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Marketing Brew

Katie Hicks

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Brands are capitalizing on ’90s nostalgic appeal 

Why brands like Osea Malibu, Skims, and Reformation are all capitalizing on throwback appeal. 

The ’90s—and the icons that defined the decade—are so back 

Jasmine Sheena

Why Spotify‘s personalization features are in the marketing spotlight

“People see their friends having fun with Daylist and they want to get in on the action, too,” Spotify’s senior director of global marketing said.

The FOMO effect: Why Spotify‘s personalization features are in the marketing spotlight

Alyssa Meyers

MLS revenue from sponsorship, season tickets, and merchandise is all up

“We have an audience that’s young, they’re multicultural, they’re tech savvy,” one MLS exec said. “Marketers are really drawn to that.”

Two dots and an arrow connected by a curving line denoting marketing brand strategy

Brand Strategy

A cartoon image of Kristina Monllos created by Morning Brew

Kristina Monllos

The idea for the latest 30-second ad from pet product maker Whisker was simple: Do nothing. Well, almost nothing.

“When you look through your feeds or you’re watching something, ads are in overdrive: poppy music, fast cuts, super dynamic,” said Joe Ciccarelli, head of creative at Whisker, the maker of the self-cleaning litter box Litter-Robot. “This one was like, ‘Let’s do none of that.’”

Instead, for an ad that ran on Fox, CNN, C-Span, and Bloomberg as well as YouTube, Whisker had a single shot of a cat sitting in the company’s litter box, seemingly doing its business for nearly the full 30 seconds of the ad, while elevator music plays.

“It’s a cat just sitting there looking at you, and then paying it off at the end by saying, ‘Hey, we just gave you that because we care about you,’” Ciccarelli said.

Whisker’s in-house team of creatives is among a contingent of marketers looking to scale back and do less with their ad creative.

During broadcast and cable election coverage late last year, mental health app 

 offered viewers 30 seconds of silence as a respite from the breakneck coverage. During the Super Bowl broadcast in February, toilet-paper brand 

 gave viewers a break from the game (and the ads) by telling them to use their 30 seconds to head to the bathroom—complete with a countdown clock and soothing music.

For some brands, it’s not a matter of budget or altruism driving them to do less with their allotted time. Instead, there seems to be a recognition that, at a time when consumers are inundated with more advertising than ever before, positioning a brand as a pressure relief valve can be powerful.

“It’s a bit of a counter-trend,” Allison Arling-Giorgi, head of brand for advertising shop Method1, said. Given the “information overload” that people are experiencing today, she added, brands and marketers that take this approach are “expressing a level of empathy and humanity to consumers.”

It’s not exactly a new idea for brands to seek out ways to be a relief rather than a burden, but tapping into that sentiment can be particularly powerful in an age of the endless scroll.

“The [idea that] we all need a break… that idea is something that has existed forever in some way or another,” Amanda Skudlarek, executive creative director at M+C Saatchi Clear, said. “That idea of, life is hectic and life is busy, and let’s take a break from that, or your feed is busy and you’re being pelted by communications—that’s going to continue.”

For many brand marketers, upping the ante can take many forms, whether that’s pulling celebrity PR stunts, picking fights with other brands, or displaying 

 head-on. Generally, Arling-Giorgi noted, “It’s quick hooks, loud sounds, eye-catching visuals [that] break through the feed, break through the clutter.”

For Whisker, positioning its own quiet ad as a moment of advertising relief (which itself serves as a reference to the cat’s use of the Litter-Robot device) seems to be resonating with audiences, at least when looking at its performance.

“Almost 50% of people are watching this all the way through,” Ciccarelli said. “I think [the] industry standard is like 15% or 18%, and it’s way higher than our other ads.”

For brands taking the less-is-more approach, the current cultural landscape makes for a ripe opportunity.

“Almost everything in society is anxiety-inducing right now,” Mike Hayward, chief creative officer and partner at creative agency Copacino Fujikado, said, adding that marketers should look to respond to cultural cues. “You’re supposed to fear for the economy, for democracy. You’ve got global crisis, humanitarian crisis. Is your job going to be there in a year?”

