We’ve been covering rebrands long enough to know the formula for their announcement. A quote-filled press release is accompanied by some splashy before-and-after animations posted to social media, along with a detailed case study on the creative agency’s website for the design nerds (guilty).
The announcement of TripAdvisor’s new rebrand, designed by Koto, features most of the above. But the brand has also found a pretty hilarious way to announce the redesign of its owl logo.
The rebrand marks TripAdvisor’s 25th anniversary (Image credit: Koto)
You may like
(Image credit: Koto)
As emerging technologies, particularly AI, reshape B2B marketing strategies, many organizations are shifting resources toward digital transformation to remain competitive.
However, sidelining traditional marketing tactics to prioritize innovation can be a costly misstep.
Traditional channels such as print, direct mail, billboards, and events have considerable value, particularly when they are thoughtfully integrated with digital strategies and real-time demand intelligence.
Combining traditional and digital approaches offers a unique advantage, namely the ability for a brand to stand out in the sea of sameness.
Experiences that blend the old with the new are more likely to capture attention, foster trust, and drive meaningful engagement.
By aligning traditional media with digital insights and delivery systems, marketers can create a cohesive brand-to-demand experience – one that resonates with today’s self-directed, risk-averse buyers.
Here are five high-impact ways to integrate traditional and digital marketing for a more personalized and effective buyer experience.
When fueled by intent data intelligence, the cold calls of yesterday become the insight-driven conversations of tomorrow.
Intent data empowers organizations to identify where prospects are within the buyer’s journey and to gauge their level of interest in specific solutions.
This approach transcends cold outreach, enabling marketers and sales teams to engage with prospects who are actively exhibiting buying intent signals.
Before initiating outreach, Go-To-Market (GTM) teams can use intent data to identify:
Organizations can begin capturing meaningful intent signals directly from their own client relationship manager (CRM) and digital ecosystem.
Key first-party intent signals include:
Once foundational tracking is established, GTM teams should consider enhancing their database with firmographic and technographic data.
When integrated thoughtfully into your GTM strategy, intent intelligence allows you to engage buyers with relevant messaging, transforming passive prospects into sales-ready opportunities.
The most effective B2B marketers are meeting the demands of cautious, self-directed buying groups by orchestrating deep media presence that aligns with how prospects prefer to research and engage.
Yet, according to our own Q4 2024 market research, only 22% of marketing teams prioritize the creation of buyer enablement materials, highlighting a significant gap between awareness-building efforts and buyer-centric strategies that support purchase decisions.
The most progressive strategies integrate AI-powered targeting, first-party intent data, and omnichannel delivery systems to ensure buyers receive value at every stage of their journey.
We know that on average, 33-50% of buyers go through seven or more pieces of content during the purchase process. Print media offers a distinct opportunity to break through this noise and command attention.
When informed by behavioral insights and demand intelligence, print media can be strategically activated in niche publications consumed by your target buying groups, delivering a high return on investment.
Here is how B2B buyer intelligence enhances print media experiences:
For marketers focused on brand-to-demand integration, combining technology-enabled media strategies with high-trust formats, such as print, provides a unique and differentiated way to capture buyer attention.
Ensuring that key accounts receive a personalized follow-up experience through an Account-Based Experience (ABX) strategy is an effective way to bridge traditional event marketing with modern, buyer-centric engagement.
ABX enables marketers to connect with prospects before, during, and after an event, creating a cohesive journey that adds value at every stage.
Before the event, contacts can be engaged with targeted nurture streams that build interest and provide relevant insights, effectively “priming” them with content that addresses common pain points, frequently asked questions, or industry trends.
This not only enhances their readiness to engage at the event, but also empowers them with the context to have more meaningful conversations on-site.
For example, if a prospect receives content around B2B buyer advocacy in pre-event nurture, they may arrive at the booth with a deeper understanding of the topic and specific questions in mind.
This creates an opportunity for sales to engage in more relevant, high-value discussions, transforming a standard booth interaction into strategically qualified engagement.
