It’s Monday. Pizza Hut temporarily dropped the “Pizza” from its name and rebranded simply to “Hut” for the NFL preseason. Here’s hoping quarterbacks don’t take it as an unconscious queue to drop their next snap.
“Do you want to build the next billion-dollar brand with us?”
Poppi founder Allison Ellsworth first posed that question on her social media accounts late last month in posts about her new CPG brand, of which details are still largely under wraps. Ellsworth’s team currently sits at 10 people, and she told us that since posting, the new brand has received more than 2,000 resumes for five open roles ranging from digital communications to influencer manager.
Multiple applicants are now in the interview process ahead of the November launch date, she said.
“I just posted on social media not fully realizing how viral it would go,” Ellsworth told Marketing Brew. “I just think it was a fun, modern way to recruit.”
Part of the posts’ success comes from the following Ellsworth has built from more than six years of sharing her journey at Poppi, from when it began as a startup to its evolution into a large-scale soda brand acquired by PepsiCo for an eye-watering $1.95 billion. While her new brand has received many applicants who are fans of the prebiotic-soda brand, she told us, those looking to work at Poppi 2.0 need not apply, as the new brand is “not competitive to Poppi,” per her post.
The immediate interest generated is a testament to the power and reach of being a socially native founder—something Ellsworth said has become table stakes for any brand looking to build affinity with the next generation.
“I’ve always seen my platforms as a way to not only build community, but to be transparent,” she said. “I don’t see why we wouldn’t continue to do all of that [with the next brand]. Why not use this beautiful tool that we have that everyone’s already looking to and is already inspired by?”
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Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photos: The Athletic
This summer’s FIFA World Cup marked the setting of a lot of records, from US viewership to Kylian Mbappé’s 22 World Cup goals to the sheer amount of beer consumed in Boston.
It was also a time of record audience and sponsor growth for The Athletic, the New York Times-owned sports newsroom that offers extensive soccer coverage across leagues including the Premier League, the Champions League, MLS, and the NWSL.
The Athletic was in a transition period during the last men’s World Cup in 2022, which took place shortly after the publication’s acquisition by the Times, when it was also brand new to selling ads. During that year, The Athletic had only about five sponsors. The following year, the outlet sold out of Women’s World Cup content sponsorships.
So far in 2026, it has 25 official advertising partners, not counting smaller deals like one-off banner ads, according to Chief Commercial Officer Sebastian Tomich.
“The Athletic’s commercial business has been growing pretty substantially every year,” Tomich told Marketing Brew. The fact that the tournament was hosted in North America contributed to more opportunities to work with US brands like Google, Amazon, and EA Sports compared to the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, he added.
Training camp: Tomich said the teams at The Athletic started prepping for the tournament about two years in advance, with a “cross-functional group spread across every team in the company” that met at summits and off-sites. With more than 70 Athletic journalists covering the World Cup, the company’s marketing team worked to promote their content with PR campaigns, retail integrations, and brand partnerships, he said.
Smart Balance’s 2022 reformulation reduced vegetable oils from 64% to 39%. Mouse Print, Morning Brew
Brands facing inflation and supply chain fluctuations have alternatives to simply raising prices. One, shrinkflation, is when brands shrink the size of the product, often imperceptibly, while keeping the price the same. Another, skimpflation, is when brands reduce product quality, often subtly reformulating products with cheaper ingredients or materials.
Consumers don’t tend to get out their pom-poms for either: Among consumers who noticed a product had been shrinkflated, 44.3% switched brands, while among those who noticed a product had been skimpflated, 54.1% switched brands, according to a 2024 survey by consumer insights platform AYTM.
In 2022, Conagra faced a backlash after consumers noticed Smart Balance’s buttery spread had reduced its vegetable oil content from 64% to 39% and that water had gone from the second ingredient to the first (and most plentiful). Conagra responded by returning to the original recipe.
In a paper published online in the Journal of Consumer Research in July, Ioannis Evangelidis, associate professor of marketing at Esade Business School in Barcelona, detailed 10 studies he conducted with consumers. The studies found that when consumers were told how companies had responded to rising costs, they viewed skimpflation as a more unfair approach than shrinkflation, and simply raising prices as the least unfair of the three.
When it came to purchase intent, consumers were least willing to buy a skimpflated product; they were about equally willing to buy products whose prices had risen or that had been shrinkflated. To learn more about the research, we asked Evangelidis about his findings and their implications.
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IN AND OUT
Francis Scialabba
Executive moves across the industry.
Albertsons tapped Emily Turner, a former executive at the grocery store chain The Fresh Market, to serve as SVP and CMO.
Vuori hired Abercrombie & Fitch CMO Carey Collins Krug as its top marketer. She starts October 5.
Lululemon’s chief AI and technology officer, Ranju Das, exited the company after a little less than a year.
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