That’s having a profound effect on the American consumer. In 2024, the American Psychiatric Association’s 

 found that 43% of adults felt more anxious than the previous year, up six percentage points from 2023.

Copacino Fujikado, which works with Visit Seattle, has made slower-paced spots, as well as ASMR-style ads highlighting the potential for visitors to relax in the city, Hayward said.

“It’s more about recognizing what as people makes us feel good, too, and [being] more singular in our messaging,” he said.

For marketers interested in doing more with less, though, agency execs stressed the importance of doing so in a way that makes sense for their brands—and recognizing when it might not work.

“Only so many people can use that message in a way that’s relevant before it feels just ridiculous,” Skudlarek said.

A photo composite of ads from AngelSoft, the Calm app and Litter-Robot

Would you watch this ad where nothing happens?

Brands like Whisker, Calm, and Angel Soft are using ad breaks to offer moments of relief from overstimulation.

Ads are loud, flashy, and in-your-face. Except these ones 

Dave Mead, chief marketing officer and co-founder of the Austin, Texas-based sparkling mineral water brand Rambler, thought he had landed on the perfect social video idea.

The plan was to outfit an old Jeep with the water brand’s logo and current tagline (“Chug Life”) and send it soaring off of a cliff in Glacier View, Alaska, as part of an annual Fourth of July car launch, recording the whole thing for social media. The hope was to make something entertaining enough to gain enough attention online and grow the brand’s social following while boosting brand awareness as Rambler moves into more markets nationally.

Leading up to the event, Mead said, he was feeling nervous about what might go wrong.

“I had butterflies because we only get one chance,” Mead told Marketing Brew. “What if there’s a clog in the fuel line? What if it dies and it just coasts over that thing and then just rolls down and is anticlimactic? Everybody launching a car there has the same dream and the same vision of launching their car farther [than] anybody.”

The Jeep didn’t end up going farther than anyone else’s car that day, and it didn’t end up soaring over the cliff at all. Instead, the car veered left and drove straight into two trees, taking them down—and, with them, Rambler’s carefully laid social content plans.

“I just thought, ‘I cannot believe we just spent months planning and preparing and spent all this money getting up here, and I have no car launch,’” Mead said.

The team didn’t linger on the failure for long—when they returned to Texas, they pivoted to sending water as part of relief efforts for the July 4th floods in Kerr County, Texas. After a few weeks passed, though, the team revisited the footage and tried to figure out if anything was salvageable.

Instead of chucking it altogether, Rambler’s marketing team ended up releasing the failed car-launch video. To do so, Rambler partnered with a viral fail video page, Send It, which has nearly 800,000 followers on Instagram, to spin the brand’s marketing failure into the social moment Mead wanted.

The team eventually recognized “that we were sitting on some gold,” Mead said. “There were 38 cars launched, 37 of them were successful, and they’re all the same. They’re all similar. Ours was unlike anyone else’s.”

Rambler is primarily focused on event sponsorship to get its cans of sparkling water into the hands of potential customers, and it’s using the moment to boost digital marketing efforts like it had initially planned—with some additional changes. Rambler paired a giveaway with the release of the car-launch video, offering those who like, follow, tag friends, and share the video a chance to win a free trip to Alaska for two and $500 worth of gear from Send It—to help boost interest in the spot.

“The intention was to go create some wild content, but not just let it live in our feed,” Mead said. “We’re gonna go create something cool, something wild, that people are gonna want to see, and that’s going to increase our following.”

Screenshots from Rambler Austin's Instagram of a car falling of a cliff and a station wagon on a forest road.

What happens when your social stunt goes terribly wrong?

Water brand Rambler wanted a viral car-launch video, but had to pivot after the car veered off course.

Jennimai Nguyen

Alison Brie and Dave Franco have been busy 

 each other’s sweat—but if that’s not enough to pique people’s interest in the duo’s new horror film 

, the out-of-the-box online campaign just might.

To drum up hype for the movie, which explores a codependent relationship through a body-horror lens and was produced by and stars the real-life couple, distributor Neon pulled a couple of stunts online, including releasing a 

 using special tech to track how a viewer’s pupil dilated during the film’s most eye-popping moments, offering to 

 of someone who proposed at a movie theater, and offering free couples’ therapy to anyone who felt the film’s themes hit a little 

The free therapy offer was in partnership with online mental health provider OurRitual, which supplied a free couples’ counseling session to fans who saw the film in theaters. Eran Yorkovsky, VP of marketing at OurRitual, said the partnership brought in high engagement rates, and he is hoping this campaign is only a piece of how the company can collaborate with the entertainment industry.

