Skip to main content
Brand Strategy

Inside the reunion tour marketing machine

Brands like Spotify, Adidas, and Amazon are getting involved in the Oasis tour—even though “anything could happen at any time,” one marketer said.

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

Illustration: Morning Brew, Photos: Adidas, Adobe Stock, Oasis

7 min read

If your TikTok feed looks anything like ours, you’ve probably seen videos of people surprising their dads 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 donning Adidas bucket hats and having emotional experiences watching Oasis perform—as their kids continue to document them online.

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

Volatile relationship

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

Music marketing machine

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.

Get marketing news you'll actually want to read

Marketing Brew informs marketing pros of the latest on brand strategy, social media, and ad tech via our weekday newsletter, virtual events, marketing conferences, and digital guides.

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 reportedly sold out within an hour.

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.”

Get marketing news you'll actually want to read

Marketing Brew informs marketing pros of the latest on brand strategy, social media, and ad tech via our weekday newsletter, virtual events, marketing conferences, and digital guides.