BRAND: Like Clint Eastwood and Christopher Nolan, Maverick Carter has his office on the Warner Bros. studio lot. Once you get past security, you drive by pinup western storefronts to a section of cookie-cutter houses with vinyl siding. (Gilmore Girls was filmed here.) Even the grass looks like it's from Milwaukee. Outside one of the houses are reserved parking spots that read: “M. Carter” and “L. James.”

ESPN's new site launching Tuesday will focus on content from an African American perspective. It's been called "The Black Grantland" but the voice of the site makes it a direct competitor to sites for black millennials like Blavity. With beautiful original photography, long form, and short form, the site does a great job of reaching its audience - young and old, hip or square.

ECOMMERCE: The chasm between e-commerce and its brick-and-mortar counterpart is expanding, and people’s shopping preferences are evolving in turn. In this day and age, retailers have little choice but to adapt to an interconnected world and to their customers’ shifting expectations of the shopping experience.

BRAND: Tough Mudder has expanded quickly by designing its marketing and messaging around shareable content like photos and videos from its events with the #ToughMudder hashtag. There are now nearly a half million posts with the hashtag on Instagram alone. But it is video that is the brand’s new focus. An in-house team of three people oversees branding and creative, including content, copy and video.

DATA: The fact that corporations around the world are embracing business intelligence (BI) should come as no surprise. As you’d imagine, the advanced analytics developed by world-class BI practitioners leads to deeper insight and significantly enhanced performance. But decidedly newsworthy is the degree to which the most successful BI programs are migrating.

The move represents a big expansion of Facebook’s existing off-site partnerships, including the Audience Network. To sweeten the deal, Facebook is also offering cross-site ads with placement next to content appearing on its own Instant Articles platform, wooing publishers and advertisers with additional scale and convenience.

BRAND: In addition to offering an unprecedented look at the interdependence of media, corporate communications, and information emanating from consumers, the study underscores how the importance of Twitter in brand management has exploded since 2010--even more than one might expect--and how the influence of other channels has waned.

MEDIA: It's upfront season in the US, the time when broadcast and cable networks make their glitzy annual pitches to marketers, and secure half their advertising sales for the year. As the highest-rated US cable network, the sports-focused Disney-owned channel ESPN has historically held an enviable position during the upfronts.

DATA: For several months, a handful of marketers including Dick’s and Allstate Corp. have been testing ESPN’s latest ad product, which will be formally announced during ESPN’s upfront event in New York City today. The company plans to roll out a similar tool for video ads that appear on ESPN.com and ESPN’s streaming app within six to nine months.

ECOMMERCE: Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) might seem a bit overwhelming when you’re looking at an entire e-commerce website. Where should you focus your testing efforts and how do you decide what to test first? There are so many opportunities because of the variety of pages to choose from, including the: homepage, category pages, product pages, shopping cart page, checkout process.

DATA: Email marketers have a lot of tools at their disposal. Some of these services pride themselves on sending billions of emails each month, while others provide a more crafted, intimate experience. For all of them, their core value has been helping people send bulk emails, manage subscriber lists, and track their results.

ECOMMERCE: Via computer or smartphone UPS will provide a “detailed view” of a package’s location when it’s out for delivery—though it will not show a driver’s exact delivery route. According to a press release, UPS also plans to add more services to the feature in the future.