The company constructed the campaign around the insight that roughly 80% of Gen Z, Millennial and Baby Boomer consumers name M&M’s as their favorite candy, according to YouGov and Statista research, suggesting the treat has a way of bringing people together and creating connections. 

The new campaign intermixes the familiar spokescandies with people in real-life scenarios where M&M’s are present. One story, for instance, depicts two parents waiting anxiously in a hallway as a voiceover describes potty training a toddler and being ready with a candy reward for a successful attempt. The door opens to find the red M&M emerging from the bathroom, only to reveal that the child is in his room, and claiming the reward. 

Other stories include a family gathering together for a scary movie night on a couch calming their nerves with M&M’s (and commentary from the spokes candies), two older adults trying to find some romantic time together at home, only to have it spoiled by a houseguest, and a young woman enjoying alone time with peanut M&M’s until she finds a funny social media filter that compels her to share both with a nearby friend. 

An additional slate of spots is purely animated and depicts different types of M&M’s being created out of liquid chocolate and other ingredients. One spot, for instance, shows a peanut being covered in chocolate and then covered by a candy shell. The spot concludes with the yellow peanut M&M’s character saying, “I do look delicious.” Other spots in that vein feature M&M minis and the traditional M&M candies. 

“By leaning into the fun that has made M&M’s such a beloved, iconic brand, we open up immense opportunity for the type of creativity that has made this brand generationally compelling,” said Rankin Carroll, global chief creative officer, Mars Snacking, in a statement. “We know that to maintain this iconicity, we must – and we will – continue to keep fans at the heart of how the M&M’s brand comes to life. Co-creation is the future of brand building, and ‘It’s More Fun Together’ lays the foundation for us to do just that.”

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“Understand your audience and deeply prove that you can understand them,” said Matthew Watson, chief creative officer at PepsiCo Europe, during the Brand Innovators Marketing Leadership Summit during SXSW London. “Everyone can do a campaign, an idea that will touch and talk to everyone, but by doing that you’ve got a slight risk of being quite vanilla, generic and not really touching any emotion. If you can really understand your culture or subculture or your niche, you can be deeply relevant and you can have much higher engagement and much higher brand love.”

This philosophy has manifested itself in a number of ways. For instance, the Doritos brand is big with gamers. But if you try to go after gamers generically, they won’t pay attention, said Watson. “If you can dig into their community and understand the subcultures that sit within that culture, you can really understand the types of gamers you want to talk to,” he added. 

The team identified an insight among gamers that like to play with their friends in squads. Think Call of Duty and FIFA. Apparently, this niche of gamers loves Doritos, but gets very annoyed when they hear their friends eating the chips, particularly the crunches. “It’s a real problem created by our own brand,” explained Watson. “Gamers were not buying us as much because we kind of got in the way of that f*cking game party…iI you crunch a Doritos down that microphone, the pain you cause for the people you’re playing with is real.”

So they created Doritos Silent, a project that uses AI to remove the sound of Doritos crunches from a user’s audio output while gaming. 

When Lay’s was launching their gourmet crisp during Christmas in Spain, they found the wavy chips corresponded to a popular hairstyle. And since the December holidays are a popular time to get your hair done, the brand leaded in.

“[Consumers] love to get the Christmas look, the Christmas hairstyle. Salons were booked up, so much so that people struggled to get spaces in salons,” explained Watson. “When we dug into TikTok and did some kind of social listening, we found a hairstyle that we called Te Andalado, which means ‘The Wavy Cut.’ We had a crisp called ‘The Wavy Cut.’ We were just like, wait a minute. We can do something with hairstyles here.”

They created a trend, a new wavy hairstyle for Christmas and hired about 10 content creators and influencers to wear the style, designed with PepsiCo’s hairstylist, and they infiltrated Spain’s version of the Oscars and the BAFTAs. “We put them on the red carpet. They all wore it. And we had TikTok, we were like, ‘why is everyone wearing this wavy cut? Is it bad? Is it a trend? What are they doing?,’” explained Watson. Two days after the event, all of the content creators were having their hairstyle by BTS eating Lay’s crisps. 

