Why settle for prestige beauty products when the hunt for an easier-on-the-wallet dupe can be a thrill?

That’s the premise powering MCoBeauty’s latest campaign and entertainment-driven activation. The effort, called “If You Know, You MCo” (or IYKYMCo for short) includes a seven-episode microdrama social series starring Tana Mongeau, in which the creator gets locked in a pink, lab-like room somewhere in MCoBeauty’s offices that requires beauty-themed puzzle-solving to escape. Audiences who wish they were there IRL can get involved, too: at 30 Escapology locations nationwide, MCoBeauty has set up real-life beauty lab escape rooms for guests, complete with free product giveaways.

Together, the series and in-person games are meant to create a more tangible brand world, according to Meridith Rojas, CMO at VidaCorp, MCoBeauty’s parent company.

“You’ve heard a lot of brands talk about community, community, community, and how do you bring them into your marketing campaigns,” Rojas told Marketing Brew. “How do you bring them into feeling more part of it, and not just [saying], ‘lean back, watch something,’ or trying to hawk them products? Instead, we wanted them to feel immersed in this world that we are creating.”

Continue reading here.—JN

For a few years, it seemed like every company that could create a retail media network would—so much so that retail media outgrew its original moniker and instead became known as commerce media.

Why not try to get a bigger piece of the pie when, per WPP’s 2025 forecast, commerce media could account for nearly a fifth of total ad revenue by 2030?

Last October, Mastercard officially debuted its own offering, Mastercard Commerce Media, joining the ranks of the financial institutions jockeying for some of those ad dollars.

To hear it from Nili Klenoff, executive vice president of Commerce Media at Mastercard, doing so wasn’t simply a matter of getting skin in the game. Instead, the push into commerce media marked an evolution of the company’s existing personalized card-linked offers business.

“We took a look at our solution and said, ‘This is really fit for purpose for this moment,’” Klenoff told us. “It’s now about taking that and evolving that into a broader value proposition, supporting more kinds of content—not just incentives and discounts, but also digital ads—and then having the ability to flex between an ad to build awareness or a well-timed incentive at the right moment to actually drive the conversion.”

Read more here.—KM

From her American Eagle ad that polarized audiences to her new lingerie brand, Syrn (as in “siren”), Sydney Sweeney has become something of a case study for a long-standing marketing question: Is all publicity ultimately good publicity?

For Syrn, the launch strategy leaned straight into attention. A fiery campaign rollout and a Hollywood Sign stunt once again split the internet. According to one marketing professor, whether that’s good or bad for business is…complicated.

“She’s such a presence right now, even starting from the American Eagle ad, she's already kind of this flashpoint figure,” Wendy Zajack, adjunct faculty at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, told Retail Brew. “So you could be like, ‘I hate her because of the American Eagle,’ or you love her because of the American Eagle, but no matter what, you’re talking about her. For a brand launch, that’s always a good thing. Controversy and craziness and all that kind of stuff is good for initial curiosity.”

Once the initial curiosity fades, however, even a celebrity-led brand needs to have a good product and an audience that buys into its messaging.

Read more on Retail Brew.—JS

Executive moves across the industry.

• Topgolf tapped Chuck E. Cheese parent company CEC Entertainment vet David McKillips as CEO.
• The US Tennis Association hired Australian Open alum Craig Tiley as CEO.
• Atlassian, the software company, hired LinkedIn CFO James Chuong to serve in the same role beginning March 30.