Wanna come over and Netflix and chill? And also do a VR experience and solve an escape room and play mini-golf?

That’s the question Netflix executives are hoping consumers will say yes to. Netflix House, the first of three planned immersive complexes based on its popular IP, opened its first set of doors in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, featuring bespoke experiences crafted around titles like Wednesday, One Piece, Stranger Things, and more. Spanning 100,000 square feet, it’s not quite a full theme park as much as, well, a themed house, just as the name suggests.

The push into live experiences builds off of Netflix’s previously successful pop-up events, including the Bridgerton-based Queen’s Ball and the interactive Squid Game: The Experience, which have attracted visitors in cities like New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Chicago. Netflix House will be opening additional locations in Dallas later this year and Las Vegas in 2027, and CMO Marian Lee told Fast Company that she “would love to see this in every major city.”

But is Netflix House aimed at driving a new stream of revenue, potentially serving as an entry point into the theme-park business, a lá Disney or Universal? Not likely, at least at the onset. Instead, the in-person experiences are meant to deepen fan connection and help develop relationships to the larger Netflix brand, Lee told The Hollywood Reporter. (Netflix repeatedly declined to make an executive available for an interview.)

Still, there’s money to be made, whether that’s from location-exclusive merch, ticket sales, food, and more, and Marketing Brew took a tour of the House to see if all those moneymakers really can make fans feel like they’re in the Upside Down, or on the ’Ton, or at Nevermore Academy, or…you get the idea.

Continue reading here.—JN

In the basketball marketing world, CarMax is something of a fixture. It’s been an official sponsor of the NBA and WNBA for half a decade, and has for years used superstars from both leagues, like Stephen Curry and Sue Bird, in its ads, some of which have gone viral.

In the past year, the used-car retailer has made some changes to its creative approach and brand platform, according to CMO Sarah Lane, but one thing has remained the same: CarMax is sticking with basketball stars.

“Basketball just continues to be a place that’s important to culture,” Lane told Marketing Brew. “It’s young, it’s modern, it’s where culture starts, and aligning the brand next to that helps us to look and feel more modern and connected to culture.”

CarMax’s latest campaign, “Wanna Drive?”, is fronted by Cleveland Cavaliers guard Donovan Mitchell and Dallas Wings guard and WNBA Rookie of the Year Paige Bueckers, and is meant to convey a new message about the brand while also nodding to its basketball history, Lane said.

Read more here.—AM

High electricity bill? Frequent power outages? Your car company wants to help.

In their quest to sell EVs, automakers are turning to a new business line: home energy products. They see multiple benefits to getting into the energy management game, from sweetening the proposition of EV ownership to creating new revenue streams.

Research suggests that consumers are receptive to the idea: Escalent’s 2025 Home Energy Solutions DeepDive report identified opportunities for automakers and utilities to team up on home energy solutions, and found strong new-car buyer trust in automakers to “manage the production and use of energy in their home.” More than two in five (43%) would even buy electricity from their vehicle brand.

Automakers are marketing products like bidirectional chargers and stationary battery storage solutions to customers as ways to save money and become less reliant on the whims of the power grid—and offering up leasing options and incentives to sweeten the deal.

“The real difference is, when can an EV do things that an ICE car can’t do? That’s mobile battery storage—a battery on wheels. The ability to tap into that battery storage, either to power your home for backup or to send power to the grid for rate arbitrage, all those kinds of things,” Loren McDonald, CEO and chief analyst at Chargeonomics, told Tech Brew.

“What we’ve seen is that most of the automakers just didn’t make that bidirectional charging capability available on their vehicles,” he added. “And it’s really just starting to explode in the last year. Most of the new models that are going to be coming out, and the next-generation ones, are going to have that capability.”

Continue reading on Tech Brew.—JG