By extending the event experience beyond the show floor, ABX ensures that traditional marketing efforts are amplified through intent-driven, personalized interactions.
This leads to stronger relationships, clearer value exchange, and accelerated pipeline progression.
To maximize the effectiveness of traditional advertising platforms such as billboards and posters, marketers can integrate geotargeting to bridge physical impressions with digital engagement.
Geotargeting enables the delivery of tailored follow-up content based on a viewer’s location, allowing billboard placements to align strategically with key account locations, such as near a corporate headquarters or an industry event venue.
When paired with compelling creatives and a clear call to action, such as a short, memorable URL or QR code, billboards can guide viewers to personalized landing pages that extend the message and encourage deeper interaction.
These landing pages can be tailored by industry, buyer stage, or intent signals, further enhancing relevance and conversion potential.
At a more advanced level, mobile location data can be used to identify devices that have passed by a billboard.
This type of geotargeting enables marketers to retarget those individuals with personalized digital nurture campaigns, reinforcing the original message across multiple touchpoints.
By combining location-specific placement with digital activation, billboards evolve from static awareness tools into measurable components of a modern ABX strategy that drives engagement and accelerates pipeline.
When executed with precision and relevance, direct mail can be a powerful tool for re-engaging prospects who have become unresponsive to digital touchpoints.
A well-timed physical asset can prompt renewed interest, particularly when guided by demand and buyer intelligence.
Technology can play a critical role in elevating direct mail from a generic outreach method in the following ways:
If five follow-up emails have failed to elicit a response, a sixth is unlikely to succeed. However, a timely and thoughtful piece of direct mail, such as a handwritten note, a tailored infographic, or a personalized token of value, can break through resistance and reinitiate dialogue.
Beyond performance metrics, direct mail also builds trust. When buyers feel recognized and understood, they are more inclined to engage, respond, and move forward in their buying journey.
As part of a broader demand strategy, direct mail plays a key role in creating high-impact, memorable moments that differentiate your brand from the competition.
More Resources:
Featured Image: JMiks/Shutterstock
AI Max now appears as a distinct search match type in reporting dashboards, giving marketers a new layer of visibility into performance data that previously lived in a black box.
How to find it. Users with AI Max-enabled campaigns can now segment their Keywords tab by “Search terms match type” to view performance specifically attributed to AI Max. That data includes critical metrics like ROAS, CPA, CPC, and revenue.
Zoom in. The AI Max match type covers queries surfaced through Google’s latest automation, blending:
This approach allows campaigns to expand reach beyond predefined keyword lists, often drawing criticism from advertisers concerned about cost control and relevance.
Why we care. This change marks a notable shift in how advertisers can analyze search campaigns powered by Google’s automation. By categorizing AI Max as its own match type, marketers can now analyze its performance separately from traditional match types, unlocking clearer insights into what’s driving results.
This helps teams make data-backed decisions about whether AI Max is improving efficiency or simply increasing costs, and ultimately allows for more intelligent budget allocation in an increasingly automated ad ecosystem.
Part of a broader beta rollout. First announced in May, the AI Max for Search campaigns beta gives advertisers the option to enable or disable AI Max within standard Search campaigns, offering flexibility to test the feature before full-scale adoption. The introduction of match type-level reporting is one of several visibility improvements included in the rollout.
The bottom line. Google isn’t just automating campaign targeting — it’s slowly making automation more measurable. With AI Max now treated as a formal match type in reporting, advertisers are better equipped to decide when and where AI belongs in their search strategies.
MarTech is owned by Semrush. We remain committed to providing high-quality coverage of marketing topics. Unless otherwise noted, this page’s content was written by either an employee or a paid contractor of Semrush Inc.
