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Marketing Brew

Alyssa Meyers

marketingbrew.com

Why ‘inserts,’ aka the ads slipped into packages, are having a moment

The channel is experiencing a “renaissance,” perhaps due to the current economic climate, one marketing exec told us. 

Katie Hicks

Pete Davidson saying, "It's pronounced stonk market"

Q4 results show advertisers are pulling back spend—but there are exceptions

McDonald’s, for one, said its marketing was a particular driver of revenue and digital growth last year.

Minda Smiley

Responses from our Super Bowl reader survey

No one’s looking for a sappy Super Bowl ad, apparently: Most of you said you prefer humorous over heartfelt commercials during the game.

Brand text billboard coming out of coffee mug

Advertising

A cartoon image of Kristina Monllos created by Morning Brew

Kristina Monllos

A brand puts out a new campaign with imagery that looks like it could be AI-generated, eagle-eyed observers point out that said campaign is likely AI-generated, backlash ensues, the brand (sometimes) makes a vague statement of acknowledgement, and everyone moves on. Rinse and repeat.

That cycle has come for big-name brands like 

 in recent weeks. The use of (or, at least, accusations of the use of) AI-generated imagery in ads by major brands may signal a shift in the marketing landscape—namely that, slowly but surely, marketers seem to be getting more comfortable using 

, regardless of whether consumers are comfortable seeing it. (The brands did not immediately respond to Marketing Brew’s requests for comment.)

“You’re already seeing things that used to be a photo shoot, even if it’s just stock imagery, you’re seeing that now be replaced by AI imagery,” Jon Weidman, SVP of development and head of brand content at production studio Wavelength, said. “[Your feed is] filling up with quote, unquote, slop, a volume of content that wouldn’t be possible without these tools. We see it. We’re watching it. I don’t see a world in which the cat goes back in that bag.”

Weidman isn’t alone in the assessment that the steady drip of AI imagery from brands will likely continue and increase.

 from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, 90% of the digital ad buyers surveyed either are planning to use or are currently using generative AI to make digital video ads.

“Every couple months, we have conversations with brands, ‘What do you think about using this technology? Are we? Do we? Does this help? Does it add value? Does it remove friction or cost or anything like that? Are there any risks involved?’” Jason Carmel, global creative data lead at VML, told Marketing Brew.

But even as marketers ask those questions and consider whether or not to use AI-generated imagery in ads, they “don’t want to be in the news because they’re using AI imagery,” Carmel said. “There are a million good ways to use this technology, and we’re exploring all of them, and our brands that we represent are exploring them as well.”

The reasons for that exploration vary. For some marketers, the decision to use AI-generated imagery for an ad campaign is about cost.

“It’s all about the budget,” Abigail Olivas, head of strategy at No Single Individual, a shop that provides talent assistance to agencies and brands, said. At the same time, she added that a sentiment shift helps as “we’re in a cultural swing of, the future is AI, and people are getting more used to it… brands [are] feeling empowered, too.”

The increasing use of AI-generated imagery in advertising comes at a time when brands have tightened the proverbial belt amid economic uncertainty. When 

 found in May that marketing budgets in 2025 were stagnant, agency executives noted that they had seen shoot budgets decrease this year given that uncertainty.

Olivas estimates that shoot budgets for some brands this year had been cut in half. “Let’s say a company that used to do a $750,000 shoot last year, and have a budget for their shoot [of] $300,000 this year,” Olivas said. “And so that is less shots, less output, less scenes, etc., right?”

When that’s the case, exploring the use of AI-generated imagery in ads is a solution that some marketers are more willing to consider. For others, it’s squeezed timelines and the ability to maximize output.

“It’s not just about being cheap, but it’s about being able to respond quickly, and it’s about being able to connect to things quicker,” Scott Thibodeaux, VP and creative director at Transmission, said.

To Thibodeaux, the appeal of generative AI tools for brands and agencies is not about brands spending less than they would before but about a difference in what brands can get with that same budget. “We can do something [for you] that you just wouldn’t have had before,” he said.

As brands test AI-generated imagery for campaigns, some agency execs don’t expect the use to replace shoots and production altogether.

There’s still trepidation about how much AI-generated advertising is viable and an understanding that people will be more critical of the use of it from brands in categories like fashion and beauty.

