Startup & Brand

Unconventional campaigns, viral stunts, and challenger brand plays that made everyone notice. The creative work worth copying.

Coca-Cola Put 13 Competing Restaurants in One Ad. The Audience Isn't at the Drive-Thru.

Coca-Cola released “And a Coke” this week, a three-spot campaign featuring 13 fast-food chains in scenarios where customers order wildly different meals but always end with the same three words. Arby’s, Domino’s, Wendy’s, Wingstop, Panda Express, Five Guys, and seven others all show up in the same

Your Best Brand Ambassador Is Quietly Building the Thing That Replaces You

The Skincare Is Almost Beside the Point Alix Earle didn’t just launch a skincare brand last week. She ran the most instructive creator-to-founder playbook of the year, and the part most brand teams should be paying attention to isn’t the product. It’s what the launch reveals about

Millennials Don't Hate Your Brand. They Just Won't Forgive It.

The headline from Adobe's latest research probably didn't surprise you: millennials abandon brands faster than any other generation. According to the 2026 Digital Trends data, 67% of millennials left at least one brand in the past 12 months after a trust breach. Gen Z is actually

A Dating App Made Signup Deliberately Annoying. Ten Months In, It Looks Like That Was the Right Call.

Every CRO playbook published in the last decade says the same thing: reduce friction. Remove form fields. Minimize clicks. Make onboarding so effortless that users barely notice they've signed up. Sonder, a London-based dating app launched in June 2025, went the other direction. Their signup process asks users

Unilever Gave Up Hellmann's and Knorr. Brand Love Was Never the Point.

Unilever just agreed to combine its food business, including Hellmann's, Knorr, and roughly a dozen other brands most people grew up with, into a new entity with McCormick in a deal valued at approximately $45 billion. Unilever shareholders get 55 percent of the combined company plus $15.7

April Fools Is the One Day Brands Can Be Weird. Most of Them Waste It.

Every April 1st, your LinkedIn feed fills up with "genius" brand pranks that are neither genius nor funny. A fake product that took longer to ideate than it took anyone to forget. A press release about a "revolutionary" food-tech mashup that exists only as a render.