Starting with the 2026 fair, running August 21 to September 7, the CNE Bandshell is officially the Bell SOUNDSTAGE at the Bandshell, done in partnership with Billboard Canada and Rolling Stone Canada. A brand new NXNE Stage is being added alongside it, built specifically to showcase breakout artists on the cusp of stardom, through a partnership with Toronto’s NXNE Music Festival.

Why Rebrand a 90-Year-Old Stage

Mark Holland, CNE CEO, framed it as building on the venue’s history rather than replacing it. He pointed out the Bandshell has hosted Joni Mitchell, Johnny Cash, Blondie and Rush over the decades, and said the fair has, at times, drifted away from live music before pulling it back into focus. The rebrand, in his words, is how the CNE ensures music becomes an even bigger part of what the fair means to Canadians.

That is a smart way to handle a legacy asset. Instead of tearing down 90 years of brand equity, the CNE partnered with two media names that already carry credibility with music audiences, Billboard Canada and Rolling Stone Canada, and let them lend relevance to a stage that risked feeling dated to younger fairgoers.

The CNE Bell Soundstage Lineup Doing the Talking

The first headliners announced include Lupe Fiasco, Shaggy, Tom Cochrane, The Trews, Lights and Silverstein, a mix that leans heavily Canadian while still pulling international names. All of it remains free with regular CNE admission, and the fair is adding a Front Row VIP add-on this year with a reserved viewing area, lounge access and a dedicated bar.

The NXNE partnership adds another layer worth noting. Festivalgoers at NXNE’s June edition were invited to vote on emerging acts through an X Marks The EX campaign, with select artists earning a spot at the CNE through a Road to the CNE showcase. That is a neat trick: it lets the CNE tap into NXNE’s existing audience and credibility months before its own gates even open.

What Legacy Brands in Toronto Can Take From This

The CNE did not need a new stage. It needed new relevance, and it got there by pairing its existing history with partners who already speak to the audience it wanted to reach. That is a repeatable move for any long-running Toronto brand sitting on decades of goodwill but struggling to feel current. Borrow credibility from a partner who already has the audience, rather than trying to manufacture that audience from scratch.

More headliners are expected in the coming months, and advance CNE tickets are available now at a discount ahead of the fair.

We are covering stories like this as part of our ongoing Brand Watch coverage of Toronto marketing news.

The post The CNE Just Rebranded Its 90-Year-Old Bandshell, and It Is Smarter Than It Sounds appeared first on Marketeller.

This is a significant move, and not primarily because of the technology involved. In-game advertising isn’t new. What’s new is EA formalizing it as a direct-sold platform with named brand partners, a signal that the company is treating gaming as a media business, not just a games business.

What the EA In-Game Advertising Platform Offers Brands

The core premise of EA’s advertising platform is straightforward: brands can reach a large, engaged audience of sports game players through placements that are contextually native to the game environment. The ads appear where advertising naturally exists in the real sports world, stadium boards, perimeter signage, equipment, scoreboards, which means they integrate into the game visual language rather than interrupting it.

This native quality is the critical differentiator from traditional digital advertising. A pre-roll video ad before a game loads asks for attention from a player who is explicitly trying to get past it. A stadium board that appears during a match is seen by a player who is deeply engaged with the game and already familiar with that advertising context from watching real sports. The mental model of “brands advertise in sports venues” transfers directly to the game environment.

The targeting capabilities are also more sophisticated than passive viewing environments allow. EA knows a great deal about its players: what titles they play, how often, what modes, what teams they support, what regions they’re in. That data creates the foundation for audience segments that advertisers can reach with precision that broadcast sports advertising can’t match.

Why Visa and Lowe’s Make Sense as Launch Partners

The choice of Visa and Lowe’s as the platform’s initial brand partners isn’t random. Both companies are category leaders who understand large-scale sports sponsorship, and both have existing relationships with sports marketing that make the transition to in-game advertising conceptually natural.

Visa has been a FIFA World Cup sponsor for decades and has experience activating across the full spectrum of sports media, broadcast, digital, out-of-home, experiential. In-game placements inside EA Sports FC, EA’s flagship football title, fit logically within a portfolio that already includes presence throughout the world’s most popular sport’s official tournament infrastructure.

Lowe’s, meanwhile, has been investing in sports marketing, particularly around American football, for several years. College Football is one of EA’s titles in the platform launch, and the home improvement retailer’s audience has a significant overlap with the demographic of adult men who play football games. The placement makes intuitive sense for a brand that has been working to associate itself with shared male experiences around sports.

The Larger Media Shift This Represents

EA’s advertising platform launch is part of a broader structural shift in how media companies are thinking about gaming. For most of its history, the gaming industry generated revenue through game sales, downloadable content, and in-game purchases. Advertising was a secondary consideration, often limited to free-to-play mobile games where ad revenue substituted for purchase prices.

That calculus is changing. The sheer size of gaming audiences, billions of people globally, with concentrated clusters of highly desirable demographic segments, has attracted advertiser interest that wasn’t present when gaming was a smaller market. At the same time, the consolidation of major gaming companies into larger entertainment entities has created organizations with the scale and infrastructure to operate as media businesses.

EA’s move signals that the company sees advertising as a meaningful revenue stream alongside its existing business model. That’s a significant strategic shift. It implies investment in ad tech infrastructure, data infrastructure, and sales capability that goes well beyond what’s required to run a games studio. It also implies that EA believes advertisers will pay premium rates for access to its specific audiences, which, at 120 million monthly active players across sports titles, is a reasonable assumption.