“We’re still at a point where people are nervous about it,” Carmel said. “We’re gonna start to see drips and drabs, people, brands are going to be more comfortable using it, but I don’t think we’re going to see a whole-hog replacement of anything for quite some time.”

A split photo montage of two AI-generated ads from Guess and J. Crew, one is a blond woman in a dress leaning against a wall and the other is a man with glasses sketching.

Tightening budgets have some marketers opting for AI imagery

But brands like Guess, J.Crew, and Skechers are finding themselves caught in cycles of consumer backlash for the perceived use of the technology.

Tightening budgets and shortened timelines have some marketers opting for AI imagery

Tired of the doom and gloom in the news cycle? Perhaps a brand can interest you in a romantic distraction.

take social media by storm, as brands like Audible, Neutrogena, Vera Bradley, and even Doritos have rolled out campaigns that are meant to not only appeal to romance fans but also celebrate the genre—all while, potentially, providing some light entertainment.

“The world is on fire for all of us,” Nic Climer, executive creative director of the marketing agency Rapp, said. “So I think the thing we are all trying to do right now, and we’re all trying to attach to, is to feel something real.”

It’s not just a matter of making consumers feel something; brands are aiming to give them something to feel good about in a time where positive feelings can be hard to come by. “The rise of romance in pop culture is about escapism and joy, two things people are craving right now,” Neha Minj, senior marketing director for face care at Neutrogena, told Marketing Brew in an email. “For brands, it is an opportunity to meet consumers where they are and connect through creativity and shared experiences, rather than just transactions.”

Leaning into stories with a romantic bent to them is almost a cheat code to making people feel something, which is why some marketers see the trend as having legs.

“Romance is having its moment,” James Finn, SVP, global head of brand and content marketing at Audible, told Marketing Brew. “There’s highly, highly engaged conversations [and] brands are seeing that, and with streaming content, movies, and TV shows, it’s a category that continues to grow.”

Part of brands’ interest in the trend can be chalked up to changing cultural sentiment around the genre. “I feel like in North America, romance has been looked down on for so long, especially the last 20 years of media and culture,” Megha Parikh, executive strategy director at VML, said. “I think that [the] tide is turning. If you look at what people are buying in terms of books and the stories that they’re watching and TikTok and things, it’s okay to have just pure romance and enjoy that for the sake of that romance.”

For a brand like Audible, tracking what’s trending for readers comes with the territory of promoting and selling audiobooks, and while the company focuses on various genres each quarter, the company has found that romance is one of the “most engaged genres on the service, outpacing every other one significantly,” Finn noted. “And [the] audience is a really passionate audience.” (That fervor mirrors traditional book sales, where sales of romance, long a powerhouse genre, are on the 

Audible aims to reflect that passion in its campaigns with efforts celebrating the genre. Last Friday, as part of its romance marketing efforts, Audible hosted a “Romance Rowboat Experience” in Central Park.

“We’re bringing fans, and we’re having actors there, and basically re-creating that whole concept of audio storytelling with rowboats kind of lean[ing] into different types of romance genres,” Finn said.

Meanwhile, Neutrogena’s entry into the romance marketing trend has also aimed to recognize the passion of the genre’s fans. Last month, the brand partnered with influencer Serena Kerrigan on two “

” short stories that are available on Wattpad, a site known for fan fiction, as a way to target millennials and zillennials on BookTok.

Brands have been going beyond romance to stories of lust and desire. In addition to Neutrogena, Doritos recently featured actor Walton Goggins 

 that used the tagline “spicy but not too spicy” as part of a throwback parody more akin to a late-night 

Pushing into different niches is a way for brands to not only test the boundaries of what stories brands can tell but also look to stand out in a fragmented media landscape.

“I think actually [it’s] not so much that they’re willing to test the boundaries, but more that they are desperate enough to [do so to] win attention,” Parikh said. “If you look at the Doritos, the reason it’s wild and smutty is that it’s wild and smutty for a brand, but it’s not wild and smutty for TikTok.”

Even if brand marketers are more willing to roll with more risqué content, it all comes down to making those consumer connections.

“If you think about how brands are trying to evolve and how they’re trying to connect, I think what we’re trying to do as marketers is be more layered and more nuanced,” Climer said. “Romance is a part of that.”

