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Katie Hicks

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Brands are capitalizing on ’90s nostalgic appeal 

Why brands like Osea Malibu, Skims, and Reformation are all capitalizing on throwback appeal. 

The ’90s—and the icons that defined the decade—are so back 

Jasmine Sheena

Why Spotify‘s personalization features are in the marketing spotlight

“People see their friends having fun with Daylist and they want to get in on the action, too,” Spotify’s senior director of global marketing said.

The FOMO effect: Why Spotify‘s personalization features are in the marketing spotlight

Alyssa Meyers

MLS revenue from sponsorship, season tickets, and merchandise is all up

“We have an audience that’s young, they’re multicultural, they’re tech savvy,” one MLS exec said. “Marketers are really drawn to that.”

Two dots and an arrow connected by a curving line denoting marketing brand strategy

Brand Strategy

A cartoon image of Kristina Monllos created by Morning Brew

Kristina Monllos

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.

Want to partner with Liquid Death? Get in line 

The beverage brand’s strange humor and social fanbase has dozens of brand marketers vying to partner up, its SVP of marketing said. 

If your TikTok feed looks anything like ours, you’ve probably seen videos of 

 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 

 and having emotional experiences watching Oasis perform—as 

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 

 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 

 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 

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

 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.

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

. 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.

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.

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 

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.”

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

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.

The outdoors aren’t all sunshine and roses. There’s snakes, storms, and vultures—and even deep canyon crevices you could fall into and maybe have to 

At least, that’s the story of the outdoors that Columbia Sportswear tells in the company’s latest 

The new campaign, called “Engineered for Whatever,” is an “intentional swing” for the brand to portray the unpredictability of the outdoors this way, Columbia Sportswear’s SVP and head of marketing, Matt Sutton, told Marketing Brew. The spot, from adam&eveDDB in London, has been in the works for the last year, Sutton told us, and it’s an effort for the brand to stand out from other outdoor apparel category brands, which often embrace classic outdoor imagery.

“Our brief was a slide with six images from competitors on a slide,” Sutton said. “You block out the logos and they all looked like they were from the same brand: Perfect sunny sweeping vistas, pristine conditions, very serious models. And the insight in our brief was that over the past 20 years, the outdoor category has kind of converged, and all follow each other and do the same thing.”

 To cut through the sea of sameness, Columbia took inspiration from the brand’s past work by Gert and Tim Boyle, the mother-son duo behind the company, and who formerly starred in ads that tested product quality in extreme, zany situations in the ’90s and early 2000s. In one ad from that time period, Tim hangs from a cliff clutching the brand’s jackets; in another, he trudges through a carwash wearing a parka and a fleece.

Columbia’s new 30-second ad is designed to serve as a table-setter to reintroduce the brand ethos, but Sutton said Columbia created new product tests spots similar to the ones the Boyles’ previously made. Those spots, which put gear up against a helicopter drop, a snowplow, and a massive snowball, will roll out later this month and into the fall.

For the brand reset, Columbia polled target audiences to find the consumer insight that even professional athletes are anxious about what can go wrong outdoors, be it extreme heat, wet, rocky or slippery terrain, or something else altogether.

Rather than ignoring those fears, the company aimed to address them head-on with new work touting the capabilities of its products.

“That insight to us was like, ‘Oh, this is an opportunity for us to establish the problem that you’re talking about and show how you can triumph with our product,’” Sutton said.

In its first quarter 2025 earnings, Columbia reported that it would withdraw its financial outlook for the full year amid tariff uncertainty. Even so, Tim Boyle, chairman, president, and CEO said in a statement at the time that Columbia was “committed to increasing investments in demand creation” with new products and a new marketing campaign.

While Sutton declined to share ad spend figures for the new brand campaign, he noted that “it’'s a meaningful increase in our overall marketing spend.” The company is also shifting more ad dollars to spend on brand marketing and is making “probably our most significant investment in five years in brand,” Sutton said.

The investment during a challenging year for many retailers is a recognition that the company can’t change the way that people see its brand without making a meaningful investment in brand marketing and storytelling.

“Our intent with this is to reintroduce and shift consumer perception of Columbia,” Sutton said. “We have a really strong performance marketing business, but we can’t shift perception with performance marketing. We have this first shot in nearly a decade of having a defined brand and a voice. And so we’re using it as an opportunity to reset and challenge new and existing customers’ expectations of Columbia.”

