Everything old is new again—or, maybe, made new again.

In recent brand campaigns from brands including Columbia Sportswear, Gushers, Pringles, Tootsie Roll, and Acuvue, marketers have dug back into the brand archives, sometimes even tapping into existing fandoms around past campaigns, to both reimagine the work for today’s audiences and lean on nostalgia to try to connect with past fans.

Take the snack brand Gushers, which expanded upon its surreal ’90s ad “Fruitheads,” with a short horror film for Halloween this year. The ad, a faux origin story directed by Mike Diva and starring The West Wing and Get Out’s Bradley Whitford, was designed in part because of the fandom and conversation that already existed around the original commercial, Stephanie Lensing, brand experience manager for Gushers at General Mills, said.

“For a long time, we’ve watched the Gushers ‘Fruitheads’ commercial live this wild, second life online as one of the strangest commercials of the ’90s,” Lensing told Marketing Brew in an email. “The original had this dreamlike, almost unsettling quality that was so ahead of its time. Our goal was to capture that same energy through modern storytelling and bold visuals that live naturally online.”

Given how difficult it can be for ad campaigns to break through, ad agency execs say it’s no surprise that brands are taking an interest in reviving their marketers’ work of yesteryear. If something appealed to brand audiences previously, especially if there’s a fandom or nostalgia for the time during which that work was produced, it can be a quick way for marketers to move the needle.

“It’s really hard for brands to stand out today, and it’s really hard for brands to build resonance,” Daryl Giannantonio, chief strategy officer for VML in New York, told Marketing Brew. “If brands have something that has been true to their ethos and people still recall it today, why wouldn’t you lean into it?”

Continue reading here.—KM

Paralympic snowboarder Mike Schultz, Olympic speed skater Erin Jackson, and Olympic freestyle skier Colby Stevenson are all among the best athletes in the country. They are also star examples of how athleticism and engineering and technology meet.

With less than 100 days to go until the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics and Paralympics, Autodesk, a Team USA sponsor, is running a campaign starring Schultz, Jackson, and Stevenson that highlights the overlap between elite athletes and professionals like engineers, architects, and designers who use the platform.

“There’s such a parallel with the Olympians,” Autodesk CMO Dara Treseder told Marketing Brew. “Think about the process and the journey and all that goes into making these athletes ready to win…This campaign is really about the makers behind the medals, whether it’s the athletes, the engineers, the builders, everybody who helps to turn this imagination into reality.”

The campaign marks Autodesk’s first foray into Olympic-related marketing, and it rolled out Oct. 29, exactly 100 days until the Winter Games. Created by Autodesk’s creative and media agency of record, Giant Spoon, the 30-second spot, part of the brand’s “Let There Be Anything” content series, shows Schultz, Jackson, and Stevenson training and competing, with Autodesk tools overlaid on some of the shots.

The ad is meant to feel “optimistic” and “inspiring,” Ian Grody, chief creative officer at Giant Spoon, told us, and is ultimately meant to encourage more people to use Autodesk, Treseder said. The idea started with a Venn diagram of Olympians and Autodesk users, according to Grody, and the team landed on the idea that for both groups, “every millimeter counts.”

“We realized that there is a lot they have in common,” he said. “They are two groups of people where precision means everything.”

Read more here.—AM

Since TikTok Shop’s launch two years ago, brands large and small have worked to turn the platform’s 170 million U.S. users from scrollers into shoppers. Increasingly, that’s included more food brands, offering products ranging from limited-edition Doritos and trending Swedish candy to fresh halibut.

TikTok Shop continues to gain traction, with overall sales up 120% YoY, and the food category’s growth more than doubling, according to Amanda Parker, head of food at TikTok Shop. While beauty has led the way, food is the second biggest category on the platform, accounting for nearly 14% of sales, according to Capital One Shopping.

And it isn’t just a place to find smaller, digitally native brands. Big CPG players like Frito-Lay, OLLY, Cholula, and Keurig now sell on the platform, too—even grocer Lidl joined the platform in the UK this year—along with a slew of emerging brands, like Waterboy, Drizzilicious, and Hormbles Chormbles, gaining in popularity.

While the level of brand recognition may vary, the novelty of TikTok Shop for food presents a sort of level playing field for brands on the platform as they vie for the piece of the pie.

Continue reading on Retail Brew.—EC

Executive moves across the industry.

• Kepler upped co-founder and North American CEO Remy Stiles to the role of global CEO.
• BambooHR hired its first CMO: Adam Christensen, who has held senior roles at PayPal and IBM.
• Highdive hired Mischief EVP of Strategy Nimisha Jain as chief strategy officer.
• VML’s global president, Mel Edwards, is preparing to retire next spring.
• Twitch global comms head Michelle Scully is leaving the company.