A classic romantic painting of two lovers. The Audible logo is a stand in for one of the lovers.

Why your latest romance find might come from a brand

Brands like Neutrogena, Audible, Vera Bradley, and Doritos are tapping into stories from sincere to smutty to attract consumers.

Morning Brew Creative Studio

The spirit of a good ad still comes from humans. 

That gem was dropped during a fireside chat at the Marketing Brew Summit, where Ali Haeri, mntn’s SVP of marketing, sat down with Morning Brew Inc.’s Kristine Wyatt to unpack the ever-evolving world of advertising in today’s content-saturated landscape.

If you missed the live convo, don’t sweat it. We’re here to break down the highlights you might’ve missed.

Grab your coffee and your content calendar. Let’s chat about creative marketing.

Haeri started the conversation by laying out a simple truth: Today’s marketers are stuck between too much content and not enough eyeballs (short attention spans, we’re lookin’ at you).

That’s because marketing was way simpler back in the day, when everyone watched the same TV shows and listened to the same top pop hits. Ads were way less targeted because, well, they didn’t really need to be.

Now, with tons of content options and all the tech powering modern advertising, marketers face a new problem: Targeting is easier than ever, but breaking through the noise is harder than ever.

“When it’s done well, it really cuts through the noise because again, people are sort of consuming so much content,” Haeri said about this modern-day marketing phenomenon. “A lot of it’s ad-supported. And the stuff that’s memorable is the stuff that is really timely.”

For marketers today, that means you get only one chance (two if you’re lucky) to grab your audience’s attention. Waste that, and you might not get another opportunity to get your brand to make a lasting impression.

In case you needed a reminder, mntn actually has a pretty big name in their leadership team, boasting Ryan Reynolds as their chief creative officer. Haeri highlighted the work Reynolds does with his agency, Maximum Effort, as an example of how important speed is for marketing.

“But for me, really, the reaction time to knowing that you need new creative is really important,” Haeri emphasized.

He laid out Maximum Effort’s rapid creative process, including how many of the ideas are iterated over text messages.

“The scripts are simple,” Haeri said. “They’re not formatted in some sort of way that you’d see, like a movie script. It’s just written in a Word document. They’ll come up with an idea and then, like a day or two later, it’s shooting. And a day or two after that, it’s live on air.”

To prove his point, Haeri cited a recent campaign Maximum Effort created. When an infamous CEO at a certain concert was featured on the jumbotron, the agency jumped on the viral moment immediately, creating a campaign and dropping it in just a few days.

That’s because the most impactful ads aren’t necessarily the most expensive. Instead, they’re the ones that feel like they’re part of a big moment. Cultural relevance > perfection. And being able to move quickly goes a long way toward helping you stay relevant.

Don’t worry, Haeri knows AI isn’t coming for your job. It’s a great tool for marketers, but it can’t come up with great ideas—at least, not like humans can.

Haeri referenced one of mntn’s most successful campaigns to prove his point: an ad featuring Steve-O from 

 eating the world’s spiciest chili pepper and then doing a demo of their platform. Not really the type of campaign an AI platform could have come up with…

The key is to encourage your team to experiment with AI, especially for time-saving tasks like organizing documents, summarizing content, or taking meeting notes. Basically, AI is best used to “take away all of the BS that I don’t really need to be consuming my time with thinking about,” Haeri said.

Remember, AI is here for support, not to replace you or your team. With that in mind, AI can help free up your time so you can focus on more impactful work.

Never want to go to Utah? Yep, Haeri’s seen those ads too, and he’s right there with you. It does teach us a valuable lesson, though: Ad fatigue is a very real thing, and everyone gets tired of seeing the same ad for the thousandth time.

“I remember watching my UCLA Bruins in March Madness a couple of years ago, and every single ad pod, every ad break was ‘visit Utah,’ like, three times in a row,” Haeri recalled. “It made me never want to visit Utah again. And then my brother moved to Utah. Now it’s complicated things for me.”

Yep, bombarding your audience with the same ad one too many times will hurt you, but so will showing a certain ad to the 

Haeri recalled a time when he was served a mntn ad and had this epiphany: “I thought to myself, like, this is obviously great, but if someone already had some exposure to MNTN, how impactful would this ad be? That’s again, sort of introducing MNTN. And this is like advertising 101, like aligning your ads with the marketing funnel.”