What Advertisers Need to Know

For brands considering the platform, a few things are worth thinking through carefully. The native quality of in-game placements is a genuine advantage, but it also creates measurement complexity. How do you attribute a sale or brand lift to a billboard seen inside a virtual stadium? The metrics for in-game advertising are still maturing, and brands entering this space need to be realistic about what they can and can’t measure with existing tools.

The audience demographic is also specific. EA Sports games skew toward adult male players, predominantly in the 18-34 and 35-49 age ranges. For brands targeting those demographics, that concentration is valuable. For brands seeking broader reach, it’s a limitation worth understanding before committing budget.

The upside, for the right advertisers, is access to deep engagement. Sports game players spend hours inside these environments, not passive viewing hours, but active, focused, emotionally invested hours. The attention quality available in that context, at 120 million monthly players, is an advertising opportunity that didn’t exist at anything like this scale a few years ago. The EA in-game advertising platform is making that opportunity directly purchasable for brands at any scale. For more on how AI and technology are reshaping advertising formats, see our piece on what Amazon Alexa for Shopping means for brands. For official information, visit the EA website. EA’s platform is making that opportunity directly purchasable. For the brands that fit, that’s worth taking seriously.

The post Level Up Your Ads: EA’s New Platform Scores Big in Gaming Marketing appeared first on Marketeller.

That’s the central argument from Collectively, a creator marketing agency, in their recent work featured in partnership with Adweek. Their finding: the brands running the most effective creator-led campaigns are doing their most important work long before any brief is written or any camera comes out of its bag.

Why Authenticity in Creator-Led Campaigns Gets Lost in the Transactional Model

For the first several years of influencer marketing, reach was the metric that mattered most. Brands bought access to audiences through creators the same way they bought billboard space, based on how many eyes would land on the message. That worked reasonably well when sponsored social posts were still novel enough to register as genuine recommendations.

It doesn’t work the same way anymore. Audiences have developed a sharp instinct for detecting when a creator endorsement is authentic versus when it’s just a paid placement. The signals are subtle but consistent: a caption that doesn’t sound like the creator’s usual voice, a product that doesn’t fit their established aesthetic, an enthusiasm that reads as performed rather than felt. Audiences pick up on these cues even when they can’t explicitly name them. When they do, the association between brand and creator works against both parties.

The frustrating part is that brands often pay premium rates to access creators with large, loyal followings, then implement a process that undermines the very thing that built those followings: the creator’s reputation for honest opinions.

What Pre-Production Authenticity Actually Looks Like

Collectively’s approach reorients the entire campaign process around one key question: does this creator already have a relationship with our brand’s world, or are we manufacturing one from scratch for the purposes of a campaign?

There’s a real difference between a creator who already uses products in a category (who has genuine opinions, preferences, and firsthand knowledge) and one who is being introduced to that category through a brand brief. The first can speak with credibility. The second can perform credibility. Most audiences can tell which is which.

Getting to authentic alignment before production means going deeper than standard vetting. Engagement rates and audience demographics are a starting point, but the more valuable work involves reading comment sections to understand what a creator’s community actually trusts them on, spending real time with their content to map their aesthetic and values, and sometimes having direct, honest conversations about whether the fit makes sense at all.

When a creator is brought into the conceptual process early, the content they eventually produce reflects that investment. You can hear it in the specificity of how they describe the product. You can see it in the moments they choose to highlight. That specificity is what moves people from passive viewers to actual customers.

The Operational Shift This Requires

For most marketing teams, this approach requires rethinking timelines more than budgets. The biggest change isn’t financial, it’s accepting that the creator relationship needs to begin long before the typical campaign planning cycle allows.

Brands that do this well tend to share a few common practices. They treat creator discovery as an ongoing function rather than a campaign-by-campaign scramble. Instead of searching for creators six weeks before a launch with the brief already locked, they’re continuously building a roster of creators who are genuinely familiar with their category. By the time a campaign launches, the relationship foundation is already in place.

They also give creators space for real product experience before creative expectations are established. Sending product three or four months before the campaign window, with no ask attached other than honest feedback, serves two purposes. It gives the creator time to develop a genuine point of view. It also reveals which creators are authentically enthusiastic versus which are simply willing to participate. That distinction shows up directly in performance.

Finally, the briefs themselves are built to protect the creator’s voice rather than control it. The most effective creative briefs define the objective and brand guidelines clearly, then step back and let the creator own the execution. The instinct to over-specify is understandable from a brand safety perspective, but it consistently produces content that audiences have learned to tune out.

The Bigger Picture for Creator Strategy

The creator marketing landscape is at an interesting moment. The pool of creators with meaningful audiences has grown enormously, which theoretically gives brands more options. In practice, it’s also added more noise, more risk of prioritizing reach over relevance, and more room for campaigns that look good in a pitch deck and disappoint in the field.

Audiences have grown more selective in parallel. Platform algorithms have made it easier for niche communities to find creators who speak directly to their specific interests, which means the creators with the deepest trust aren’t always the ones with the biggest numbers. A creator with 80,000 highly engaged followers in a specific vertical can routinely outperform a creator with two million generalist followers when it comes to conversion and brand sentiment.

Collectively’s core argument is that authenticity can’t be manufactured in post-production or compensated for with additional budget. It’s either built into the relationship before the shoot, or it isn’t. And building it requires starting earlier than most brands currently do.

For any marketing team looking to get more out of their creator investments, start by asking whether your current approach to authenticity in creator-led campaigns begins early enough. The first question isn’t which creators to pick. It’s: how far in advance are we starting the relationship? For more on how brands are building marketing momentum around major events, see our coverage of the top brand campaigns of 2026.

The post Beyond the Camera: Why Authenticity in Creator-Led Campaigns Starts Long Before the Shoot appeared first on Marketeller.