Super Bowl Bonanza: The ADWEEK newsroom covered the Super Bowl from tip to tail over the course of the last week, chronicling every ad that made the Big Game, as well as the best and worst spots that ran during the lopsided contest. ADWEEK also premiered its first live-stream analysis of the ads, with segments running before, during, and after the game that featured a rotating cast of editors, reporters, and social strategists, as well as insights from our partners at ViralNation, who helped track public sentiment. Overall, I was underwhelmed by most of the ad creative, although I did enjoy the Levi’s and Fanatics spots. I really hated the Coinbase ad.
Food52 Is Served: The Food52 saga has finally reached its hard-boiled conclusion. On Friday, the publisher was sold in a Delaware bankruptcy auction for $10.3 million to America’s Test Kitchen, as I told you would happen last month. Its subsidiary brands, Schoolhouse and Dansk, were also snapped up—the former to Troy-CSL Lighting for $2.2 million and the latter to Form Portfolios for $250,000. Together, the transactions value the three businesses at about $12.75 million, roughly 4% of their peak valuation. For The Chernin Group, the private equity backers that invested over $100 million into the venture, the outcome represents a steep loss.
Run-a-Muck Sizes Up (Exclusive): The production studio Run-a-Muck, whose cofounder Pamela Drucker Mann led revenue at Condé Nast for nearly two decades until her departure in 2024, is quietly assembling a talented team to lead the venture. This week, the firm brought in Kimberly Diaz, most recently of Wondery and Google, to lead its advertising and brand partnerships. Last year, it also added former Paper editor in chief Justin Moran to helm its flagship Substack, called Drafting. The startup currently has more than 20 projects in development, including a television series produced by Kristen Stewart and an adaptation of the novel Stag Dance.
Amazon Eyes Content Marketplace: Amazon is exploring launching a content marketplace, making it the second technology firm to do so behind Microsoft, according to reporting from The Information. I hinted at this in December, when I noted that a passel of media executives had flown to Seattle to speak with the retail giant about the possibility of it paying for their content, but it appears the concept has grown more serious in recent weeks. Along with the Microsoft news, this is a positive development for publishers: If the backers of major LLMs begin paying content creators to use their data, it could lead to revenue in the short term and, more importantly, the formation of a competitive market for websites’ content in the long term.
