Disney’s handling of the seven dwarves, from initial depictions to casting choices to CGI use, has all prompted backlash. All of it made a recipe for potential disaster—and the ingredient list only got longer when looking at third-party data evaluating Disney’s marketing investment around the film.

By the numbers: As Snow White’s release date drew nearer, some fans wondered why the entertainment juggernaut’s marketing efforts seemed more muted than usual.

According to data from iSpot, it was. The measurement firm tracked a significant decrease in estimated investment in media advertising when compared to other recent Disney live-action remakes.

• Snow White’s estimated national linear TV media value (measured from December 2024 to the film’s release in March 2025) came in at only $6.8 million and 724 million household TV ad impressions, whereas Mufasa: The Lion King, a 2024 Disney live-action project, pulled $22.8 million and 1.74 billion impressions from April 2024 to February 2025.

Read more about the numbers here.—JN

Join Lauren Manning, head of product design at the NFL, as she explores how direct-to-consumer models and social media are changing sports advertising. Learn how to connect with today’s most engaged fans and create marketing strategies that score big. Get ready for a new era of fan interaction on April 8!

Stories we’re jealous of.

• Bloomberg wrote about airlines increasingly partnering with restaurants like Shake Shack and Magnolia Bakery to improve plane-food perceptions.
• The Wall Street Journal wrote about denim brand True Religion and how it’s working to be the next big ’00s brand revival.
• Vox wrote about the many ways smart TVs are collecting viewership data.