Case Studies
McDonald's Arch Deluxe: The $150 Million Campaign to Sell Adults a Burger They Didn't Want
McDonald's spent a quarter-billion dollars developing and marketing a burger for sophisticated adults, then watched it fail because nobody trusts McDonald's to be sophisticated.
McDonald's
Tropicana's 2009 Packaging Redesign: The $35 Million Rebrand That Lasted Six Weeks
Tropicana replaced one of the most recognizable packages in grocery retail with something that looked like a store brand, lost $30–35 million in sales, and reversed course in six weeks.
Tropicana
The Battery That Keeps Going: Energizer's Bunny as a Brand Machine
A pink mechanical bunny with a bass drum interrupted fake ads for fictional products to prove one point: Energizer keeps going and going. The 1989 campaign turned a commodity product into a pop culture icon that lasted for decades.
Energizer
I Heard It Through the Grapevine: The California Raisins' Unlikely Hit
Clay-animated raisins singing Marvin Gaye's 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine' for a government commodity board became one of the most beloved ad campaigns of the 1980s — spinning off merchandise, specials, and a cultural life far beyond any raisin promotion.
California Raisin Advisory Board
Where's the Beef? Wendy's Most Famous Three Words
Three elderly women. One tiny hamburger. And a phrase that entered the American vocabulary overnight — 'Where's the beef?' turned a 1984 Wendy's commercial into a cultural event and accelerated sales by 26 percent in its first year.
Wendy's
The Man in the Hathaway Shirt: How David Ogilvy Invented the Intrigue Model of Advertising
David Ogilvy had a $30,000 budget and stopped at a drugstore on the way to the shoot. What he bought cost less than a dollar and built a brand for 25 years.
Hathaway
"Morning in America": The Political Ad That Redefined What Political Advertising Could Do
Hal Riney wrote 60 seconds about a morning that was dawning in America, never mentioned Walter Mondale once, and Reagan won 49 states.
Reagan Campaign
"I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke": The Hilltop Ad That Defined Aspirational Advertising
Bill Backer was stranded in an airport watching strangers share Cokes, and he realized he wasn't selling a soft drink — he was selling the moment around it.
Coca-Cola
Calvin Klein and Kate Moss: Controversy as a Brand Strategy
Calvin Klein didn't stumble into controversy. He built a brand on the reliable knowledge that the right kind of outrage is free media.
Calvin Klein
Sega "Genesis Does What Nintendon't": The Console War Campaign That Changed Videogame Marketing
Sega looked at the most dominant brand in gaming and decided the correct strategy was to tell children that Nintendo was for babies.
Sega
Wonderbra "Hello Boys": The Billboard That Stopped Traffic
Two words on a billboard made Wonderbra the most talked-about brand in Britain and turned a Czech model into an international icon.
Wonderbra
The Energizer Bunny: How a Battery Ad Became a Metaphor for Unstoppability
Energizer set out to mock a competitor's bunny and accidentally created a cultural icon that outlived the original joke by decades.
Energizer
Oh What a Feeling: How Toyota Sold Joy Instead of Cars
Toyota's 1982 Australian campaign turned a car purchase into a euphoric leap into the air — and made 'Oh what a feeling' one of the most enduring advertising slogans in automotive history.
Toyota
Nike "Bo Knows": The Campaign Built Around the Last True Multi-Sport Athlete
Bo Jackson played Major League Baseball and NFL football at the same time, at an elite level. Nike built a campaign around this physical impossibility, brought in Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan, and John McEnroe to testify, and sold out of cross-training shoes.
Nike
Volvic Touch of Fruit: A Simple Product Extension That Dominated a Category
Volvic added a small amount of fruit flavoring to mineral water, positioned it between soft drinks and plain water, and built one of the UK's best-selling beverage lines. Not through a revolutionary idea, but through perfect category positioning.
