startup-brand

Ulta Credits AI for 95% of Sales. That Number's Been 95% Since 2023.

Ulta Beauty told Adweek on May 5 that AI personalization is supercharging the loyalty program that drives 95% of its sales. PYMNTS reported the same 95% loyalty share in 2023, two full years before Ulta rolled out the Virtual Beauty Advisor AI inside its mobile app. The number AI is

GameStop's eBay Bid Calls Out $2.4B in Marketing That Added 1M Buyers

GameStop made a $55.5 billion unsolicited bid for eBay on May 4, 2026, and the pitch names eBay's $2.4 billion fiscal 2025 sales and marketing budget as the single biggest target for cuts. The bid's logic: that spend produced one million net active buyers,

What Liquid Death, CeraVe, and Stanley Did to Go Viral on Zero Ad Spend

Five brands earned over a billion impressions each in the past three years without spending a dollar on paid amplification: Liquid Death, CeraVe, Olipop, Duolingo, and Stanley. Each followed the same pattern: make content people share unprompted, plant a hook the internet can finish, then amplify through creators instead of

Allbirds Sold for $39M. The DTC Death Pattern Has Four Acts

Allbirds agreed to sell its brand and assets to American Exchange Group for roughly $39 million in March 2026, down from a $4.2 billion peak market value in 2021. The pattern underneath this collapse repeats across Outdoor Voices, Casper, Brandless, and Away. Pure-play direct-to-consumer brands die when paid-acquisition costs

Hellmann's Stuck Ranch on a Billboard Because UK Shoppers Won't Try It

Hellmann's launched an edible billboard in the UK on April 29, 2026, asking "WTF Is Ranch?" and inviting passersby to taste Creamy Ranch directly off the panel. Edelman built the activation around a single insight: UK shoppers have read about ranch on TikTok for two years

Nectar's 'Asian Glow Up' Just Branded the Stigma 36% of East Asians Hide

Nectar, the Asian American hard seltzer Jeremy Kim launched in December 2020 with $20,000, ran an AAPI Heritage Month campaign called "Asian Glow Up" that reframes alcohol flush, a physiological reaction in roughly 36% of East Asians, as a brand identity. The category lesson: brands whose product

Land O'Lakes and Getty Caught Brands Using Rural Clichés on 46M People

Two-thirds of rural Americans say advertisers don't understand them, according to Getty Images' VisualGPS panel, while only 5% of popular ad visuals are actually set in a rural place. That gap sits on top of 46.2 million people: 14% of the US population spread across 72%