We all want to believe that the only thing that matters in design is work itself. And for a long time, that was more or less true (or at least easier to believe). In the early 20th century, the work of visual communication was largely split between commercial artists, illustrators, and printers. It wasn’t until the postwar period, driven by mass consumerism and corporate expansion, that graphic design began to solidify into its own discipline. Early modernist figures like Massimo Vignelli, Josef Müller-Brockmann, and Paul Rand (the closest person our industry has to Don Draper), operated within the cultural posture of architects and academics: method-driven system-builders and rational problem-solvers. They were public in a professional sense, via publishing, teaching, or speaking, but not quite public personalities. They could show up in an AIGA Journal photograph, but otherwise mostly stayed behind the curtain.
By the 1980s, the designer and their work were becoming more entangled. In contemporary art, the artist had become the subject. Chris Burden and Marina Abramović used their bodies as instruments in performance, Cindy Sherman staged elaborate self-portraits, and Nan Goldin exhibited photographs of her intimate circle in gallery settings. Meanwhile, celebrity talk shows, lifestyle brands, and self-promotion as entertainment were entering the mainstream. Design absorbed some of that same ethos, giving designers room to position themselves as cultural figures rather than just technicians. Tibor Kalman used Colors magazine to push his personal politics, while April Greiman layered her nude body into an early digital composition for Design Quarterly. If the early modernists sold method and mastery, this next wave began inserting personal stakes more clearly; client briefs still set the parameters, but designers were claiming more space within them.
When Stefan Sagmeister launched Sagmeister Inc. in 1994, he announced it with a photo of himself wearing only socks, plus a black redaction bar which implied that starting his own studio had given him a bigger dick. 1990s misogyny aside, the image captured where design culture was tilting: hiring a designer meant buying into their mythology as well as their output. Five years later, for an AIGA conference poster, Sagmeister had an intern carve the event details directly into his torso with an X-Acto knife and photographed the result. Eat your heart out, April Greiman – this was pure exhibitionism, designed to shock. James Victore built a parallel persona around outlaw bravado and brooding masculine genius; Neville Brody positioned himself as a renegade theorist, merging experimental typography with academic weight. These were auteur figures with a rockstar attitude. The client still signed the check, but the designer’s name was part of the product.
In 2012, when Jessica Walsh joined Sagmeister as partner to form Sagmeister & Walsh, he marked the occasion with another naked photo (quelle surprise). But in 2012, the duo added something new: a 24/7 livestream of their office on the studio website. You could now watch interns eating lunch and designers standing at the plotter in real time. In 2019, Public Works launched a similar livestream project, with a different creative team streaming their workspace each month. The studio itself had become the site of ongoing performance, collapsing personal life, process, and promotion into a self-reinforcing brand.
YouTube is rolling out a new audience analytics feature that replaces the “returning viewers” metric with more detailed viewer categories.
The update introduces three viewer types: new, casual, and regular. This is designed to help creators better understand who’s engaging with their content and how often.
YouTube now segments viewers into:
Screenshot from: YouTube.com/CreatorInsider, July 2025.
In an announcment, YouTube clarifies:
“These new categories provide a more nuanced understanding of viewer engagement and are not a direct equivalent of the previous returning viewers metric.”
There are no changes to the definition of new viewers. The new segmentation applies across all video formats, including Shorts, VOD, and livestreams.
The switch to more granular segmentation addresses a long-standing limitation in YouTube’s analytics.
Previously, creators could only distinguish between new and returning viewers. That was a binary distinction that didn’t capture the full range of audience engagement.
Now, with casual and regular viewer categories, creators can identify which viewers are sporadically engaged versus those who form a loyal base.
YouTube cautioned that many channels may see a smaller percentage of regular viewers than expected, stating:
“Regular viewers is a high bar to reach as it signifies viewers who have consistently returned to watch your content for 6 months or more in the past year.”
YouTube suggests that maintaining a strong base of regular viewers requires consistent publishing and community engagement.
The platform recommends the following tactics:
These strategies reflect broader trends in the creator economy, where sustained engagement is becoming more valuable than viral reach.