Volvic
I'm Lovin' It: How McDonald's Built a Global Tagline From a German Hip-Hop Jingle
McDonald's first genuinely global campaign came not from New York or London but from a German agency, featured a jingle written for hip-hop radio, and starred Justin Timberlake. It became the longest-running tagline in the company's history.
McDonald's
Tata Nano: The World's Cheapest Car, and Why That Was the Problem
Ratan Tata built a car to lift Indian families off motorcycles and into safety. He marketed it as the world's cheapest car. The emerging Indian middle class didn't want the world's cheapest anything.
Tata Motors
Starbucks "Race Together": What Happens When a Brand Enters a Conversation It Has No Standing In
Howard Schultz wanted to start a national conversation about race. He chose to do it on disposable coffee cups, through baristas, during the morning rush. The country responded with near-universal derision.
Starbucks
BMW Films "The Hire": The Series That Invented Branded Entertainment
Eight short films by directors including Ang Lee and Guy Ritchie, starring Clive Owen, only available on the internet: BMW invented branded entertainment in 2001 and nobody has done it better since.
BMW
Burger King's Subservient Chicken: The Website That Changed Interactive Marketing
A man in a chicken costume who did whatever you typed became the internet's first major branded interactive moment. It worked because the interactivity wasn't a feature; it was the entire point.
Burger King
Microsoft + Seinfeld + Gates: The $300 Million Campaign Nobody Understood
Microsoft paid Jerry Seinfeld $10 million and Bill Gates an unknown sum to star in ads that had no discernible message, pulled them after two spots, and replaced them with a campaign that actually worked.
Microsoft
Dove "Evolution": The 75-Second Film That Changed How Brands Talk About Beauty
A 75-second YouTube film showing a woman's full transformation into a billboard model (makeup, lighting, Photoshop) became one of the most shared brand videos in history before anyone had coined the phrase 'viral marketing.'
Dove
Ryanair on TikTok: The Airline That Made Itself a Meme and Grew Its Audience
Ryanair built a TikTok presence by making jokes about their own hidden fees, cramped seats, and bad reputation — and ended up with millions of followers who genuinely liked them for it.
Ryanair
Peloton's Holiday Ad: How One Commercial Nearly Derailed a Billion-Dollar Brand
Peloton ran a holiday ad showing a woman documenting her year on a gifted exercise bike, and somehow managed to make a premium fitness product feel like an insult.
Peloton
Calm's Super Bowl Spot: A Black Screen and the Sound of Breathing
Calm paid Super Bowl prices for 30 seconds of silence, a black screen, and a waterfall — and the next morning it was the most-downloaded app in the country.
Calm
IHOP Becomes IHOb: The Stunt That Proved You Can Win Without Changing Anything
IHOP announced it was changing its name to IHOb, broke the internet, got roasted by every major burger chain, and then changed nothing — and burger sales went up.
IHOP
KFC "FCK": The Apology Ad That Won Awards for Running Out of Chicken
KFC ran out of chicken, closed 900 restaurants, and then ran a newspaper ad rearranging the letters in their name to describe the situation — and it became one of the most praised crisis communications in recent memory.
KFC
The Mailchimp Rebrand: What Happens When a Quirky Brand Grows Up Without Losing Itself
Mailchimp needed to grow from an email tool into a full marketing platform without sanding down the personality that made it beloved, and Collins figured out how.
Mailchimp
"Draw Ketchup": The Brief That Proved Heinz Owns a Color
Rethink asked people around the world to draw ketchup and then ran the results as an ad campaign, proving that brand equity doesn't need a logo to be visible.
Heinz
Cards Against Humanity's Black Friday Campaigns: Anti-Marketing as the Best Marketing
Cards Against Humanity raised prices on Black Friday, sold literal bull feces, and dug a pointless hole in the ground — and won every time.
Cards Against Humanity
Old Spice "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like": How Isaiah Mustafa Saved a Dying Brand
Old Spice was a brand for grandfathers until Isaiah Mustafa stood on a boat and changed everything.
