BRAND STRATEGY

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc, Photos: Vera Bradley, @bublysparklingwater/YouTube, @starbucks/YouTube

If a brand offered to make one of your teenage daydreams into reality, would you do it?

That’s a question that Erin Miller recently got to ponder. Miller, a millennial content creator who posts throwback skits under the handle @overthemoonfaraway on TikTok and Instagram, was recently offered the chance to collaborate with PepsiCo’s Bubly and star in an ad opposite actor Chad Michael Murray, who won the hearts of thousands of teenage girls for his roles in shows like One Tree Hill and Dawson’s Creek.

She took it.

In the resulting spot, released in late June, Miller, in character as a dorky teen, sips a Bubly and is transported from her bedroom to her daydream fantasy where Murray showers her with attention. Playing the stand-in for millennial women who once swooned over Murray was “very surreal” for Miller, who told us she was “barely acting” in the ad.

“Millennials immediately recognized the fantasy of it,” Miller told us. “It was about remembering what it was like to be 13. We all had celebrity crushes. We were all writing in our diaries and covering our bedroom walls with magazine pages and posters, and we would imagine what it was like if our teen crush magically appeared. That emotional memory is what people [connect] to.”

Bubly isn’t alone in tapping into that emotional memory, and is the latest brand to revisit teen heartthrobs of the ’90s and early 2000s. Nor is the brand alone in landing Murray; snack-food brand Snackish also got Murray to riff off of his role in the 2004 teen rom-com A Cinderella Story in some recent spots.

As for the other heartthrob ads:

• Last summer, handbag and accessory brand Vera Bradley tapped actor Devon Sawa to revisit his heartthrob status (and haircut) to make one woman’s fanfiction from 2002 into a five-minute spot;
• This past fall, Panera worked with Jared Padalecki and Matt Czuchry of Gilmore Girls fame on an ad that not-so-subtly references their respective characters, Dean and Logan;
• And this spring, actor Adrian Grenier may not have reprised his role as Nate in The Devil Wears Prada sequel—but he did score two ads, one for Jarlsberg cheese and another for Starbucks, both of which reference his character in the original film.

Audiences who once harbored these celebrity crushes may be thanking brand marketers, but it’s not pure altruism to bring back the heartthrobs of yesteryear to target core audiences. Instead, the feelings that ’90s and early 2000s heartthrobs once evoked can serve as a potential nostalgia cheat code to win the attention and affection of millennials today.

“Everything is so complicated and so scary to people right now,” Kelly Bayett, co-founder and managing partner of production shop Love Song, told us. “What it does is it brings you back to what you felt joy from, and what felt simple, and it didn’t have political undertones, and it wasn’t complicated.”

Continue reading here.—KM

      

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AI

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If you build it, they will come. And as OpenAI builds ChatGPT’s fledgling advertising business, the marketers are coming—slowly but surely.

With the platform crossing 1 billion monthly app users in May, according to Sensor Tower, some advertisers said they feel compelled to hop on the channel—at least to try it out.

“As a brand whose consumer is parents looking to keep their kids safe online, it would be crazy to not test that channel,” said Titania Jordan, CMO and chief parenting officer at digital safety firm Bark Technologies, which provides services including monitoring kids’ online activity. “We want to be where the parents are.”

But marketers told us that tests on the platform have revealed a number of product gaps that some advertisers would like to see filled from the platform, they told us, including more sophisticated campaign toggles and more comprehensive measurement tools.

Read more here.—Jasmine

      

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BRAND STRATEGY

Ingrid & Isabel

While some retail founders have opted for venture-backed growth, Ingrid & Isabel Founder and CEO Ingrid Carney believes there’s still room for a slower path.

The maternity clothing brand—which Carney launched in 2003 after inventing the Bellaband, the brand’s best-selling pregnancy accessory—has grown into the largest maternity label by retail sales in the US without taking venture-capital or private-equity funding, according to the company.

Per Carney, she never entered the business with a hard rule against raising outside capital. “I didn’t go into this saying, ‘I’m not going to raise money,’” she told Retail Brew. “I went into this saying, ‘Should I raise money or can I do it on my own?’”

After working at multiple startups, including VC-backed businesses, Carney ultimately decided she wanted greater control over the company’s direction. “I saw the pros and cons of that,” she said. “So for this company…I wanted to determine the path rather than have a board determine it for me.”

Read more on Retail Brew.—Jeena

      

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Morning Brew

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

For you: TikTok tips for marketers looking to stand out in the endless scroll.

Channel surfing: How TV advertising might be getting more accessible for smaller companies.

Getting steamy: Ad Age’s Hottest Brands of 2026, a list of brands capturing the zeitgeist.

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Ira L. Black/Corbis/Getty Images

Learn what new league CMO Rachel Epstein and CCO Brian Kelly had to say about working to kick audience and sponsor growth up a notch.

METRICS AND MEDIA

Stat: 185,658,801. That’s how many TV ad impressions Google generated during the World Cup, landing it the No. 1 spot on Samba Media Intelligence’s list of “brands that won the World Cup,” per AdWeek.

Quote: “We’re not going to make you the class clown…We’re using humor to signal awareness and understanding of your audience’s biggest pain points.”—Aidan Brannigan, founder of agency No Boring Brands, speaking to Inc. on how he brings humor to B2B brands

Read: “The latest darlings of social media marketing? Regular people with 500 followers” (the Wall Street Journal)