“[The film] aligns very well with what we are trying to help couples with,” Yorkovsky told us. “Although it’s a horror movie, and our goal is to make sure your life is not a horror movie, it felt right.”

Yorkovsky said Neon first approached OurRitual to collaborate, but admitted that the cold reachout “[almost] fell between the cracks.” The studio, he said, had initiated contact via OurRitual’s online support form, and while staffers found the message “strange,” Yorkovsky quickly took the call. After meeting with Neon’s team to discuss the potential partnership and watching an early version of the film, he was on board.

“I felt this is something crazy enough that it might work,” he said.

To participate in the giveaway, moviegoers were required to upload a photo of their movie ticket to OurRitual’s website before getting a free session. The company capped free sessions at 50 people, and Yorkovsky said while there were a few no-shows, a majority of those selected to receive a free session followed through. Though the company is still waiting on full results, Yorkovsky said the campaign led to several people converting their free session into full subscriptions.

“They leveraged the taste that they got from the campaign and stayed after for a longer time period,” he said. “People saw that opportunity and seized it.”

OurRitual’s investors were also “very happy seeing us at the forefront and as a brand that is recognized and that other brands want to partner with,” Yorkovsky said.

OurRitual promoted the giveaway primarily on its own social media alongside Neon and the actors’ own accounts, and it didn’t dip into paid media. Yorkovsky said he felt it resonated even without any ad dollars because it supplied the audience with something they actually wanted.

“When something provides value, it works regardless,” he said.

This isn’t OurRitual’s first time working with Hollywood behind the scenes: it already has an existing relationship with the Showtime show 

, as the show’s host, Orna Guralnik, also holds the company’s chief clinical officer role. But this campaign was the first time OurRitual had partnered with a movie studio, and Yorkovsky said he’s gotten the itch to see what else is out there in entertainment partnership–land.

“We have our general collaboration agenda, which is mostly around influencers in the space of mental health,” he said. “This was kind of a surprise and a very ad hoc one, but it gave us an appetite to do more things…in a similar way.”

Amid a sea of several summer horror releases, 

’s unexpected offerings have also prompted some fans to recognize Neon’s broader marketing approach. As one Instagram commenter put it, “Every time I think the marketing team can’t keep this up, you all deliver. Kudos to the whole team.”

The film, which hit theaters on July 30, has so far raked in more than $21 million at the box office, according to Box Office Mojo

A movie still from the movie Together starring Allison Brie and Dave Franco with their foreheads touching.

Why OurRitual offered free therapy sessions to “Together” ticket-holders

OurRitual partnered with the Neon film “Together” to provide free therapy sessions to fans in a stunt that felt “crazy enough that it might work,” a marketing exec said.

Why an online couples’ therapy service got involved with a buzzy body-horror movie

Sweetgreen is giving farmers the celebrity treatment, online and in person.

Dan Drake, a goat farmer and second-generation owner of Drake Family Farms in Southern California, is the newest face of the brand’s “Faces of the Farm” content series, which kicked off in the spring with fellow Sweetgreen supplier and potato farmer Alex Weiser.

The latest iteration of the series centers on Drake Family Farms, which supplies goat cheese that will be a mainstay of Sweetgreen’s upcoming seasonal menu. A campaign supporting the series officially launched last week on Wednesday with a teaser billboard of Drake in Times Square, while a video of Drake sharing his story and his farm went live online today. This weekend, Sweetgreen will host a “Goat Mart” meet-and-greet activation with Drake and his baby goats at its Silverlake location in Los Angeles.

“These farmers are heroes,” Jonathan Neman, co-founder and CEO of Sweetgreen, told us. “They’re so important to the food we grow, and they are the stars that make the food delicious, so we wanted to give them a bigger stage.”

We spoke with Neman and Nicolas Jammet, co-founder and chief concept officer of Sweetgreen, about why the brand opted for real spokespeople over celebrities and the story it’s aiming to tell in the process.