Outdoorsman Aron Ralston is featured in Columbia's new brand campaign

Why Columbia leaned into Mother Nature danger to reintroduce the brand

The brand took inspiration from ads from the ‘80s and ‘90s where zany stunts proved product durability.

 to date end up being its most costly mistake?

The campaign, which launched last week with actor Sydney Sweeney at the helm, reportedly cost millions of dollars as a big-bet play to reverse declining sales after the company reported a $68 million operating loss in Q1 of this year. Initially, the campaign caused American Eagle’s stock to jump (perhaps due in part to it becoming a 

), but as the campaign spread, its focus on Sweeney’s physical attributes caused a social media firestorm on multiple fronts.

A video touting Sweeney’s genetics as a play on the jeans/genes homophone, in which she states, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans are blue,” drew backlash for what some called 

 dogwhistle language given Sweeney’s traditionally Aryan features. Others took issue with the campaign’s use of sex appeal as a vehicle for 

 and the general weirdness of the visuals and the script, which has 

“People were very upset, and not only people who didn’t look like Sydney Sweeney,” Myles Worthington, CEO and founder of marketing agency Worthi, told us. “They missed the mark, both tonally when it comes to the copy and the visuals they put out there.”

 continue to weigh in as American Eagle is seemingly retreating. Some of the brand’s most controversial posts, including the “My jeans are blue” video and another that zooms in on Sweeney’s chest, appear to have been 

 from some of its channels. Executives seem to be shielding themselves from the public: Craig Brommers, CMO, and Ashley Schapiro, VP of marketing, have turned off comments on their LinkedIn posts announcing the campaign and Angela Sumner, creative director of media, social, and influencer, has removed her profile picture and abbreviated her last name on the platform, Ad Age 

American Eagle’s comms agency, Shadow, did not respond to requests for comment. On Friday afternoon, American Eagle 

 to the backlash, saying that the campaign “is and was always about the jeans” and that “great jeans look good on everyone.”

Experts told us that there are clear lessons to be learned from the campaign to date.

Given the scale of the campaign, many critics have 

 how many people likely had to approve the campaign, which could indicate a 

 among decision-makers at American Eagle.

“It’s so clear that they didn’t have anybody in the room that poked and prodded at this ad,” Worthington said. “I would bet all the dollars in the world that it was a very white, very privileged room [full of] people who didn’t ask the right questions.”

Prior to the launch of the campaign, American Eagle CMO Craig Brommers told us that the brand wanted to use Sweeney’s recognizability and sex appeal to reach women who want to be Sweeney and men who want to be with her in the hopes of “[cutting] through in culture.”

“With Sydney, we want people to either reconsider and reengage with us or look at us in a new light and begin to shop the brand,” Brommers said last week.

By framing Sweeney’s features as “good genes,” Worthington said there is an implication that “everything else that isn’t this perfect blonde, white [skin], blue eyes, snatched-waist prototype is not good genes.”

 to contrast American Eagle’s campaign with Ralph Lauren’s recent “Oak Bluffs” campaign, which celebrates the “Black Hamptons” on Martha’s Vineyard.

 the similarities between the “My jeans are blue” video and Calvin Klein’s infamous 1980s Brooke Shields ad, which drew controversy for its sexually suggestive script and Shields being 15 at the time of filming.

Between the sexual aspects of the campaign and the focus on genetics, some critics have said they’re not convinced that the brand wasn’t consciously rage- or engagement-baiting, or perhaps seeking to reach an audience responsive to that type of messaging. Since the campaign was released, some on the right have come out to praise or defend it.

“If they’re going after that demo, and it boosted the stock price like 4% or whatever it is, then they’ve been successful,” Seth Horowitz, veteran publicist and president of marketing services group Horowitz Agency, told us.

Even if American Eagle’s intent was to simply highlight a conventionally attractive spokesperson, some have said they feel it was a misguided strategy to begin with. A person who identified herself as a former social media manager for American Eagle 

 on TikTok, saying that the brand’s “lack of direction, lack of social awareness," and overall disconnect from its customers stems from a desire to outperform competitors like Abercrombie & Fitch. Given American Eagle’s place in a “sea of sameness” among other retailers like A&F and Urban Outfitters, Worthington said he sees why American Eagle sought to stand out, but that impact was limited by the campaign’s copy and the decision to not take on a more “alt or different” spokesperson, rather than one with mass appeal.