Old Spice
Patagonia "Don't Buy This Jacket": The Ad That Told You Not to Buy the Product
Patagonia ran a full-page Black Friday ad telling customers not to buy their jacket, and sales went up.
Patagonia
The Gap Logo: A $100 Million Lesson in Not Fixing What Isn't Broken
On October 6, 2010, Gap quietly replaced its 20-year-old logo with a new one. Six days later, it reversed course after one of the most swift and unanimous public rejections of a rebrand in modern retail history.
Gap
Juicero: The $400 Juice Machine That Didn't Need to Exist
Juicero raised $120 million to build a Wi-Fi connected juice machine, then Bloomberg reporters discovered you could get the same result by squeezing the packet with your hands — a $400 machine made functionally unnecessary by basic human grip strength.
Juicero
Bud Light and Dylan Mulvaney: How One Influencer Partnership Became a Brand Crisis
Bud Light sent a single personalized can to a single influencer, said nothing publicly, and then said the wrong things when the backlash hit — a case study in what happens when a brand takes a position without having prepared a position.
Bud Light
Theranos: The Marketing Strategy That Turned Fraud Into a Story About Disruption
Theranos built a $9 billion valuation on a technology that didn't work, powered by a messaging strategy so precisely constructed that it convinced Walgreens, Safeway, and a board of statesmen to look past the science entirely.
Theranos
Quibi: The $1.75 Billion Streaming Failure Nobody Saw Coming (But Should Have)
Quibi raised $1.75 billion, hired Hollywood royalty, and launched directly into the one moment in modern history when nobody needed short-form mobile video on their commute. There was no commute.
Quibi
Airbnb "Belong Anywhere": Building a Brand Identity for a Company People Were Afraid Of
In 2014, Airbnb hired DesignStudio to rebrand a company that people thought was for trusting strangers with their homes, and turned a transaction into a philosophy of belonging.
Airbnb
The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge: How a Viral Fundraising Mechanic Changed Nonprofit Marketing
In the summer of 2014, a grassroots ice-water stunt raised over $115 million for ALS research in two months, funded a gene discovery, and rewrote the rules for how nonprofit campaigns spread.
ALS Association
Red Bull Stratos: The Day a Brand Sent a Man to the Edge of Space
On October 14, 2012, Felix Baumgartner stepped off a capsule 128,100 feet above New Mexico and became the first human to break the sound barrier in freefall — and Red Bull produced the whole thing.
Red Bull
Snickers "You're Not You When You're Hungry": How a Simple Insight Became a Global Platform
A 30-second Super Bowl ad featuring Betty White getting tackled in a football game launched a decade-long global platform that turned Snickers back into the world's best-selling candy bar.
Snickers
Cadbury's Gorilla: The Ad That Had Nothing to Do With Chocolate
Fallon London rebuilt Cadbury's battered brand after a salmonella crisis by airing a gorilla playing Phil Collins on a drum kit — and never showing chocolate until the final seconds.
Cadbury
"Got Milk?" — The Campaign That Saved a Category by Reframing the Problem
For decades, milk advertising told people milk was good for them. Then Goodby Silverstein asked what happens when you don't have it — and milk consumption in California reversed a decades-long decline.
California Milk Processor Board
Absolut Vodka: The 25-Year Campaign Built Around a Single Object
For 25 years, Absolut ran over 1,500 different ads that were all, at their core, the same ad — a bottle and two words — and that discipline is what made them one of the most recognizable campaigns in history.
Absolut Vodka
Avis "We Try Harder": The Campaign That Made Being Second an Advantage
In 1962, Avis was losing money and running a distant second to Hertz. DDB's solution was to say so out loud — and it's one of the most effective counter-positioning moves in advertising history.
