20AGENCY
🍫 Big Game Bets Start Early
Nutella Is Going to the Super Bowl. Ferrero Is Spending $50M Around It.
Morning Brew Bought a Creator Newsletter. Audiences Are Now Acquisitions.
And Kroger Scored Its Ads With AI. The Hit Rate Was 81%.
Ferrero is pairing a first-ever Nutella Super Bowl spot with a new flavor and a $50 million-plus plan. Morning Brew paid cash for the creator behind Express Checkout. And Kroger's AI scoring study shows how to cut weak creative before it runs.
Ferrero is treating the Super Bowl as a portfolio play, with Nutella as the newest brand to step into the spotlight.
Nutella Is Going to the Super Bowl, and Ferrero Is Spending $50 Million Around It
Ferrero North America is putting more than $50 million behind its portfolio ahead of Super Bowl LXI in 2027, and Nutella will run its first Super Bowl commercial. Marketing Dive reports the move follows Kinder Bueno's 2026 game debut, which Ferrero says delivered a 140% lift in sales volume year over year. Super Bowl LX drew 125.6 million viewers. Ferrero North America president Michael Lindsey said: "We've invested billions of dollars in our North American growth plans, and last year's ad debut proved it's working."
Nutella has momentum to spend. After the Artemis II mission in April, the brand saw Amazon sales grow 20.2% and search volume jump 60.7% year over year, and Nutella Peanut is its first new flavor in 62 years. Ferrero Group reported 2025 revenue of €19.3 billion, about $21.73 billion, up 4.6%. The sales and search figures come from Ferrero via Marketing Dive and are not independently audited.
Ferrero is using the Super Bowl as a proof-of-concept machine. One brand debuts, the sales lift gets reported, and the next brand gets the green light. The lesson for mid-size budgets is the pairing: a big moment plus a new product to talk about. A national spot with nothing new to say is just expensive reach.
Product news plus mass reach. Byron Sharp's work on mental and physical availability says broad reach builds the memory structures that make a brand easy to buy. A new flavor gives that reach something specific to attach to. Ask students why Ferrero tests the format on Kinder Bueno before committing Nutella, and what a 140% lift can and cannot prove.
Creator-led media keeps getting bought, funded and folded into bigger platforms. Today it is a CPG newsletter.
Morning Brew Buys Express Checkout, and Creator Newsletters Are Now Acquisition Targets
Morning Brew has acquired Express Checkout, a creator-led newsletter covering consumer packaged goods, retail and ecommerce. Net Influencer reports the deal was all-cash and moves full ownership of the intellectual property to Morning Brew. Founders Nate Rosen and Jenna Movsowitz join Morning Brew as full-time employees. Express Checkout launched about four years ago and grew into podcasts, social video, interviews and live events.
It lands next to Retail Brew, Marketing Brew, Morning Brew Daily, Maxinomics and Good Work inside Brew Media Group, which Axel Springer owns. Net Influencer points to comparable deals: Acast's $20 million acquisition of Backyard Ventures and RedBird's majority stake in Puck at a $250 million valuation. Deal terms for Express Checkout were not disclosed in the article.
A niche audience that trusts one voice is a media asset, and publishers are paying for it. If you are a CPG brand, Express Checkout's readers just moved inside a bigger ad business, so expect sponsorship packages to get more structured. If you are a creator, build the owned audience first. Acquirers buy lists and habits, not follower counts.
Not a new model today. A real test of whether AI can predict which creative will convert.
Kroger Used AI to Score Creative Before It Ran, and the Hit Rate Was 81%
Marketing Dive reports that Kroger, working with data platform Vidmob and trade association MMA Global, tested whether predictive scoring could tie creative choices to e-commerce conversion. The analysis covered more than 1,900 video and image assets from Kroger campaigns on Meta and Google. Predictive scoring forecast conversion rates with 81% accuracy, and creative that followed the recommendations averaged a fourfold improvement in conversion.
Reallocating media toward higher-scoring creative could produce more than twice as many conversions from the same budget, per the analysis. Vidmob founder and executive chairman Alex Collmer said: "The ability to get ahead of that and basically not spend behind assets that aren't going to work is a pretty big deal." Vidmob sells this kind of scoring, so treat the results as vendor-involved until a client replicates them.
Kill the losers before you pay to run them. That is the real budget lever here, and it works for any team with a few hundred assets and conversion data. Ask your agency how creative gets scored before launch, and what the hit rate was last quarter. If the answer is taste and gut, you are paying for the learning twice.
Predictive validity. An 81% accuracy claim needs a baseline: how often would a coin flip, or a senior creative director, be right? Ask students what the model was trained on, whether results held on assets it had not seen, and why a vendor-involved study deserves a second look.
The retailer behind today's AI creative study, with live figures from the Oct. 6 close.
The Kroger Co. (KR): The Retailer Betting on Creative AI
KR closed at $58.41 on Oct. 6, down 0.63%, inside a 52-week range of $54.15 to $76.58. StockAnalysis shows a market cap of $34.50 billion, a trailing P/E of 33.95 and a forward P/E of 10.92. The dividend is $1.56 per share, a 2.67% yield. Twenty-four analysts rate it Buy with an average target of $68.14, about 16.7% above the close. Trailing revenue was $149.33 billion and trailing net income was $1.08 billion, down 60.2%.
The bull case is the work in today's AI story: retail media, e-commerce and predictive creative scoring that could squeeze more conversion out of every ad dollar. The bear case is a shrinking bottom line and a share price well below its 52-week high. Tools like Vidmob scoring only matter if they show up in margins, so the next earnings report is the scoreboard.
A grocer using AI to pick better ads is an efficiency story, and efficiency stories get judged on margin. Watch whether retail media and e-commerce growth outrun the profit decline. Until then, treat KR as a watch item, not a pick.
⚠️ Not investment advice. Verify independently before any decision.
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