Return of the heartthrob: Why the men of the early aughts are booked and busy in advertising

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 (where she has 3.1 million followers) and Instagram (where she has 1.5 million), 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 85-second spot, which was released in late June, Miller, in character as a dorky teen, sips a Bubly and is transported from her bedroom, where she’s got a poster of the early-aughts heartthrob, 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. (We’d rather Grenier go back to his character Chase Hammond in 1999’s Drive Me Crazy, but that’s beside the point.)

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.”

The ‘millennial mom’ audience

Katelyn Meola, brand marketing director for PepsiCo’s flavored sparkling beverages portfolio, told us that Bubly’s target audience—as well as the brand’s Melted Ice Pop flavor promoted in the spot—were well served by a nostalgic approach.

“The millennial mom is really our target for Bubly,” Meola said. “As we all are marketing social-first, these are those collective memories that we can all bond over…Not only was [Chad Michael Murray] in all of these shows back then, but he was beyond being on TV. He was on your wall. He was the poster boy of the era. There’s so many little inside jokes that we even lean into within the piece.”

Those inside jokes and ample references to the time period—which include capri pants, journal doodles, a well-timed All-American Rejects needle drop, and frizzy hair—are all crucial details for the social-first advertising to win over intended audiences, hopefully make the content go viral, and fill comment sections, per Meola.

Creating content that will appeal to an audience with attention to detail and accurate references is part of the “brand-ertainment” social-first approach that Snackish is also looking to produce, Tara Bosch, founder of Snackish, told us. But the key, Bosch said, is finding a way to make that content evoke a true feeling and connection.

“For us with the heartthrob, it’s really that nostalgia and that feeling of your inner teenage girl squealing that…evokes this joy and excitement,” Bosch said.

Nostalgia, all the rage

Evoking those feelings of joy and excitement goes beyond heartthrobs, too. Millennial mainstays like Hilary Duff and Lindsay Lohan have also been booked for recent campaigns that similarly channel the past.

Over the last six months, there’s been a “big push” for “nostalgia millennial talent,” Garrett Smith, agent, endorsements at UTA, told Marketing Brew. That millennial talent appeals to a generation where “the purchasing power is pretty substantial” at the same time that Gen Z is “interested in millennial culture, 2000s culture,” a convergence that has increased the relevance of millennial talent for brands, Smith explained.

Ashley Strom, senior director at Platinum Rye Entertainment, noted that nostalgia continues to drive many campaigns. Working with millennial talent who hit those nostalgia points allows brands to create marketing that has a “transportative quality” and create an emotional connection that also allows them to be in cultural conversation and pitch media outlets to get their ads to go further, Strom said, which likely makes it even more appealing to do so.

Of course, there are some heartthrobs who aren’t yet booked and busy—and who some marketers would love to see more of.

“Where is JTT?” Strom asked, referring, of course, to the actor Jonathan Taylor Thomas, best known for starring in the sitcom Home Improvement and who became a prominent feature of teen magazines of the ’90s and early aughts. “If a brand could book him to come out of hiding, that would be hilarious.”