The new segmentation is now rolling out globally on both desktop and mobile, with availability expanding to all creators in the coming weeks.
For marketers and brands, the added granularity offers a clearer picture of a creator’s influence and audience loyalty.
As YouTube continues refining its analytics tools, the emphasis is shifting from raw numbers to actionable insights that help creators grow sustainable channels.
Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock
As Substack invests in video content, the platform’s smaller creators stand to gain the most subscribers and advertisers by embracing the medium.
Over the past year, Substack has considerably expanded its video tools for both creators and audience members. In January, Substack launched live video as a tool for all users. In early March, the company enabled video posts for mobile users for the first time; two weeks later, the platform rolled out its first TikTok-style video feed.
Six months into 2025, however, Substack’s video push has resulted in mixed results for creators on the platform, with the impact of video on individual Substackers’ subscriber growth varying widely depending on the size of the creator’s following, according to an analysis of over 58,000 active Substack accounts by Subalytics, an influencer marketing platform with data on Bluesky, Substack and Medium creators. (Substack has not publicly disclosed how many accounts have been active on the platform in 2025, but the company’s founders shared in a December blog post that “more than 50,000 publishers” had made money on Substack in 2024.)
Subalytics analyzed subscriber growth by comparing Substack accounts where over 50 percent of posts contained video to those using video in less than 25 percent of their posts. Among Substack creators with between 500 and 5,000 subscribers, video-heavy accounts grew by 47 percent since the start of the year, compared to only 36 percent for those relying on text. Among Substack creators with 50,000 or more subscribers, video-heavy accounts had grown by 11 percent, compared to 19 percent for text-focused accounts.
Unlike larger, “legacy” Substack accounts, smaller Substack accounts are more likely to be built around video from day one, according to Subalytics CEO Timofey Pletz. “The new, smaller accounts want to stand out on a platform that they’re trying to conquer, and they’re trying new things — and a new audience, or the same audience that is looking for something fresh, is starting to pick up on that,” Pletz said.
One such smaller Substack creator who has found success by focusing on video is Andrew Keen, whose Substack Keen On America has 3,100 subscribers — and who includes videos in 100 percent of his posts in 2025, according to Subalytics’ analysis. Keen, who also shares his podcast on Apple and YouTube, told Digiday that he had experienced a “very effective” uptick in both free and paid subscribers since introducing video to his Substack, although he declined to share specific numbers. Keen said that he does not currently have any brand partnerships tied to his Substack content.
Although Substack doesn’t view itself as a competitor of other video platforms, creators say it has unique benefits. Keen said that one of Substack’s biggest advantages over other video platforms is the depth of audience data it offers. Unlike YouTube, which only lets creators see the names of subscribers who’ve made their preferences public, Substack gives all creators access to a full list of their subscribers — including detailed metrics, such as open rates and subscription history, as well as demographic insights.
“Podcasting is a black hole,” Keen said. “Who knows what the real numbers are.”
Total subscriber count is a key metric for brands looking to reach a Substacker’s audience, per Pletz, who said that this metric provides a better sense of a creator’s overall reach than their paid subscriber count. Although influencer marketing activity on Substack remains relatively minimal compared to influencer marketing on other platforms, top creators that have used video on Substack, such as Jomboy Media, view the platform as a potential growth area for their sponsorship business.
“We work with a fantastic range of brand partners on our YouTube shows, and if the opportunity is right we’d certainly be open to pairing the right sponsor with our core community on Substack, especially if they can elevate the special offering we’re trying to build there,” said Jomboy Media CEO Courtney Hirsch. Jomboy Media views Substack as “a place for our core community members,” per Hirsch, who said that over 90 percent of the company’s Substack content is exclusive to the platform, including videos such as longer, unedited cuts of shows and trial runs of new content ideas.