Sweeney, he said, is a safe bet with broad interest, which is perhaps why she’s worked with so many brands and done similarly sexually suggestive campaigns in the past, most recently by selling her 

 with Dr. Squatch. Brommers previously told us he didn’t feel that this campaign would lose impact as yet another campaign for Sweeney, and he was confident her fans would be supportive, but that 

According to Worthington, there’s a difference between popularity and influence, and Sweeney is leaning more toward the former because of the number of products she’s promoted.

“Sydney Sweeney seems like a safe bet, but actually, because she’s so monopolized, it’s not a safe bet,” he said. ”You’re spending a fuck ton of money and not getting any influence…Are people going to buy American Eagle because Sydney Sweeney said yes? Probably not, because she says yes to everything.”

So how does American Eagle move forward? Ahead of American Eagle's public comments, Horowitz said he didn’t expect American Eagle to issue an apology. What they do next, he said, will likely be determined by sales and engagement from the campaign.

“If they’re looking at the bottom line and it’s boosting sales for them, then they might just move on from this,” he said.

What Horowitz said he’s particularly interested to see is how American Eagle’s campaign impacts its other brand, Aerie, which was built on body positivity and inclusion. Some people online have already 

 brands like Levi’s to respond with their Beyoncé denim collab, or have spotlighted past jeans/genes content from brands like 

 as a counter to American Eagle’s campaign.

Washington said he believes the reason American Eagle hasn’t spoken up yet is because its team may not know what to say, but he feels an apology is in order if the brand wants to engage those it’s alienated with this campaign. While bringing in a diverse group of people to represent “good genes” in the first place would have been ideal, he said even if the campaign copy is redone or expanded to be more inclusive, it’ll always be marred by the first iteration.

“This was a campaign that they needed to matter, and it did the opposite,” he said. “I’d be very surprised if they were able to dig out of this as a business.”

Update 08/04/2025: This piece has been updated to include a public statement from American Eagle.

Lessons learned from American Eagle’s crash and burn

The brand’s campaign with Sydney Sweeney, which it reportedly spent millions on, has spread like wildfire across the internet for its questionable messaging and strategy.

Burrito-proof beauty so nice, they had to do it twice.

Last year, Chipotle and Wonderskin Beauty came together in an unexpected collab to create a “Lipotle” lip stain, which sold out in a week and drew more than 10,000 emails, posts, and comments on both brand’s channels asking for more.

A year later, the two brands answered the call from customers, offering 30,000 products, three times as many as last year, and selling out in less than a week. The relaunch generated more than 41 million social impressions, 282,000 earned social engagements, and 3 billion earned media impressions, according to Chipotle’s internal figures.

Stephanie Perdue, VP of brand marketing at Chipotle, told us that Lipotle was ultimately more about storytelling and driving conversation than sales.

“It’s been incredible and a testament to a collab that has increased the relevancy of both brands for a specific audience,” she said.

The original idea for the Lipotle collab, which first launched last summer for National Avocado Day, was inspired by Wonderskin’s lip products trending on TikTok, combined with the rising popularity of Chipotle mukbangs, or videos of people eating while chatting with their audience, according to Perdue.

“You’re on camera the whole time eating,” she said. “Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a way where that lipstick didn’t disappear?”

Working together, the two brands created a lip stain that goes on in an avocado-green color and is wiped away with a Chipotle napkin-inspired wipe to reveal a pink lip color. The product packaging also features silver accent colors as a nod to Chipotle’s burrito wrappers and lids.

Chipotle hosted promotional in-restaurant lip-stain trials, adding a London event this year as Wonderskin and Chipotle grow their market presence there, with 20 restaurant locations in the city, Perdue said. Trial videos from the events were used for social fodder in addition to content from mukbangers and beauty creators who were sent the product, she added. The lip stain was sold on TikTok Shop for the first time this year, and many of the promoted videos from creators on the platform linked to the product on TikTok Shop.

“Having content in the beauty category versus content in mukbangs, that’s where you double your reach and have even more success when two brands come together,” Perdue said.

Perdue noted that the user-generated content created from the collab, both this year and last, has also helped Chipotle categorize it as a success.