His solution? Create a new ad for retargeting so that particular audience segment would see a straightforward demo showcasing their platform’s benefits. The results speak for themselves.

“When we only showed this ad as a retargeting ad to people who had already visited the MNTN website, it outperformed any other retargeting ad that we ever had before,” Haeri said. “Because again, it sort of freed us of having to explain what MNTN is to someone who has never heard of it before, and it allowed us to just focus on benefits.”

Wyatt ended the fireside chat by asking Haeri one big question: “If you had $50,000 in a very small team, what would you do in 30 days?”

Haeri’s response? He plugged Quick Frame, a company that mntn acquired a couple of years ago. He described Quick Frame as “a secret weapon for marketers because it’s a platform made up of video professionals like motion graphics artists, editors, full-blown-TV-shoot commercial directors.”

Quick Frame helps marketers create TV-quality creative fast 

affordably, and then it deploys that top-notch creative across your channels ASAP. In just 30 days, you would get results.

At the end of the day, even with AI, ad tech, and celebrity-backed creative, the best ads still need that human touch. Tools can help you move faster and focus on the more important things, but real connection, creativity, and craft? That’s all you.

Ali Haeri and Kristine Wyatt speak on stage at the Marketing Brew Summit 2025 during a session titled "Creativity + Tech: The Future of Impact Marketing at Scale," with vibrant lighting and event branding in the background.

mntn_sep25_eventsrecap_article

How mntn scales creative marketing at speed with insights on AI, ad fatigue, and timely campaigns

Recapping the Marketing Brew Summit 2025 fireside chat with mntn

The spirit of a good ad

Got a ton of people on the internet talking about the same thing for a day? Brands might 

. Got a ton of people talking about the same thing for weeks on end? Brands 

That’s exactly what has happened over the last two months amid the third and final season of Amazon Prime Video’s 

, an adaptation of a book series by Jenny Han that nabbed 25 million viewers in the first seven days following its premiere, according to Amazon internal data shared with Marketing Brew. The coming-of-age romance drama following Isabel “Belly” Conklin and her relationship with two brothers has been the talk of the summer on social media, with fans speculating what will come next each week, making predictions, and dissecting episodes. And 

Social media teams who spoke to Marketing Brew said the response to their show-related posts has largely been positive. So why not continue to build on the momentum? For some marketers, the show has a particular element making it ripe for conversation: there’s a team element to the show, with many fans rooting for either Conrad or Jeremiah Fisher to win over Belly’s heart and declaring themselves #TeamConrad or #TeamJeremiah.

“What really excites us in social is that fandom is a universal language, whether or not you are a fan of a baseball team or a TV show or a musician,” said Cameron Gidari, VP, social media and innovation for MLB, which has been posting about the show on its socials since August. “This show is having watch parties [where] you’re team Conrad or you’re team Jeremiah, so a lot of the instinct and the behavior is really similar to that of a sports fan.”

’s popularity—and brand placement in the series—is driving big numbers. Engagement for social content about the show’s third season is up 514% from Season 2 for Mondelez’s Swedish Fish, according to the company, and the brand’s 

 TikToks for the summer were both about the show. Meanwhile Sour Patch Kids, another Mondelez brand, has netted 12 million impressions so far this year for its show-related social content, the company said. 

Both brands were referenced in the show at the end of the second season, with each brother debating which candy she will choose—an on-the-nose metaphor for which brother Belly will ultimately end up with.

“It was a pleasant surprise to us to be featured in such a prominent way,” John Vasington, senior brand manager, candy, at Mondelez, told Marketing Brew. “Jenny is a fan of the brands, and I know has included us in the third book, so we had an idea that we’d probably at some point make an appearance in the show. But for it to happen in such an impactful way in Season 2 was a really welcome surprise.”

In the gap between seasons, social chatter tying the brands to the show didn’t slow down, said Sandra Yang, associate director of social and strategy for Dentsu Creative, Mondelez’s agency, and both brands opted to advocate for the brother tied to the brands online. For the third season, the brands became an official brand partner, with 

 of Sour Patch Kids for Team Conrad and Swedish Fish for Team Jeremiah.