Although top-tier Substack accounts that prioritize video are growing at a slower rate than text-heavy accounts, they are still growing, and some larger Substack creators view video — and particularly live video — as a key tool to help build their following. Glenn Kirschner, whose Substack boasts over 85,000 followers, said that he believes Substack is an additive opportunity because the fans who tune into his regular live broadcasts on the platform represent a different group than the million-plus subscribers who consume long-form video on his YouTube account.
“I think there’s minimal overlap,” said Kirschner, who co-hosts a podcast, the Legal Breakdown, with fellow political creator Brian Tyler Cohen in addition to his individual presence on YouTube and Substack. “With Brian, I know the Legal Breakdown skews very young; my YouTube skews older. Substack, I would bet, is somewhere in between.”
The video opportunity on Substack — particularly for smaller creators whose subscription growth has been boosted by the format — could help the platform maintain its lead with newsletter creators during a time in which some have grown increasingly wary of Substack due to both its perceived ideological shift to the right and its monetization model, which some say favors creators less than that of other newsletter services. To creators with a significant video focus, Substack’s more advanced video feed and video tools are a selling point to stay the course on the platform.
“I had been podcasting before on other platforms and always with a video and an audio feed, largely because of YouTube’s reach,” said Substack writer Michael Conniff. “When Substack came along, the user interface made it easy to do video with or without newsletter articles, so it became low-hanging fruit for me.”
There was a time when stories of damaged artworks weren’t so grimly common. Before smartphones and selfies, precious pieces weren’t so often pressed and leaned on in the name of content. But if reports from the last month are anything to go by, gallery etiquette is a dying art.
Putting aside examples of artworks deliberately targeted as part of political and environmental protests, we’ve seen a shocking rise in cases of pieces being damaged by gallery-goers taking selfies and videos. But is destroying a centuries-old masterpiece really worth it for the ‘gram? At least the worst botched art restorations had decent intentions behind them.
Was this worth the selfie? (Image credit: Palazzo Maffei)
You may like
Man breaks crystal-covered ‘Van Gogh’ chair in museum. #Italy #Art #BBCNews – YouTube
A portrait in the Uffizi Galleries was torn by a visitor taking a selfie (Image credit: Uffizi Galleries)
A discussion on LinkedIn about LLM visibility and the tools for tracking it explored how SEOs are approaching optimization for LLM-based search. The answers provided suggest that tools for LLM-focused SEO are gaining maturity, though there is some disagreement about what exactly should be tracked.
Joe Hall (LinkedIn profile) raised a series of questions on LinkedIn about the usefulness of tools that track LLM visibility. He didn’t explicitly say that the tools lacked utility, but his questions appeared intended to open a conversation
He wrote:
“I don’t understand how these systems that claim to track LLM visibility work. LLM responses are highly subjective to context. They are not static like traditional SERPs are. Even if you could track them, how can you reasonably connect performance to business objectives? How can you do forecasting, or even build a strategy with that data? I understand the value of it from a superficial level, but it doesn’t really seem good for anything other than selling a service to consultants that don’t really know what they are doing.”
Joshua Levenson (LinkedIn profile) else answered saying that today’s SEO tools are out of date, remarking:
“People are using the old paradigm to measure a new tech.”
Joe Hall responded with “Bingo!”
Lily Ray (LinkedIn profile) responded to say that the entities that LLMs fall back on are a key element to focus on.
She explained:
“If you ask an LLM the same question thousands of times per day, you’ll be able to average the entities it mentions in its responses. And then repeat that every day. It’s not perfect but it’s something.”
Hall asked her how that’s helpful to clients and Lily answered:
“Well, there are plenty of actionable recommendations that can be gleaned from the data. But that’s obviously the hard part. It’s not as easy as “add this keyword to your title tag.”
Dixon Jones (LinkedIn profile) responded with a brief comment to introduce Waikay, which stands for What AI Knows About You. He said that his tool uses entity and topic extraction, and bases its recommendations and actions on gap analysis.