“[It was] doing something special for that community of Gen Z girlies who really appreciate a product that has a real benefit,” she said.

In many ways, Chipotle has become known for its tongue-in-cheek and sometimes irreverent merch, from its lemonade-in-a-water-cup 

, which playfully acknowledges that not every customer is paying for their fountain drinks, to a cilantro-scented soap, which nods to the genetic variation that makes cilantro taste like soap for some people. Much like Lipotle’s mukbang inspiration, Perdue said that most of the ideas for these products have come from social listening and tapping into audience conversations.

“Our social team has been recognized for finding insights in social and turning them into products, whether that’s a meme or a trend,” Perdue said. “I think that gives you outsized results in terms of not just PR impressions or sales, but also fans’ engagement with your brand.”

By tapping into what customers are saying, and staying in on the joke, Perdue said it only helps with increasing brand love, relevancy, and loyalty.

“It’s more of a long-term brand [play] over time,” she said.

Chipotle product advertisement campaign images

Bringing back the ‘Lipotle’ lip stain paid off for Chipotle

The collab with Wonderskin sold out in less time this year than last, with three times as much product sold.

Dove. United Talent Agency. TelevisaUnivision.

These are just some of the companies that were represented at Marketing Brew’s What’s Next? Navigating the Future Business of Creator Marketing event in New York last week. Executives discussed the evolving creator marketing landscape, which is being shaped by new platforms, trends, and technologies. Below are a few of the juiciest tips given onstage.

 LinkedIn is no longer just a job-hunting platform, Aneesh Lal, founder of creator firm The Wishly Group, told attendees. Brands are looking to capitalize on the platform’s audience, which includes “all these influential…people who drive budgets at home and drive budgets at the office.” He pointed to short-form video and carousels as content types that work well on the platform.

Another way to potentially stand out on LinkedIn is to post lifestyle content on the platform, Sara Uy, an influencer who goes by the moniker SellingSara, said onstage. She pointed to a video she made walking through a day in her life attending Cannes this year with the AI brand Luster as an example.

“When you try a little bit less in sales and try to be a little bit less sales-y, it goes a long way,” she said. “I think that’s why the lifestyle piece on LinkedIn is doing so well right now, just because it’s a refresher.”

Cultivating relationships with local creators with niche audiences is one way to reach a dedicated audience and signal that a brand is part of the community, Andrew Karson, EVP of marketing at BSE Global, the parent company of the Brooklyn Nets and New York Liberty, said. To that end, in 2023, the Nets partnered with Brooklyn-based creator Kareem Rahma, best known for his viral Instagram account, Subway Takes, on a Subway Takes-style 

“We try to anchor much of what we do in Brooklyn and the DNA of Brooklyn,” Karson said.

Rethink your brand’s creator partnership criteria:

 Checking that a potential creator partner’s audience over-indexes with a particular brand is important in addition to considering more standard metrics like engagement rate, Emily Anatole, senior director, UTA IQ, at UTA, said.

“We love to see a creator’s followers over-index with that particular brand, so that presumably, they’d be excited to see a brand that they love partner with a creator that they admire, and it’s well-positioned for both parties that it’s going to succeed and feel authentic,” she said.

Another way brands can use metrics to their advantage is to examine which creators they’ve previously worked with that drove successful results and source similar creators, Samantha Haberl, senior manager of influencer marketing at online learning community Skillshare, said. Brands can also look at metrics from their work with those creators, like CPAs and conversion rates, to “at least try to predict what the ROI is going to look like” with similar creators in the future, too, she said.

Update 7/28/25: This story has been updated with attending brands.

Panelists Jake Bullock, Andrew Karson, and Emily Steele in conversation with moderator Jennimai Nguyen

Tips from Marketing Brew’s What’s Next? Navigating the Future Business of Creator Marketing event

Execs from Dove and TelevisaUnivision doled out advice onstage.

The best tips and tricks from Marketing Brew’s What’s Next? Navigating the Future Business of Creator Marketing event

Jennimai Nguyen

When Labubu made it big in America this summer, it wasn’t just because it caught on with kids.