Then they blasted the out-of-home everywhere and built a salon where consumers could get their hairstyles and some crips. “It was all to launch this new gourmet crisp in probably the hardest time to launch a luxury food,” Watson said.

Drilling down into consumer-specific insights and finding niche audiences allows the brand to drive these specific experiences.

“To be deeply relevant, you need to be able to prove it and be able to put your money where your mouth is,” Watson said. “We also use insight miners to mine the truth, the tensions and the trends happening within our subculture.”

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Nespresso’s new collaboration and agency shift come as the brand is looking to refresh its image for a younger generation. The company’s new marketing campaign (including materials for its collaboration with The Weeknd) is designed to cater to Gen Z’s preference for iced coffee drinks and leans heavily on ‘90s nostalgia, according to The Wall Street Journal. 

“Coffee runs deep in my family culture – it’s about gathering, sharing, reflecting,” said Abel Tesfaye (a.k.a. The Weeknd), in a statement. “That’s what Samra Origins and Nespresso mean to me – sharing a love of that tradition and making it accessible to many coffee lovers is truly incredible.”

Nespresso’s previous marketing has featured actor George Clooney and leaned heavily on his movie star charm and sophistication. “Cups in its ads were always steaming,” reports the Journal.

While the trend toward marketing more iced drinks and partnering with The Weeknd – the brand is also sponsoring the artist’s upcoming tour – is part of the company’s larger strategy to reach younger consumers, Jessica Padula, Nespresso USA’s vice president of marketing and head of sustainability, said Clooney would remain part of the company’s advertising strategy. 

“The Weeknd isn’t replacing George,” Padula said, “but [he is] helping us reach new audiences that George maybe isn’t reaching today.”

Clooney’s continued involvement may be questionable as Nespresso moves global creative duties on its account to Leo from McCann. According to Adweek, the shift came after a pitch that included those two agencies as well as WPP’s Ogilvy and Omnicom’s TBWA. Adweek described McCann’s relationship with Nespresso as “project-based,” and that no work was scoped out for this year. 

“We’re incredibly proud to have worked with this iconic coffee brand to turn it into a global phenomenon. From the highly successful collaboration with George Clooney to the power of the ‘Nespresso What else?’ platform, our partnership has created work that has built a new premium coffee brand around the world,” a McCann spokesperson told the outlet. “We wish the brand well in its next chapter and look forward to continuing our strong partnership across the many other ways we support the business.”

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The Magnum Ice Cream company has once again used the Cannes Film Festival as a launch platform for its summer campaign. This year’s edition is called “Crack into Pleasure.”

The social-first experiential effort is aimed at positioning the brand as an ice cream for adults that offers adult pleasures. This time around, those adults are Gen Z.

“Gen Z was born into a world of abundance, of options, of copycats, of different propositions. It has not been easy to treat them the same as Millennials,” said Tugce Aksoy, global brand director at Magnum, at the Brand Innovators Entertainment Marketing Summit at the Cannes Film Festival. “Before, when we were targeting Millennials, we could actually rely on getting to them through TV and through one message. Now we are being faced with different communities with very strong passion points, very strong fandoms. You need to actually customize yourself into their attention span.”

The brand, which sells more than 1 billion units of ice cream a year, has customized themselves into that Gen Z world by partnering with pop star Charli XCX and creating an experiential pop up at Cannes. Working with partners Golin and The Edje, the company built out a beach on the Croisette with customizable ways to enjoy their ice cream including a pistachio matcha milkshake in Charli’s signature green, green Brat ice cream sticks and the Magnum Bakery – a place to enjoy an ice cream sandwich croissant.

The brand hosted one of the biggest parties in town during the festival, attended by Charli XCX and 300 influencers. The idea was to bring the creative to the influencers and to give Gen Z the chance to remix the brand.

“We have come a long way from an experience where it was all around a lone big celebrity and it was quite exclusive and fans didn’t get access to it and they could only see one picture in the newspaper,” explained Aksoy. “Now we are doing it by finding the most relevant icon to this audience and giving them the creative keys to the space.”

Half of the party attendees were content creators and the friends and fans of the space. “They are all there. They love her. This interaction creates an incredible amplification that goes way beyond Cannes.”