Ryan Jones (LinkedIn profile) responded to discuss how his product SERPRecon works:
“There’s 2 ways to do it. one – the way I’m doing it on SERPrecon is to use the APIs to monitor responses to the queries and then like LIly said, extract the entities, topics, etc from it. this is the cheaper/easier way but is easiest to focus on what you care about. The focus isn’t on the exact wording but the topics and themes it keeps mentioning – so you can go optimize for those.
The other way is to monitor ISP data and see how many real user queries you actually showed up for. This is super expensive.
Any other method doesn’t make much sense.”
And in another post followed up with more information:
“AI doesn’t tell you how it fanned out or what other queries it did. people keep finding clever ways in the network tab of chrome to see it, but they keep changing it just as fast.
The AI Overview tool in my tool tries to reverse engineer them using the same logic/math as their patents, but it can never be 100%.”
Then he explained how it helps clients:
“It helps us in the context of, if I enter 25 queries I want to see who IS showing up there, and what topics they’re mentioning so that I can try to make sure I’m showing up there if I’m not. That’s about it. The people measuring sentiment of the AI responses annoy the hell out of me.”
Although Hall stated that the “traditional” search results were static, in contrast to LLM-based search results, it must be pointed out that the old search results were in a constant state of change, especially after the Hummingbird update which enabled Google to add fresh search results when the query required it or when new or updated web pages were introduced to the web. Also, the traditional search results tended to have more than one intent, often as many as three, resulting in fluctuations in what’s ranking.
LLMs also show diversity in their search results but, in the case of AI Overviews, Google shows a few results that for the query and then does the “fan-out” thing to anticipate follow-up questions that naturally follow as part of discovering a topic.
Billy Peery (LinkedIn profile) offered an interesting insight into LLM search results, suggesting that the output exhibits a degree of stability and isn’t as volatile as commonly believed.
He offered this truly interesting insight:
“I guess I disagree with the idea that the SERPs were ever static.
With LLMs, we’re able to better understand which sources they’re pulling from to answer questions. So, even if the specific words change, the model’s likelihood of pulling from sources and mentioning brands is significantly more static.
I think the people who are saying that LLMs are too volatile for optimization are too focused on the exact wording, as opposed to the sources and brand mentions.”
Peery makes an excellent point by noting that some SEOs may be getting hung up on the exact keyword matching (“exact wording”) and that perhaps the more important thing to focus on is whether the LLM is linking to and mentioning specific websites and brands.
Awareness of LLM tools for tracking visibility is growing. Marketers are reaching some agreement on what should be tracked and how it benefits clients. While some question the strategic value of these tools, others use them to identify which brands and themes are mentioned, adding that data to their SEO mix.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/TierneyMJ
Below are the cable news ratings for the second quarter of 2025.
The threat of widespread conflict in the Middle East and the U.S. involvement were the main news stories of the second quarter.
Despite these bubbling tensions, the second-quarter cable news ratings were not as impressive as those in the first quarter, as all three cable news networks experienced declines in total viewers and the Adult 25-54 demo during primetime.
MSNBC was the lone bright spot for the quarter as it was the only news network not to lose viewers in either of the measured categories during total day. Rachel Maddow‘s return to her once-a-week schedule did, however, hurt the network’s primetime momentum.
Fox News continued its streak as cable news’ most-watched network and also surged past a couple of the broadcast networks, ABC (2.977 million) and NBC (2.704 million), in primetime in total viewers. This was the network’s second-highest-rated second quarter in network history with weekday total day viewers, trailing its coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
Fox News Channel
Fox News averaged 2.633 million total primetime viewers and 304,000 Adults 25-54 viewers in Q2 2025. During total day, Fox News had 1.632 million total viewers and 202,000 demo viewers.
Compared to the first quarter, Fox News was down -13% in total viewers and -20 in the demo during primetime. When looking at total day, it was down by -15% and -18% in total viewers and the demo, respectively.
When comparing its performance in the same quarter of 2024, it saw a +25% increase in total viewers and a +34% increase in the demo during primetime. Looking at total day, the network was up +25% and +31% in total viewers and the demo, respectively. Fox News was the only network with year-over-year same-quarter growth.