“We knew this show was going to be very top of mind for Gen Z as the new season kicked off, and we wanted to be a part of it in a much more substantial way,” Vasington said.

Most brands don’t have the luxury of appearing in the show’s universe. Even so, brand social accounts big and small have recognized the value of staying up-to-date on the show.

MLB, for example, started posting about the show in mid-August after a member of its social media team who is a fan of the show pitched getting involved, Gidari said. As of late August, the social content around the show had generated 2.5 million views and 540,000 engagements.

In addition to the brand TikToks and Reels referencing episodes, brand accounts are also showing up in the comment sections of edits that fans make for the show, sometimes doing so with commentary about the episode or rooting for a particular character.

“I think why this phenomenon caught wildfire this summer, in addition to the pure escapism… [is that] it allows us to talk the way these people talk, make creative the way that they’re already seeing stuff on their own algorithms and their own platforms, like it doesn’t feel brand-y,” said Mimia Johnson, SVP of creative excellence at VaynerMedia, which created social content around the show for brands like Miralax and sparkling-water brand Bubly.

“People don’t want to see ads. They want to see brands that act like people,” Johnson noted. “That’s why we see the brands in the comments. That’s why we see brands activating Team Jeremiah versus Team Conrad, talking about love triangles.”

Nick Mazzucco, head of social strategy at Burrell Communications, said that at a time when social media managers worry about the high stakes of internet chatter, something like this can be a low-stakes way to participate in a trend.

“It is that spark of old internet monoculture,” he told us.

, social media and brand managers said they are careful to use language like the names of the characters from the show rather than specific IP like quotes, soundbites, or even the Taylor Swift songs used in the show that could land them in hot water when creating content.

“There wasn’t a specific line in the trend that you had to use, you could really make it your own,” Katherine Blessis-Poto, social media specialist at Hannaford Supermarkets, said. “So we felt comfortable taking that risk and putting it out there.”

Some brands have an advantage by working with the show’s cast or creators to get them to be part of the content that they’re making around the show. The reigning WNBA champs, the New York Liberty, for example, hosted cast members and Han courtside; a subsequent post with the cast garnered more than 80,000 likes on Instagram, and on TikTok, content with the cast was one of the top four highest-engaged videos of August. Meanwhile, content with the cast for Barclays Center, where the Liberty plays, nabbed 8.1 million views and more than 920,000 engagements on TikTok and 3.1 million impressions on Instagram.

Shana Stephenson, the Liberty’s chief brand officer, said the partnership worked well because Liberty players are fans of the show themselves.

“Liberty center Nyara Sabally is a fan of

 Team Conrad,” Stephenson wrote in an email. “Bringing her together with the cast courtside postgame felt organic and true to who she is—and that authenticity is exactly what we aim for.”

After the show’s season finale on September 17, brands will look for more shows to, like consumers, throw themselves into.

“We’re going to continue to see that more and more as people are looking for that escapism,” Johnson said. “They’re looking for something that totally sucks them in.”

A photo collage of a poster of the Amazon show The Summer I Turned Pretty surrounded with iPhone message bubbles, reading #teamjeremiah and #teamconrad

Inside the social media frenzy around ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’

Swedish Fish, Sour Patch Kids, MLB, the New York Liberty, and more got involved in the Amazon show. 

The design landscape is changing rapidly. In some ways, it’s more accessible than ever as AI tools flood the market and AI companies pitch consumers and businesses alike on its ease of use. In others, it’s becoming more difficult to balance the need for personalization, the myriad touchpoints, finding ways to stand out amid the onslaught of AI slop, and more.

To understand how brands are managing this shift, Marketing Brew caught up with Kiser Barnes, chief creative officer and partner at Red Antler, who is set to speak about that topic at our upcoming 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

You joined Red Antler last year as partner and chief creative officer. Tell us about what you’re doing. 

What I’ve been doing over the past year is really helping to evolve Red Antler into the new era of what brand building means. Brand building now is much more multidisciplinary in terms of the touchpoints that it needs to impact, the touchpoints that it needs to affect.

