Last year, New York welcomed a new women’s pro soccer team in Brooklyn FC, which just wrapped up its inaugural season competing in the USL Super League.

The league, which is officially called the Gainbridge Super League following an April naming rights deal with the insurance company, sits at the top of the United Soccer League, a North American pre-professional and professional men’s and women’s soccer organization that’s been around since the mid-1980s.

But the Super League and its teams are new, and Brooklyn FC has some stiff competition when it comes to capturing the attention of New York sports fans—or even just New York women’s soccer fans. NWSL team Gotham FC plays across the Hudson in New Jersey, and Brooklyn FC plays on Coney Island, neither location of which is particularly convenient for many New Yorkers, especially those without cars.

Tom Lyons, global CMO of Brooklyn FC, has aspirations to eventually turn the team into a “globally recognized” brand, he said. But first, Brooklyn FC needs to foster fandom in its home borough.

“The paradox of Coney [Island] is that it’s not that easy to get to, but that once you’re there, it’s pretty magical,” Lyons told Marketing Brew. “We feel like we’ve started to get people out to Coney who hadn’t been to Coney in a long time.”

Continue reading here.—AM

Gainbridge is ensuring its place in the women’s sports ecosystem.

The Indiana-based financial services and insurance company was among the brands to sponsor Caitlin Clark when she was still in college, and it holds the naming rights to the Indiana Fever and Pacers’ home arena, Gainbridge Fieldhouse. But it’s also expanding its presence outside of basketball.

Gainbridge’s history with women’s sports dates back to 2017, when it struck up a partnership with the LPGA. It’s since stretched into tennis as the title sponsor of the Billie Jean King Cup, and in April, the brand secured a deal for the naming rights to the USL Super League, a pro women’s soccer league in the US.

Overall, about 40% of the company’s sponsorship spend is allocated to women’s sports, according to Mike Nichols, chief of sponsorship strategy and activation for Gainbridge parent company Group 1001.

“What we’re trying to do in the women’s sports space, as well as all of our sponsorships, is just raise the profile of the brand,” Nichols told Marketing Brew. “When you are asking somebody to invest their money with you, you want to give them the comfort of having seen the brand in major spaces.”

The company’s latest efforts in women’s sports go beyond brand KPIs, including its Gainbridge Assists grant program that aims to fund various girls’ and women’s sports organizations. The goal with all of the efforts is “to be authentic,” Nichols said, “at the risk of [using] the most overused word right now in marketing.”

Read more here.—AM

Each week, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.

Priya Gill is global head of marketing at SurveyMonkey. Prior to joining SurveyMonkey, she spent nearly six years at Box, and she has also worked at HP and Boeing.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? I loved our recent NBA All-Star campaign, aligned with the 2025 NBA All-Star weekend in and around Chase Center and throughout downtown San Francisco during the event. Coined, “You may not be an All-Star. But you can survey like one.” This out-of-home campaign leveraged billboards and pillars, LED mobile trucks, and SurveyMonkey-branded wrapped cars (which circled the event during Saturday night and all day Sunday). This ad campaign took a playful yet strategic approach, tying the core of what we do here at SurveyMonkey (gather feedback to make better decisions) to a big cultural moment. By aligning our brand lightning strike with a high-visibility event, we were able to tap into a conversation already buzzing with excitement and engagement. It was a great example of meeting people where their energy already is. And I have to admit, it was so fun seeing all of our branding shared between our team, and also from friends and fans who saw it in the wild.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: My background includes both engineering and culinary school (among other areas)—an unusual mix that deeply informs how I lead. Engineering taught me process, structure, and the power of data-driven decision-making. It’s how I keep my team focused on solving the right problems and making the smartest decisions with the information we have. Culinary school, on the other hand, sharpened my creativity and adaptability, two skills every marketing leader needs in today’s fast-changing digital landscape. One thing I have learned throughout my career is that whether you’re in the kitchen or driving a cross-functional marketing campaign, success depends on being open to new ideas and unafraid to take creative risks.

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You asked. We answered. Morning Brew’s latest report answers questions asked on the ground at Cannes, revealing must-read insights into AI’s evolution, Gen Z’s preferences, and the business impact of economic uncertainty.

Mergers and acquisitions, company partnerships, and more.

• Magna Studios, a production house, signed The Brutalist director Brady Corbet for commercial representation.
• Qualcomm signed a deal with LIV Golf’s Bryson DeChambeau.
• Novo Nordisk ended a partnership with the telehealth brand Hims & Hers over Hims & Hers’s continued promotion of compounded GLP-1s.
• Omnicom’s acquisition of Interpublic Group is another step closer to closing after both agreed to a consent decree with the FTC that bars “collusion” and “the creation of premade ‘exclusion lists’ to withhold ad dollars to encourage advertisers to join de facto boycotts.”