Fox News’ domination at the top of cable news has now stretched to 94 consecutive quarters, according to Nielsen Media Research.
Fox News was the most-watched cable network during primetime with total viewers and was the third most-watched network in the demo. During total day, Fox News was again on top in total viewers and finished in second place in the demo.
MSNBC
During Q2 2025, MSNBC averaged 1.008 million total primetime viewers and 91,000 primetime demo viewers. During total day, MSNBC had 596,000 total viewers and 57,000 A25-54 viewers.
When looking at MSNBC’s performance vs. the first quarter in 2025, it was down in total viewers and the demo by -2% and -5%, respectively, during primetime. However, during total day, the network was up +1% in total viewers and was flat in the demo—the only network not to lose viewers during this daypart.
When compared to the second quarter of 2024, MSNBC was down -15% in total viewers and -20% in the A25-54 demo during primetime. It was also down -26% and -31% in the demo during total day.
MSNBC was the fourth most-watched cable news network in total viewers and No. 15 in the demo. During total day, MSNBC was in second place in total viewers and was 11th in the demo.
CNN
CNN averaged 538,000 total primetime viewers and 105,000 primetime demo viewers in Q2 2025. During total day, the network had 406,000 total viewers and 71,000 A25-54 viewers.
Compared to the first quarter, CNN was down -4% and -13% in total viewers and the demo, respectively, in primetime. When looking at how it performed during total day, it was down -5% in total viewers and -10% in the demo.
The network experienced a -13% decline in total viewers and a -15% decline in A25-54 during primetime compared to the second quarter of 2024. During total day, it had losses of -14% and -16% in total viewers and the demo, respectively.
CNN finished in 6th place during primetime with total viewers and tied for 9th in the demo with HGTV. During total day, CNN was No.5 in total viewers and landed in sixth place in the demo.
PROGRAMMING
Among Total Viewers
Among Adults 25-54
2025 Q2 Cable News Ratings (Nielsen Live+SD data):
PRIMETIME Fox News MSNBC CNN • Total Viewers: 2,663,000 1,008,000 538,000 • A25-54: 304,000 91,000 105,000 TOTAL DAY Fox News MSNBC CNN • Total Viewers: 1,632,000 596,000 406,000 • A25-54: 202,000 57,000 71,000
Q2’25 Cable Ranker by Adweek on Scribd
A story of a female footballer, as well as an outline of the hidden history of the women’s game, the inspiration for her debut graphic novel was sparked a few years ago when Anna was thinking about the 1921 ban on women playing on FA-affiliated pitches. “I started looking closely at team photos from that time and found them incredibly moving: the keen faces, muddy knees, and striped shirts of the players. I wondered what happened to all those women who had so many possibilities opened up for them, only to be shut down.”
A name that kept coming up on old women’s team sheets Anna uncovered in her research was Florrie, so the illustrator decided to create a fictional character with the title to create an adventure that would touch on both real and fictional events rooted in the period: “huge crowds at matches in London and Preston, international fixtures, dances at lesbian club Le Monocle in Paris and the devastating consequences of a ban on women playing a game deemed ‘unsuitable’ for women.”
The novel follows Florrie’s great-niece who discovers she was secretly a footballing legend in the early 20th century, and unearths Florrie’s hidden history “both on and off the pitch” – a narrative that “has some overlap with my experience of playing football, and with that of many players I know”, Anna tells us. The illustrator slowly formed the visual world of the book from a host of old photographs of even the smallest historical details to inform her drawing, like “berets the 1920s Parisian football players wore to the rides running at Blackpool Pleasure Beach in 1921”, she says.
An ode to unforgettable women in the sport, and a beautiful queer love story, Anna’s only hope for her debut graphic novel is that its tale touches readers with “the joy of playing football, the feeling of first love, and the discovery and celebration of a past that should be better known”.
