Why Pride Marketing Isn't All Rainbows

Read more: Visit website

Marketing and sponsorship disputes have gone to the dogs. Hot dogs, that is. News broke yesterday that Joey Chestnut, 16-time winner of the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest on July 4, has been barred from competing because he signed an endorsement deal with a rival hot dog brand: plant-based Impossible Foods .

However, the sponsorship requirements of the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest gave Impossible Foods a much bigger opportunity to share its message than just signing Chestnut. After the initial excitement around the category as it started to grow about five years ago, plant-based meat has faced an issue that traditional marketing hasn't yet been able to solve: Sales have slumped because the products often don't deliver the same experience of eating meat and can be more expensive. It's been tough for the companies to land on a value proposition to present to their target consumers. Impossible Foods, one of the leading companies in the space, kicked off a campaign last month that frames its products as meat, too—just from plants.

Chestnut is one of the most well-known carnivores in the nation, and a key person to push forward Impossible's new marketing campaign: Impossible's Beef Hot Dog still is meat. However, Major League Eating's ban of Chestnut is reinforcing that message. If they didn't consider Impossible to actually be a competitor, it's likely that Chestnut would be in the lineup to down dogs on Coney Island again this July 4. And because the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest is such a quirky Independence Day tradition, the story about Chestnut—and Impossible Foods—is appearing in hundreds of news feeds.

The latest big change in the social network formerly known as Twitter has rolled out. Elon Musk, owner of X, confirmed in a post that "likes" will now be automatically hidden . This move has been talked about by many in the upper levels of X, and was made official this week. X director of engineering Haofei Wang talked about the change in an X post last month, saying, "Public likes are incentivizing the wrong behavior … many people feel discouraged from liking content that might be 'edgy' in fear of retaliation from trolls, or to protect their public image." Paid X users have had this feature since last summer.