Sweetgreen has worked with small and local farmers since its early days in DC, when Neman said he developed connections with farmers at the Dupont Circle Farmers Market. Many partners, he said, are ones the brand has been working with for a decade or longer, including Drake Family Farms, and part of the campaign strategy is to inform customers of the brand’s commitment to continue doing so as it scales and works to differentiate itself from competitors.

,’” Neman said. “We’re not calling up a distributor and having the food come in. We’re working with real farmers and chefs.”

The marketing effort is also focused on projecting transparency and showing customers where their food is coming from, Jammet added.

“When you come to Sweetgreen and you order goat cheese or you get peaches, we do source them differently,” he said. “It does, we think, make a difference.”

The campaign shows the reciprocal nature of the brand’s partnerships. In Drake’s video, he says that Sweetgreen is “bankrolling the farm,” after mentioning his past need to sell goats to stay afloat. He concludes the video by saying that if everyone gets “three scoops of goat cheese at Sweetgreen, maybe [he] can keep all 3,000” goats.

While Sweetgreen is focusing on non-celebrity spokespeople for this campaign, it’s worked with celebrities in the past, including tennis pro Naomi Osaka, singer and actress Reneé Rapp, Phoenix Suns guard Devin Booker, and chef David Chang. Neman said there’s room for both types of partnerships in the brand’s strategy because they serve different purposes.

“There’s the authenticity of working with someone who actually is supplying our food and telling a big story around that, and then there are times where we want to tell a bigger story with Naomi or Devin around performance, or with chefs in…creating new menu items,” he said. “They each have a different angle.”

“Faces of the Farm” is a social-first campaign, Jammet said, with a focus on Instagram and YouTube. Neman said the creative approach to the series was inspired, in part, by brands like Patagonia and Nike and their work highlighting everyday people and athletes. This was the first time Sweetgreen experimented with bringing the campaign to a large OOH location like Times Square, which Neman said was not only a way of celebrating Drake but also surprising the Times Square audience.

“You see a lot of things in the Times Square billboards, but you don’t usually see a goat farmer,” he said.

Drake seems to agree. In a video shared with Marketing Brew, he shared his reaction to being in New York for the first time to see the ad. “Certainly one of the greatest events in my life,” he said.

As for who the next farmer to grace Times Square could be? Jammet said Sweetgreen has a couple of longtime farming partners in mind. Neman said they’re considering not only the signature products that Sweetgreen is proud of but also the people who are good on camera with a story to tell, like Drake.

“He’s someone who needs to be put on the screen,” Jammet agreed. “He’s such a star.”

A split image of a smiling farmer holding a goat with a ribbon around its neck, and a goat nuzzling a green book with Faces of the Farm on the cover.

Sweetgreen wants this goat farmer to be a star

It’s the latest installment in the brand’s content series, which aims to showcase farmers as celebrities in their own right.

Theaters aren’t just places to see movies—they can serve as a place for fans to gather, hang out, and build community.

That’s part of the reason why BoxLunch partnered up with theaters ahead of the release of 

Ahead of the release of the film, the merchandise brand, which sells movie-themed merchandise collections in stores and online, partnered with Fandango to offer free movie tickets to BoxLunch customers who spent $100 or more in-store, as well as free exclusive collectors’ pins during opening night at Regal Cinemas nationwide.

BoxLunch also showed up on the ground at San Diego Comic-Con in July to connect with fans and local residents while handing out free tickets to a screening at Regal.

Rick Vargas, SVP of merchandise and marketing, told us the activations were designed to showcase BoxLunch as a brand and create excitement around a major movie launch, but it didn’t end there. The brand has a longstanding partnership with the nonprofit Feeding America, where every $10 spent with BoxLunch helps donate a meal to food banks in the Feeding America network, and the goal, Vargas said, was also to emphasize the importance of building relationships with consumers in local communities.

“At the end of the day, we’re about giving back to the community, and specifically, giving back to your community, wherever you are,” Vargas said.

