Good morning. Today, chief marketing officers get in the game; the Cracker Barrel rebranding claims a company director; and the new head of CBS News is booking guests and approaching possible anchors.

Booming interest in women’s sports, Formula 1 and soccer is opening new roles for senior marketers who want to work outside the corporate earnings cycle, Katie Deighton reports.

“It gets them out of just selling products,” said Ash Wendt, president and co-founder at executive recruiter Cowen Partners, which has placed marketing and sales execs with sports teams including Italian soccer club Como 1907.

But sports CMO is a competitive opening and a demanding job. Hours are long, decisions have to be quick and fans can be more brutal than shareholders. (See: The BOS Nation backlash.)

“At JPMorgan the office has something like 19 restaurants in the building and Drybar products in the bathroom,” said Radhika Duggal, CMO of Major League Soccer and a former JPMorgan, Deloitte and Super.com executive. “We don’t have that and I didn’t expect it. But what I did expect, which has come to fruition, is we move really fast, we get energy from being physically around each other and brainstorming with a whiteboard. I don’t need the Drybar products.”

Katie spoke with Duggal and four more sports CMOs who came from outside about how they found life after the leap, why they made it and, in one case, why they’ve moved on again. Meet them all here.

That semi-secret trip to smoke pot before Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner is mushrooming into a full-blown commercial holiday of its own, Ellen Gamerman writes.

The cousin walk, which also goes by no name and many names—“cousins walk,” “Thanksgiving walk” and “pre-dinner safety meeting”—is big enough to spur sales on what’s now known as “Green Wednesday,” the day before Thanksgiving. Dispensaries say it’s often the second-biggest day for cannabis sales after 4/20.

The New York dispensary Gotham just released ads for a product called “Cousins Walk,” a container of pre-rolled joints that travels easily for what the company calls “a secret society that meets once a year.”

Some food businesses are embracing the occasion too.

“Pre-Thanksgiving-Dinner Cousin Walk,” one Instagram ad for Jif peanut butter read last year over a picture of a guy holding open his jacket with a Jif squeeze pouch tucked inside. 

Cracker Barrel shareholders voted to retain the company’s embattled chief executive after its calamitous rebranding campaign, but sent a clear message of discontent, Heather Haddon reports.

In a binding vote Thursday, Cracker Barrel shareholders voted around 75% of shares in favor of keeping CEO Julie Felss Masino on its board, according to preliminary results.

Board member Gilbert Dávila, a longtime marketing and diversity specialist, didn’t receive the necessary votes to stay on the board and has resigned, the company said.

Masino and Dávila both had been targeted by activist efforts after the chain’s logo change and restaurant remodels set off a political firestorm over the summer.

For a sense of Bari Weiss’s approach to leading CBS News in her first weeks on the job, Joe Flint and Isabella Simonetti write, consider a phrase the new editor in chief has used as a rallying cry in meetings with colleagues: “I wanna blow this up.”

The former New York Times columnist turned anti-woke crusader is working to overhaul the longtime third-place “CBS Evening News,” counter what she calls left-leaning bias in legacy media and make the newsroom more efficient.

One shift has been her approach to talent management and operations. She recruits some guests herself without bookers or producers, and has contacted outside talent directly about joining the network instead of going through their agents.

Weiss has told some friends and colleagues she is most interested in a male anchor, mentioning names including CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Fox News’s Bret Baier, both of whom are under contract.

The community where marketing leaders drop the corporate speak and share what’s actually happening. The WSJ CMO Council unites leaders from the world’s most influential brands including Adobe, Audi, Google, IBM, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, Meta, Taco Bell, P&G and Verizon.

Tap into the connections and WSJ intelligence that move careers forward and separate the prepared from the scrambling.

Request Information

Paramount, Comcast and Netflix have submitted nonbinding, opening bids for Warner Bros. Discovery, owner of the storied Warner Bros. movie and TV studio and HBO. [WSJ] 

Walmart said its low prices are drawing both low-income shoppers and high earners, contributing to strong sales in its latest quarter and a higher full-year outlook. [WSJ]

Pepsi will use Black Friday to offer a limited quantity of the Prebiotic Cola that’s set to reach stores next year. [Beverage Industry] 

The final eight, never aired episodes of the “Friends” spinoff “Joey,” which NBC canceled in 2006, are finally available to watch. [Variety]

Google gave advertisers across its properties free access to a pro version of its Nano Banana image generator for ad creation. [Ad Age] 

Amazon blocked more ChatGPT crawlers. [Modern Retail] 

Don’t abandon the em dash just because ChatGPT uses it too much. [WSJ]