On a Sunday in late March, MLS fans packed into Yankee Stadium—the temporary home of New York City FC—to watch Thiago Martins, Aiden O’Neill, and the rest of the home team take on Inter Miami FC and Leo Messi.

Before the players took the pitch, though, all eyes were on the giant pigeon dancing in a pair of Timberland-esque boots at center field.

Sky Scraper, or Sky for short, is NYCFC’s pigeon mascot. The pigeon was officially introduced as the face of the club earlier this year, but it’s been circling NYCFC in an unofficial capacity essentially since the team started playing in 2015, according to VP of Marketing Lauren Scrima.

“It’s very perfect for New York,” Scrima said. “There was always some light discussion about, ‘Should we have a mascot?’ We’ve obviously seen what it can do for other teams, and now that we are so close to opening our own stadium and having passed that 10-year anniversary threshold, it felt like the right time to really seriously look at this.”

Any New Yorker knows that pigeons are polarizing animals, and while Scrima expected Sky to have some critics, after spending most of last year bringing the bird to life, she and her team have sky-high hopes of using the new mascot to drive fandom and revenue.

Continue reading here.—AM

If you’ve walked down any street in New York City recently, chances are high that you’ve seen an MTA bus and, with it, an ad for the Museum of Sex.

Across the city, more than 3,000 buses are running with the museum’s logo plastered across the front, which has led to countless social media posts from curious, amused, and only sometimes annoyed observers. The omnipresence of the museum logo is all in service of leaving the institution’s mark on the city, Daniel Gluck, founder and executive director at the Museum of Sex, told Marketing Brew.

“It’s fun to see the Museum of Sex logo on every bus in New York,” he said. “Hopefully it becomes another iconic New York thing.”

The Museum of Sex opened in 2002, but Gluck said it took years before the MTA would consider allowing it to advertise. It first placed its logo on city buses in 2018 with Outfront Media, but the spots were removed following complaints from bus drivers. (Gluck said the negative feedback was surprising, given the “overwhelmingly positive” response from the public.)

The current campaign, which launched in December and will run through the end of this year, so far hasn’t faced any calls for removal, and Gluck said the museum has seen a bump in foot traffic and earned media from the ads—including from an incident in February when a wild turkey brought a bus to a stop and was photographed face-to-face with the logo.

“It’s been going very well,” Gluck said of the campaign. “A lot of people are really getting a kick out of it.”

Read more here.—KH

Becky Owen is CMO at the creator agency Billion Dollar Boy, which has partnered with brands including Heineken, Nike, Unilever, PepsiCo, L’Oréal, Crocs, Burberry, Microsoft, and Sephora. She’s set to speak at Marketing Brew’s upcoming event, The Next Phase of Social & Creator Marketing, on May 12.

Ahead of the event, we caught up with her to hear how her team is advising brands on their creator strategies.

US creator ad spend is growing four times faster than the rest of the media industry. What do you think is the biggest reason for this growth? Creators have shown that maybe we haven’t understood how advertising really works…We are seeing increasingly that [creators are] outperforming, and I think it’s because creators do things differently from how traditional adverts would engage or sell…What creators have shown us is that there are different rules to engaging and building relationships with audiences and shifting the needle for brands. We’re seeing that brand growth is increasingly just being built via social and creator channels. The shift is performance-based…because creators do things differently to how traditional marketers do, and it is based off of community, lived experience, and things that feel more honest.

Increasingly, we’re seeing brands are able to grow entirely in social spaces and not require other types of mediums. They are dominating their spend on social spaces, which are owned and marketed by creators, far more readily than it’s owned and marketed by people from traditional spaces and traditional disciplines.

Continue reading here.

Real jobs, shared through real communities. CollabWORK brings opportunities directly to Marketing Brew readers—no mass postings, no clutter, just roles worth seeing. Click here to view the full job board.

Mergers and acquisitions, company partnerships, and more.

• Viant, a connected TV–centric DSP, acquired the measurement firm TVision Insights for $40 million.
• Adobe is working with Omnicom, Publicis, and WPP on standardizing its agentic AI platform for enterprise clients.
• The Onion is seeking to license the InfoWars brand from a court-appointed site manager in the satirical outlet’s latest efforts to take over the conspiracy-theory website; the deal, though, still needs to be approved by a judge.