Though BoxLunch has been to SDCC before, working with a local Regal theater this year allowed the brand to demonstrate its ability to connect with audiences and be part of the hype around 

“Because of all of the excitement around the film, this [was] a great opportunity for us just to say ‘Hey, we feel the energy. We want to be part of this,’” Vargas said. “Let’s go and create an experience for our fans and get them into the movie theaters and really showcase the film and showcase what BoxLunch can do and how important it is for us to support the fans.”

At BoxLunch activation on the ground at SDCC, all available tickets were given away within two minutes of the brand’s announcement on its social media channels, Vargas told us. The brand announced several ticket drops throughout the day at different locations around SDCC via its Instagram Stories, and interested fans had to follow along for location reveals.

BoxLunch is nearing its 10-year anniversary, but as a still relatively new brand, Vargas said being on the ground at events is a key part of integrating the brand into pop culture and connecting with fans.

“We need to be there. We need to make sure that we understand what the fans are excited about, even beyond what we did with 

” Vargas said. “We go and we ask the customers, ask the fans, ‘Hey, what are you guys excited about?’”

BoxLunch’s partnership with Fandango continues through mid-August, and Vargas said the brand will continue to lean on social media, email, and in-store messaging to communicate its commitment to fans and philanthropy. So far, BoxLunch has been tracking engagement with social posts on its own channels, Fandango’s, and its theater partners to gather feedback on the campaign, as

well as seeking feedback from consumers in-person.

“With these relationships, we’re seeing consistency post release, where we keep the customers engaged with the film, we keep the customers engaged with the content,” Vargas said. “They’re just as excited this week as they were during the release week, which is atypical.”

Connecting the BoxLunch message to a theater audience was natural, and after 

leaves theaters, Vargas said there’s still more he’s hoping to explore in terms of winning over in-theater audiences.

“There’s still a lot that we can do going forward in terms of working more closely with the theaters, so they can also kind of amplify what we're trying to do [with Feeding America],” Vargas said. “But I think getting the folks into the theaters, into the stores, to tell that story and to kind of showcase the impact that customers can have to their specific communities is really important."

A composited image of screenshots from BoxLunch's Instagram, including cosplayers dressed as superheroes being interviewed.

Why BoxLunch teamed up with Regal ahead of ‘Fantastic Four’ 

 The 10-year-old fan merch brand gave away tickets and collectors’ items  as it emphasized  giving back to the community, an exec told us.

An all-too-literal guillotine league. Chainsawed sandwiches. A moshpit diaper.

Those aren’t just random words jumbled together to test your reading comprehension—they’re the outcome of recent brand collaborations with Liquid Death.

The canned-beverage brand has been inking more than 

 in the last year, striking deals with a bevvy of other big names, including Yahoo Sports (the aforementioned guillotine league), Sheetz (chainsawed sandwiches), and Depends (moshpit diaper), all of which are shown off in splashy social posts.

“We hope to be one of the better things in your feed,” Dan Murphy, SVP of marketing for Liquid Death, told Marketing Brew.

While collaborations are nothing new, the strange humor that’s a feature of Liquid Death’s brand mashups certainly

stands out. To understand what goes into partnering with Liquid Death, Marketing Brew caught up with Murphy to get a sense of the process.

 stage,” according to Murphy, who said that he has some 73 brands interested in partnering currently in his inbox. “We’re going to go into the Liquid Death world,” Murphy said of the reasoning he sees, “and we’re going to get exposed to this new audience.”

For interested brands, Liquid Death has a big stage to offer. Since its founding in 2018, the brand has built a dedicated fanbase on social media, with 7 million followers on TikTok and 7.3 million followers on Instagram. Murphy says the brand regularly earns more than a billion media impressions each month, all while keeping costs relatively low.

“We’re very much an influencer,” Murphy said. “We ended [2024 with] over 30 billion [earned media impressions], and that was on a spend of—I’m talking every production dollar, every talent fee, because we work with celebrities too—that was under $2 million.”

While the details of each brand partnership deal vary, Liquid Death’s typical arrangement when partnering with a brand is to contribute whatever creative that its five-person, in-house team lands on. The company generally asks that its brand partner cover “hard costs” of production, as well as the marketing budget and media resources that could include anything from influencer spend or light paid spend behind the campaign, Murphy said.

When considering partners, the most important factor is if the brand looking to link up is “aligned with our creative sensibilities,” Murphy said.