There are two things that are happening. One is [that] tech and marketing are merging. Tech brands are becoming marketing brands. Marketing brands and agencies are becoming—are being forced to become—tech brands. And the tools are accelerating the speed at which we need to get to market. They’re also accelerating the ability to personalize and customize brands in ways that it’s never been before…The second part of that is about social and the idea that people are interacting with brands in very fragmented ways and multi-touchpoint ways around social. The first way you might interact with a new brand might be through a social post versus the traditional way of the past, which was typically through advertising or through a website or through some sort of marketing material…In order to be a brand expert and a brand builder, now you have to be able to think about how you orchestrate across all of these different touchpoints. You, of course, have to think about the tools and the ways that those tools become increasingly relevant to the work that you do, and you have to evolve constantly.

How does the cultural desire for personalization change the design conversation? 

It’s so exciting from a design standpoint. It means that we have to build increasingly modular brands. A lot of the ways that we think about brands are shifting from this idea of the brand bible that sits on a shelf somewhere and collects dust into this mode of a living, breathing thing that should always be evolving and always shifting…It means that we have to build a wider toolkit for brands. We’ve got to build enough of a toolkit that can be taken right by social influencers, or it can be taken by vendors, or it can be plugged into experiential in the real world. And so we have to really think wide now. I don’t think that brand teams ever did that in the past…To build a brand now, you can’t just think about the logo and the font and the color and that stuff. You’ve got to not just test it out but really think about how it shows up in the real world as experiential or retail, how it shows up on social platforms. And you have to really know those spaces…It just means that we have to build brands from a design standpoint, brands that are much richer, much more modular, much more connected to full-ecosystem thinking.

That’s all happening at a time when people have much stronger reactions to brand changes today, like we just saw with 

Brands are much more fluid, and they’re really responsive to culture now. This old idea of a pristine brand sitting in an ivory tower is not as relevant anymore. And again, it’s this influence. It’s the impact and amplification of social and influencer[s]. If you think about it, we’re in a culture of influencer. I don’t think that’s set in, but our president is an influencer, our entire cabinet is made of influencers. Not to be provocative, but we are in a culture now of influence, where influence is king. That means that brands have to be more democratic. They’ve got to really think about what their people and their fans and their loyalists really think about and care about in the brand.

Ultimately—hopefully—that’s a good thing for brands. It means it’s more influenced by [the] community, it’s more influenced in the sense of co-ownership. But I do think that’s a huge pivot.

Another major shift that we’ve touched on is the introduction of all of these AI tools to the market. That’s changing the design landscape. I’m curious, if everyone is using the same tools and those tools are trained on what has been, how can design continue to push the envelope? 

The tools are really great for, in my mind, workflow, amplification of ideas, creativity. I have a thesis that the human soul is about experimentation. What makes us really creative, and what makes us feel, what creates differentiation is experimentation. It’s like when jazz came into the scene and it created a new language of music. Every single cultural shift and change has been driven by this incredible explosion of creative experimentation. And that is what makes us uniquely human…The machine and AI can’t do that, certainly not now. I’m sure it’ll be programmed to do a little bit more of it. But that’s what makes us unique, and I do think we’re already starting to see a response to AI and to this mass adoption of AI.

You’ll see it in fashion and luxury brands are going back to stop-motion and handcrafted techniques for creating content, which is really beautiful. I do think there’s always a pendulum swing…Brands go back and forth. But I do think, ultimately, the tools allow us to do things more rapidly. They allow us to touch more spaces, and they allow us to have more depth in terms of strategy research, the foundational pieces of brand building. So from a design perspective, they allow us to take an idea and really amplify it…I do think we will always have to, as creative leaders, show up in ways that feel differentiated and cut through that sort of clutter of noise. There’s this idea of AI slop, that everything will be kind of created by AI, and it’s bots speaking to bots—the dead internet theory. There’s so many kinds of theories around this and that. Ultimately, we’ll have to find ways to differentiate, and once those tools become widely adopted, we will come up with more interesting ways to approach creativity and to approach marketing. I believe that strongly. That’s what the human spirit’s all about.

Red Antler’s CCO on the new era of brand building

Ahead of the Marketing Brew Summit, Kiser Barnes told us how the design shop is creating “richer, more modular” brands for the future. 

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 Consulting, 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.

Update 08/26/2025: Amanda Skudlarek's title has been updated.

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 

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.