“Gen Z wants to see things that are truly curated by that talent and they want to see the talent that has had a real say in things and that sometimes makes us so nervous,” said Askoy. “We’ve never handed that level of creative control over before but we knew she was the right partner for us.

The creative will be rolled out for the rest of the year and will support the Crack into Pleasure effort. The idea behind the campaign came out of research the brand and agency did. They used AI to read grocery store reviews and identify what was happening when people do and do not buy a Magnum to figure out what they love about the product.

“We really needed to understand what created that emotional connection,” explained Katie-Jo Flynn, head of consumer at Golin. “The resounding thing that came out across all of the different supermarket reviews was that actually it is the crack of that chocolate that has that real emotional connection. That’s what has been that real moment of pleasure, so when we looked at all the distinctive brand assets that were in front of us it gave us the confidence to take the crack into so many different places –earned, social and it’s a part of our global campaign.”

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The race marks the first gathering of the brand’s entire fleet of six Wienermobiles in more than a decade. As mentioned, each of the hot-dog-and-bun vehicles will represent a different area of the country by regional hot dog style, including Midwest (Chicago dog), East (New York dog), Southeast (Slaw Dog), Southwest (Sonoran Dog), South (Chili Dog) and Northeast (Seattle dog). 

Wienermobile drivers will be treated to custom Hotdogger racing suits and the winner will receive a trophy presentation in the “Wiener’s Circle,” complete with a condiment spray and a championship hot dog. 

For those who want to get a little deeper into the action, the brand has partnered with DraftKings to set up a free-to-play pool where fans can predict the outcome of the race by answering a series of questions. Those who rack up the most points will win a share of a $10,000 prize. 

Like the Indianapolis 500 itself, the event is meant to mark the beginning of summer grilling season and is part of a partnership that includes Oscar Mayer being named the “Official Hot Dog” of Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the Indianapolis 500. The race will also be supported by an advertising campaign that will roll out across the country. 

“As a brand known for sparking smiles in disarmingly delightful ways, it’s only fitting that we bring a race of epic proportions to the Speedway and celebrate a timeless tradition: delicious meats and a little friendly competition to kick off a summer of wieners,” said Kelsey Rice, brand communications director at Oscar Mayer, in a statement.

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While it has long been understood that people find satisfaction and peace from their pets, the collaboration benefitted from company-commissioned research depicting some of the tangible ways this occurs. For instance, 78% of people say their pet reminds them to pause and take a break from work, chores or tasks, as a reminder to stop, breathe and reset. Further, half of those respondents say this happens daily. 

“As part of our ongoing research into the relationship between pets and people, our research team uncovered the insight that pets are ‘nudging’ us to better wellbeing – but we don’t always notice it,” said David Reilly, global VP of communications at Mars Petcare. “We wanted to shine a light on this hidden role pets play in everyday mental health and wellbeing – and who better to partner with than Calm to do it?”

The content initiative through the partnership will include Sleep Stories categorized under “Pets and their People,” in the Calm app, as well as guided meditations that reflect on the ways pets support mental health. The app will also include a series of breathing exercises that blend mindfulness with the warmth and comfort of pets.

“There is a mountain of evidence that the bond we share with our pets has a truly

transformational impact on our wellbeing,” Reilly said. “We want to help more pet lovers celebrate their pets and embrace the idea that as we care for our pets, we can also unlock ways to look after ourselves a little bit more. We have launched the first-ever pet-inspired content collection on Calm, which features sleep stories, meditations and breathing exercises.”

To celebrate the partnership, Calm and Mars are launching a search to find touching stories of human-pet interactions via social media. To facilitate the search, the brands have partnered with Kinship to set up an interactive quiz of five questions that are designed to identify one of six pet wellbeing superpowers. Users can then use those results to share their stories with the brands in hopes of having those stories turned into Calm content later this year. 

“We are searching for inspirational pet stories that showcase the everyday wellbeing power of pets,” Reilly said. “We want to hear about the impacts, big and small, that pets have. Every post shared using #MyPetGuru adds to a global collection of stories — reminding the world that the path to better wellbeing might just be curled up at your feet.”