That likeminded spirit was what attracted Sheetz, a convenience store brand that operates its own irreverent social presence, to promote its recent partnership with Liquid Death, Ryan Sheetz, executive vice president of marketing and supply chain at Sheetz, told Marketing Brew.

“We have a lot in common, right? Both very bold brands, both very high energy brands, but both brands who really like to have a lot of fun,” Sheetz said.

For one day in late July, the brands offered Sheetz customers a new, if unconventional, way to slice their sandwiches: with a chainsaw. And no, it wasn’t just a lark just for social media; some 150 patrons in Cranberry, Pennsylvania, got to see their sandwiches chainsawed in half.

The whole endeavor required an unconventional setup.

“It took a lot of preparation and planning to make sure our store teams were well set up and we had all the proper safety and organizational measures in place,” Sheetz said. “We had a brand-new kind of food-safe blade that was put on the chainsaw, and we used food-grade lubricant instead of petroleum-based oil. I learned a lot about chainsaws that I never thought I would need to know.”

Jeremy Ekes, VP client strategy and services at January Digital, said Liquid Death’s built a reputation for unique partnerships where marketers are willing to take a leap, making its particular creative sensibility stand out in a landscape where 

“Generally, there’s probably few and far between in the industry,” Ekes said. “Probably a handful of brands you can think of that have the right to own that space, Liquid Death being one of them.”

Those kinds of out-of-the-box partnerships and unexpected creative aren’t solely for entertainment. Through all of its partnerships, Liquid Death is aiming to continue to boost its brand awareness—while educating consumers about what the brand offers, especially as its product lineup expands.

“We are talking more about product benefits than we have ever before,” Murphy said. “I think we found we had this great awareness number, and especially being a young company, but at least a third of those people still thought we were a beer or maybe an energy drink, so we had to work a little harder to make sure that message comes through.”

A woman holds a Liquid Death X Sheets branded chainsaw that she's just cut a sandwich with and it's splattered sauce on her face.

Want to partner with Liquid Death? Get in line 

The beverage brand’s strange humor and social fanbase has dozens of brand marketers vying to partner up, its SVP of marketing said. 

If your TikTok feed looks anything like ours, you’ve probably seen videos of 

 with tickets to the Oasis reunion tour since it was first announced. Now that the tour is officially underway and brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher are performing together again, said dads are 

 and having emotional experiences watching Oasis perform—as 

Simply put: The Oasis reunion can’t be ignored, making it no surprise, then, that brands quickly got involved.

In June, Adidas announced a collaboration with the band that included a 

 as well as an apparel collection featuring 26 co-branded pieces to be sold online and at tour stops. Also in June, Amazon debuted its 

 with exclusive merch and limited-edition items in tandem with a curated Oasis playlist from Amazon Music.

Spotify got into the mix in mid-July with its own campaign, “This is…An Oasis Fan,” a fan portrait series that was used for out-of-home ads in Manchester, London, Edinburgh, and Dublin, as well as a 

 of fans talking about how much the band means to them. Just this week, Oasis announced the locations of fan store 

 in North America ahead of the first gig on the continent on August 24 in Toronto.

For marketers and agency execs, the Oasis reunion presents a unique opportunity to tap into a tour that’s become a rare cultural force, even while the famously volatile relationship between the Gallagher brothers could present potential challenges for companies tying up with the tour. But working with artists is no easy feat, marketers told us, and can take months of special consideration to determine whether there’s a genuine fit.

“It’s not just any reunion, right? It’s like the biggest reunion in the last decade,” Billie Baier, co-head of marketing, Spotify UK and Republic of Ireland, told Marketing Brew.

Baier said the Spotify campaign isn’t without a level of uncertainty, considering the Gallagher brothers’ tumultuous history and 

. But that’s all part of the fun, making the reunion more enticing for fans; it comes with the potential for a curveball.

“With any campaign, there’s always a risk,” Baier said. “Anything could happen at any time, but you’ve got to take the risks that you believe in.”

Paul Furia, who previously worked in entertainment marketing at talent agency William Morris and now serves as head of content and creative packaging at Media by Mother, said that to mitigate that risk for brands, agencies and talent representatives likely negotiated with that in mind.