Avis
The Marlboro Man Campaign Case Study: How a Feminine Cigarette Brand Became the Best-Selling in the World
In 1954, Leo Burnett took a cigarette marketed with the tagline 'Mild as May' and turned it into the best-selling cigarette in the world. He did it by inventing a cowboy.
Marlboro
Coca-Cola "Share a Coke" Campaign Case Study
Coca-Cola reversed a decade of declining sales in Australia by doing something no brand manager would sanction: erasing their own logo and replacing it with someone's name.
Coca-Cola
De Beers "A Diamond is Forever": The Ad That Invented a Tradition
Frances Gerety wrote 'A Diamond is Forever' in 1947 without particularly liking it — and in doing so created the most successful manufactured tradition in consumer history.
De Beers
Liquid Death: How a $700M Water Brand Was Built on Heavy Metal Branding
Liquid Death is literally water in a can. The fact that it's a $700 million company is entirely a branding story, and it's one of the more instructive branding stories of the past decade.
Liquid Death
New Coke: The 1985 Marketing Failure Case Study
Coca-Cola ran the most rigorous consumer taste tests in the history of packaged goods, got a clear result, acted on it decisively — and produced one of the most spectacular brand failures of the 20th century, because they were measuring the wrong thing.
Coca-Cola Burger King "Moldy Whopper" Campaign Case Study
Burger King showed their flagship burger decomposing over 34 days — and won more advertising awards than any other campaign that year, because the rot was the proof.
Burger King
Duolingo on TikTok: What a Giant Owl Mascot Teaches About Brand Personality
Duolingo let a 23-year-old social media manager put their mascot in a costume and act unhinged on TikTok — and it became one of the most successful brand accounts on the platform.
Duolingo
Pepsi Kendall Jenner Ad: A Marketing Failure Case Study
Pepsi's Kendall Jenner ad was pulled within 24 hours — a case study in how purpose-washing fails when there's no genuine connection between a brand and the cause it's appropriating.
Pepsi
Wendy's Twitter Strategy: How a Fast Food Chain Rewrote the Rules of Brand Voice
Wendy's decided to act like a person on Twitter instead of a brand, and in doing so became the most-talked-about fast food account on the internet.
Wendy's
Always "#LikeAGirl" Campaign Case Study
Always turned a phrase used as an insult into one of the most awarded and culturally resonant campaigns of the 2010s — by simply showing what 'like a girl' looks like before someone teaches you it means weak.
Always (P&G)
Spotify Wrapped: How a Data Feature Became a Cultural Moment
Spotify figured out how to turn surveillance into a gift, and in doing so created one of the most reliable annual social media events of the past decade.
Spotify
Dos Equis "Most Interesting Man in the World" Case Study
Dos Equis built one of the most imitated advertising characters in modern marketing by understanding that their real target wasn't beer drinkers — it was a specific aspiration.
Dos Equis
Nike "Dream Crazy" — The Colin Kaepernick Campaign Case Study
Nike put Colin Kaepernick's face on a global ad campaign knowing full well that a percentage of their customers would burn their shoes. They did it anyway.
Nike
Volkswagen "Think Small" Campaign Case Study
In 1959, Bill Bernbach put a tiny car in the corner of a white page and wrote two words that would change advertising forever: Think Small.
Volkswagen Dove "Real Beauty" Campaign Case Study
Dove built one of the most durable brand platforms of the 21st century by asking a simple question that the entire beauty industry had avoided: what if we showed real women?
Dove
Old Spice "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" Case Study
Old Spice was your grandfather's aftershave — until Wieden+Kennedy turned a single Super Bowl commercial into a cultural reset that doubled body wash sales in a year.
Old Spice
Apple "Get a Mac" Campaign Case Study
Sixty-six commercials, two actors, a white void, and the most effective identity-based comparative advertising campaign in technology history.
Apple
Apple "1984" Super Bowl Commercial Case Study
The Apple board voted to fire the agency and pull the ad — then the ad aired once and changed advertising forever.
Apple