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The new “Heinz Verified” program continues the brand’s longstanding campaign to highlight its dedicated fan base and its “It has to be Heinz” overall brand positioning. Previous campaigns have included asking fans to call out “ketchup fraud,” creating a tattoo-ready label, and positioning its product as an emotional-support assistant. 

Taking that passion a step further, the Heinz Verified campaign is meant to showcase the brand as an ally to restaurateurs in a difficult business. By becoming Heinz Verified, the company will provide its partners with access to insights and consumer trends, product samples, promotions, branded merchandise, digital resources and free marketing support to drive customer traffic. 

“By introducing HEINZ Verified, we want to help restaurants succeed so communities can thrive – delivering quality and value for both restaurants and individuals through meaningful, best-in-class products and experiences,” said Peter Hall, president of elevation, North America at Kraft Heinz, in a statement. “Our ambition is to help restaurant operators excel while also providing elevated dining experiences for people wherever they eat away from home.”  

Kraft Heinz will further support the program with a new content series, “Daytrippin,” featuring actor, comedian and social media personality Steven He. The program, which will be distributed on YouTube and packaged for other streaming platforms, will follow He as he takes a road trip from Pittsburgh to Chicago (via Cleveland), showcasing each city’s local food culture, iconic dishes and the people behind them. 

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The cold brew coffee category has seen significant growth over the last few years, becoming a $3.16 billion business in 2024 and is projected to reach $16.22 billion by 2032. While these drinks are now available at retail and in hospitality locations, concert venues have long lacked access to this trending drink.

Kiedis, Powers and their friend John Terzian, who co-owns h.wood group believe that coffee needs to be in more places. “It’s not just for rise-and-shining,” says the company’s origin story on the website. “Coffee belongs in all their favorite places, including nightlife and live music venues. This team is on a mission to bring incredible coffee to wherever people may want to drink it.”

“We’ve made a series of strategic investments in brands that improve the fan experience in simple, tangible ways — from staying hydrated with Liquid Death and connected with FUZE Technology, to cooling off with CVT Soft Serve and now, staying caffeinated with JOLENE,” said Russell Wallach, global president at Live Nation Media & Sponsorship. “We’re always looking for ways to add more value for fans at concerts and festivals. Cold coffee kept rising to the top in all our research. The opportunity was clear when the JOLENE team came to us with a product built for the pace of live music. We could bring it to fans at scale across 40+ U.S. venues and festivals, starting with BottleRock. It’s a great product that we know fans want.”

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“For a lot of moms, we hear that Mother’s Day can be just another day they need to manage, from the mess to the meltdowns to the not-so-subtle gift hints,” said Katelyn Meola, brand marketing director for Bubly sparkling water. “Bubly stands for delivering smiles, even in life’s messiest moments. The Bubly Gift Glow Up Shop is helping moms feel seen by giving them what they deserve: a refreshing moment for them.”

In total, the brand estimates it will give away more than $100,000 in merchandise and experiences through the Glow Up Shop. Those who don’t get gifts through the shop can still receive some perks through its Instacart store, where they can receive $2 off a $15 purchase of items such as wine, chocolate and self-care.

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The spot aims to highlight Gerber’s commitment to supporting parents and families. 

“At Gerber, we think the world can do better when it comes to supporting parents,” said Meghan Bhatia, marketing director at Gerber. “We’ve been on a mission to make mealtime easier for parents for nearly 100 years. And now, we’re taking it a step further with our Parent-Friendly Pursuit. It’s time for meaningful change, and we believe we can help lead the way.”

The brand’s “For a Parent Friendly World” platform is leaning into their heritage as being a brand that has been supporting families for almost 100 years. 

“In 1927, our founder, Dorothy Gerber, invented baby food to deliver nutritious food for littles and lighten the load for parents. She was beloved for personally responding to thousands of letters from parents across the country,” added Bhatia. “Supporting parents is in our DNA, and we have a responsibility to carry on Dorothy’s legacy. This campaign is about challenging the support systems we’ve built for parents and raising the bar. The new creative — Sorry! — is just the start of our journey.”

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