Travel marketing is full of aspirational content. A beautiful destination. A happy family. A picture-perfect sunset somewhere in the background. It looks so serene, so relaxing. How could you not want to go there?

That’s not the kind of marketing that Expedia is doing with creator IShowSpeed.

Last week, the company kicked off a yearlong partnership with the creator, who has some 150 million followers across social platforms, with a nearly 12-hour livestream of his breakneck travels to four Caribbean locales—Dominica, Guadeloupe, St. Kitts and Nevis, and St. Maarten.

The stream shows a version of travel that is both unbelievable and relatable. The unreal: the average person is not going to be sponsored by a brand to hit four destinations in half a day and be inundated with fans in each locale. As for the real? All you want to do after traveling somewhere is find a good meal.

IShowSpeed, aka Darren Watkins Jr., creates content based on his travels, and he recently made headlines for his 28-day tour of 20 countries throughout Africa. But before this deal, he had not yet worked with a travel brand, according to Lauri Metrose, SVP of global communications at Expedia.

“This was really about connecting culture with our brand in a really authentic way and telling stories,” Metrose said of the partnership, adding that Watkins’s “extreme curiosity” in “learning about different cultures and learning about different people” was compelling.

“It was really important for us to do a partnership and not a one-off deal, not a brand deal,” she said. “This is really about storytelling and exploring the world and then allowing people to book the trips that [he] has gone on.”

Continue reading here.—KM

Lowe’s has a long history in sports sponsorships, including almost two decades of prior involvement with Nascar and an active relationship with the NFL. But the home improvement retailer has never taken a shot at basketball.

That changed last week when Lowe’s announced its first-ever basketball campaign, which includes partnerships with Las Vegas Aces center A’ja Wilson and New York Knicks guard Jalen Brunson. CMO Jen Wilson has aspirations to expand the work into a multifaceted basketball platform, she told Marketing Brew, applying tactics that have worked for the brand in football and soccer to try to connect with Gen Z and millennials through the cultural power of basketball.

“There’s a vibe to basketball that we just love,” Wilson said. “And not just women’s, but men’s basketball, too.”

Nail on the head: Lowe’s has approached sports marketing at both the league and athlete levels depending on its goals. With the NFL, the brand went for breadth and reach in the form of a league-wide deal, Wilson said, while in soccer, her team tapped Leo Messi, a decision aimed at building deeper relationships and loyalty with customers.

To stand up their basketball platform, the Lowe’s team started with athletes instead of leagues, which Wilson said allowed the brand to get into the space quickly, learn what works, and try to establish credibility among fans. With that said, she added, WNBA and NBA sponsorships are “absolutely on the table for us to evaluate” down the line.

Read more here.—AM

Mae Karwowski is founder and CEO of influencer marketing agency Obviously. 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 why she’s so bullish on creator marketing.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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? It works! Ads appear where the customer is engaged and with content that they care about from people that they care about. These creators have built their audiences by learning how to get their attention. Also, where else are ads going to be seen? When is the last time you watched a TV commercial? I think my last commercial sighting was at a bar watching March Madness.

What signals do you evaluate to determine whether creator partnerships are successful? There are different signals for different campaigns. Did we sell out of the product? Was there a sales lift? Did we drive traffic to their website? Did we create content that, when turned into an ad, outperformed all other ad content? This last one is very important for most brands. We can provide the best ads from creators that hit the best CPA/CPC/CPM metrics for a fraction of the cost of a creative agency.

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.

• GameStop made an offer to buy eBay, a company nearly four times its size, for $55.5 billion.
• JPMorgan Chase signed with the IOC to become the Olympics’s first global banking partner, which includes being a founding partner of LA28 and being named the official bank of Team USA and the LA28 Olympics and Paralympics.
• King’s Hawaiian and Van Leeuwen have partnered to release ube coconut ice cream sandwiches for a limited time.