“This is where the recovering agent in me would answer: You will have strong protections in your contract,” Furia told Marketing Brew. “If anything were to truncate this, you would get your money back, or you would get your money back plus penalties.”

Spotify’s Oasis campaign was in the works for roughly six months, Baier told us, and the marketing team decided to focus its efforts on celebrating fans of the band. Spotify then worked with Oasis’s label and management teams, which provided archived footage, video, and memorabilia to support a one-day immersive gallery activation in London dedicated to Oasis in late July, Baier said.

The company declined to share its overall media spend for the campaign, but Baier noted that it was one of its biggest marketing moments for the year for music in the UK.

“Oasis is a British story. It’s a Manchester story, and it travels around the world,” Baier said. “The strength of the anticipation and the reach of the Oasis fandom globally makes [it] a super exciting story for us to tell from a UK perspective, especially in celebrating those fans and putting them in front of and center.”

Oasis’s management team and Adidas did not respond to requests for comment. Amazon declined to comment.

In general, marketers looking to advertise around a musical act’s tour will start by finding the best fit for their brand rather than aiming for the biggest possible get, Furia explained. Questions about the artist like, “Do they align with your audience?” and, “Do they share your values?” will come first followed by considerations like scale, reach, price, notoriety, and venue size.

In the case of Oasis, there’s particular value that the “cultural zeitgeist” of the tour comes from “artists of their age,” said Rick Faigin, executive vice president for Acceleration Brand Advisory—value that could help the tour stand out with brands looking to target slightly older audiences.

Once artist and brand details align, marketers and agency partners usually suss out how the partnership can be beneficial for fans of the act, whether that’s serving as a utility (like a brand sponsoring power-charging banks at festivals like Coachella for example) or providing something more integral to the story of the tour.

“You also don’t want to be a logo slap, right?” Furia said. “A lot of times, when you speak directly with the talent or the manager or the promoter, there’s usually a story that goes along with the tour…and if you can align yourself with the narrative of what that show is going to be, that’s a multiplier.”

For bigger tours, marketers could work a year or more in advance of when a campaign will roll out, but the timeline can depend on when in the tour cycle the brand activates their marketing. Brands that have more experience sponsoring tours may get involved with as little as a few weeks ahead of time, Faigin said.

“If you are a brand that you know it’s important for you to be part of the announcement of the tour and part of the offer you need to be much further upstream,” he said, adding that financial services brands offering early access to ticket sales typically need to button up details early.

Cost may vary depending on terms including exclusivity, length, territories, sponsorship level, original content creation, total number of assets, media days with the artist, and exclusive experiences. Faigin estimated that the cost could range anywhere from low six figures to seven figures or even eight figures for some artists.

“Part of it depends on what your value [is as a brand], what you’re bringing to the table from a value standpoint for the artist,” Faigin said. “If you are selling your tickets, they like that. If you’re putting advertising behind the offer or behind the tour, they like that, too. So you may pay less in a sponsorship fee and say, ‘Look, we’re going to put $500,000 or a million dollars into working media around the tour,’ and, depending on the artist, that might be very attractive.”

That said, he noted, brands typically believe there’s more benefit in sponsoring festivals like Lollapalooza or Coachella compared to an individual tour.

For brands, the cultural interest in the reunion has already had an effect. Following the reunion’s first show on the weekend of July 5, Oasis streams were up 400% in the UK and 320% globally on Spotify, according to internal data shared with Marketing Brew. It’s not just relegated to Gen X and millennial dads: the platform also found that there have been over 16.6 million “user discoveries” of Oasis so far in 2025, with more than 50% of those from Gen Z users.

The Adidas collection initially sold out, but has been restocked, and some of the hottest items (read: the bucket hat) have sold out multiple times. Tickets for the reunion tour have also been notoriously difficult to get: In North America, tickets were 

The hype, combined with continued uncertainty of how long the Oasis reunion might last, likely makes it all the more appealing for brands to show up and celebrate along with die-hard fans.

“Reunions sell, nostalgia sells, this one specifically because it was one of those bands that none of us thought would get back together,” Furia said. “That scarcity element is so important.”

An image of Oasis along with Adidas merch and a ticket. 