The fuzzy little demon toys, made by Chinese company Pop Mart, also became 

 hottest accessory for adults, prominently displayed on designer handbags, showed off on TikTok, and spotted on many a favorite celeb. That cultural pizzazz has helped more than 

 the company’s revenue, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Pop Mart isn’t the first to tap into the American “kidult” audience, and it’s not likely to be the last. Brands like Barbie and Hot Wheels from toy giant Mattel have long catered to an adult audience of toy appreciators and nostalgia-seekers, and other brands are jumping in: In 2023, doll company Bratz introduced an animated series that particularly pleased grown-up fans, while Trixie Mattel’s Trixie Cosmetics debuted a campaign and makeup collection with the Teletubbies in May.

The customer that possesses both childlike wonder and grown-up spending power is a key target for many brands, and it’s a market that’s poised to keep going, Juli Lennett, VP and toys industry advisor at research firm Circana, told us.

“Ever since the pandemic, the adult market for toys has been the growth area for the toy industry,” Lennett said. “When there are times of stress, which it feels like we’re getting into that even now, consumers do tend to lean into when they were children and lean into toys.”

In the first quarter of 2025, toy sales for adults aged 18 or older increased 12% compared to the same time period in 2024, making them the fastest-growing age demographic for the toy industry, according to Circana. But kidults aren’t strictly aged 18+, according to Lennett. Rather, she said, Circana defines the kidult market as anyone 12 and up “who buys toys for themselves or receives toys.” This definition allows it to also examine the behavior of the 12–17 age demographic, which tends to engage with toys differently than both younger children and the 18-and-older crowd.

In the case of Labubu, the appeal seems to be cross-generational, albeit for different reasons. While younger kids might attach their little furry guys to school backpacks and rely on their parents to keep track of product drops, older customers are clipping their creepy keyrings to designer bags and 

That adult engagement has allowed a wider swath of brands to get in on the hype: In June, Highsnobbery hosted a Labubu fashion show in New York’s Washington Square Park with prizes including a Coach bag, while Uniqlo announced a line of officially licensed Labubu T-shirts and sweatshirts

that will roll out in August. Countless other brands made cheeky social media posts featuring the dolls as they took over the zeitgeist.

Despite their popularity with kids, Pop Mart is not particularly focused on catering to children. “The target audience for our product is the adult collector,” Emily Brough, Pop Mart’s head of licensing, said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “We are specifically hitting that Gen Z kidult customer, so they’re more collectible items than anything else, and so they’re definitely not marketed for children.”

Labubu isn’t the only toy taking off in the grown-up world. Roberto Stanichi, EVP of Hot Wheels, said that adults have long been a cornerstone of the toy-car brand’s audience due to its commitment to reflecting authentic car culture, but that in recent years, interest from adults has “accelerated dramatically.” The Hot Wheels Collector die-cast collection, which is built specifically for adults, has had sales triple since 2017, according to the company.

“I think it has to do a little bit with the moment that we live in, but at the same time, [there’s] this cross-generational nature of Hot Wheels,” Stanichi said. “1968 is when Hot Wheels came out. There are some of the original kids that played with Hot Wheels, not only have they shared that with their kids, but now some of them are starting to have grandkids. So you have three generations, full-cycle generations, of kids that grew up with Hot Wheels.”

Whether it’s a doll or a car, adults engaging with toy culture are often looking for a sense of belonging, Lennett said, and greater toy appreciation is creating community for older audiences.

“It kind of makes you feel good, and you’re part of a bigger group,” she said. “It’s social media–driven. You feel okay doing it, and you’re going to promote it,” she said.

For brands that are embracing their adult audience, adult-focused messaging can look a little different than the marketing aimed at getting kids excited.

“When you’re talking [to] kids, there’s an element of the fantastical,” Stanichi said. When it comes to adults, “understanding what is moving in terms of cultural trends in car culture and how we can authentically tap into that and play into that is what’s really important.”

At Hot Wheels, adult-focused marketing is centered around immersive messaging and experiential, as well as brand partnerships, including collaborations with brands like Formula 1, Ferrari, and car brands in the Japanese domestic market.

By connecting with consumers beyond childhood, Stanichi said that the kidult market has allowed customer bases and toy brands to continue growing—together.

“It doesn’t matter how old you are,” he said. “You might change the way you interact with the brand, but it never ceases to be a part of your life.”

Collage of Bratz figures, a Hot Wheels t-shirt, and a Labubu doll. 