The best purpose-driven campaigns share one quality that separates them from the rest: they are built around a genuine commercial and cultural tension, not a values statement written by committee. When purpose is real, it creates the kind of brand conviction that advertising alone cannot manufacture. When it is not real, everyone can tell. Consumers,…
The Coca-Cola AI ad controversy is less a story about artificial intelligence and more a story about expectations. When Coca-Cola released its AI-generated remake of its iconic 1995 “Holidays Are Coming” Christmas ad, the public reaction was swift and largely negative. Critics called it soulless, uncanny, and a cynical cost-cutting exercise dressed up as innovation….
Mountain Dew’s gaming marketing strategy is one of the most studied and most misunderstood in the beverage category. The brand spent years, and significant budget, embedding itself in gaming culture through sponsorships, limited editions, and co-branded campaigns. Some of it worked. Some of it was expensive theatre that looked like cultural relevance from a distance…
AI is reshaping how brands show up, stay consistent, and build recognition at scale. But the brands getting real commercial value from it are not the ones chasing the technology. They are the ones who knew what their brand stood for before they touched a single AI tool. That distinction matters more than most brand…
JCPenney’s brand collapse is one of the most instructive case studies in modern retail history, not because the company made one catastrophic decision, but because it made a series of positioning errors that compounded over two decades. The retailer lost its target market by trying to be everything to everyone, then destroyed what remained of…
IPG’s AI strategy is one of the more coherent plays to emerge from the holding company world. Rather than announcing a single AI product and calling it a transformation, IPG has been building AI into its media planning infrastructure, creative production workflows, and data capabilities in a way that reflects how agencies actually operate at…
Coca-Cola’s AI-generated advertising has become one of the most discussed experiments in modern marketing, and not entirely for the right reasons. The brand used generative AI to recreate its iconic 1995 “Holidays Are Coming” Christmas ad, and the reaction was swift, polarised, and genuinely instructive for anyone thinking seriously about where this technology fits in…
Liquid Death marketing campaigns work because the brand made a single, irreversible decision early on: it would rather be ignored by most people than be forgettable to everyone. That choice, more than any individual campaign, explains why a company selling canned water in a crowded beverage market has built a brand with genuine cultural weight….
The most instructive marketing campaigns of 2025 were not the ones with the biggest budgets or the most press coverage. They were the ones where a brand correctly identified a real business problem, chose the right mechanism to solve it, and executed with enough discipline to see results. That combination is rarer than the industry…
Multi-channel social campaigns are harder to run well than most briefs acknowledge. The platforms are different, the audiences behave differently on each one, and the operational overhead of keeping everything coherent, on-brand, and measurable is significant. Most teams underestimate this until they are already in it. The challenges are not just technical. They are strategic,…
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