Oren Meets World: the best marketing campaigns of 2025 (so far)

In this video, I'm going to talk about the best marketing of 2025 so far, along with a few campaigns that don't hit so well. We're going to rank everything on my arbitrary system of 1 to 10, based entirely on my criteria and what I like because it is my thought. We're going to cover everything from event activations, to actual ad campaigns, to social media content, just to highlight a bunch of standout things in all kinds of industries. Who am I to be able to talk to you about this? I am a former CMO and marketing leader across consumer electronics and consumer packaged goods companies. And now I make content on the internet and help brands at the largest level navigate how to do great on social and make campaigns that culturally resonate. This will be a fun one because there's all kinds of interesting visuals and exciting campaigns happening for better or for worse. So let's lock in. So I'm going to start off with one of the most interesting and culturally relevant, yet also particularly controversial campaigns. And that is The Ordinary releasing cheap eggs in New York City at $3.37. So if you aren't familiar with The Ordinary, you're probably not alone. They are a clinical skincare company, noted for their kind of no-nonsense approach and branding and being very focused on the science behind their products. And they've grown to quite an impressive size with that. But what they've never had is anything that's kind of gotten them outside of the box or showed any really element of personality for the brand. They've been dead focused on the product, which makes complete sense. You can scale to a certain level as a brand with only focusing on that. But they decided at some point that we need to go bigger. We need to be doing things that are more interesting. And so they collaborated with Mischief. Yes, the mischief of Big Red Boots fame amongst others as a beauty brand providing cheap groceries when everyone is talking about the price of eggs. So the conversation is, what does this actually do for them? So first, it enters them into a much bigger conversation. This became a cultural moment talked about from everything from news media to social media influencers where people could actually go and capture it. They did it in New York, which is the epicenter of being able to launch things like this. But they also caught plenty of controversy as a company that is notoriously vegan offering eggs is something particularly un-vegan. And thus, the comments on their posts, as you can see here when you scroll, absolutely went off with these really complicated conversations around, aren't you cruelty free? And yet you're selling eggs. I'm not going to dive into the depths of people that care about that kind of stuff on the internet. But you will note that that controversy is part of what propelled this to its 114,000 likes. And I do think for a brand that is getting very little attention inside the zeitgeist, inside content, doing something like this is an interesting way to spearhead becoming a more interesting brand. And on that note, I'm going to touch on the next campaign, which is by a brand with a similar strategy, who has done this at the highest level now for years, and that is CeraVe. So most people know from CeraVe or became a household name at their Michael Cera campaign, where there's all this speculation around whether it was his brand and it was a celebrity endorsement. But they also this year announced their heads of CeraVe with a couple of famous and prolific athletes, one of whom being Anthony Davis, who was in this paparazzi moment carrying around massive tubs of CeraVe anti-dandruff shampoo. And why is this relevant to The Ordinary? Because CeraVe is another company, clinically focused, scientific products, or basically advertising on basketball sites to debut this. They actually got Woj to debut the news of Anthony Davis signing to CeraVe like it was a trade and brought him out of retirement. But they as a company have leaned into this over-the-top performative marketing inside these niches at culturally relevant moments to help give them an identity beyond just being like a clinical brand. While their actual branding stays completely true to what you'd expect from like a traditional shampoo. And this is the route that something like The Ordinary goes on by doing this egg program, opens the doors for them to be a more interesting, talked about brand with whatever they do next to enter into a category where they become a little more cultural versus purely just a product choice. And I always find these arcs fascinating. So next up, this is Anthony Davis and his sneakers with Adidas. So right after Anthony Davis threw down a poster dunk, those of you not familiar with basketball is when someone gets humiliated on the dunk so much that you'd want to have the dunk on a poster and then the piercer would be like cowering below and got hit. Adidas releases this commercial basically right away. Right after this in-game dunk where they're replicating with Ice-T your Law & Order style recap of a crime scene of how bad this dude got dunked on. In the signature Anthony Davis style, if you haven't seen his other ads, you will see the same background with the orange, et cetera, is within all of these. And then they find the actual shoes like evidence. And you see Anthony Davis pop up here at the end. So this is a great example of kind of this cultural relevance idea that we started with The Ordinary. We're saying, hey, eggs is a topic of conversation. Let's give people cheap eggs. Let's enter the conversation that way. Or Sarah V being like, hey, we're announcing Anthony Davis. He just got traded. We're gonna leverage all that conversation around him to actually have basketball outlets debut the marketing campaign for us versus just putting it on television to something like this where they have made this ad. They probably have multiple ads in this campaign sitting in their queue and have said, hey, when he does something impressive, we're gonna drop another one. And they're using cultural figures that people recognize and scenarios they recognize to cut these ads with a branded kind of dramatic background. And once we see ad 15 like this, you're gonna automatically associate with Anthony Davis campaigns. So getting some rankings on these and what do they mean actually scoring some of them. So that ordinary campaign, I'm gonna give like a seven. And I give it a seven because I think for them and for the impact it has on getting their brand into the conversation, it is extremely high. But to the point of like, hey, there actually are like a vegan cruelty-free brand. Their audience seemed to be a little bit dissuaded by it. I will knock it down a few pegs. It didn't make sense in a greater context what the brand's trying to do. Whereas that Sarah V Anthony Davis campaign where they announced the heads of Sarah V. They do it on social media. They bring in all these orgs and things you wouldn't expect like being debuted through basketball media. It's part of a multi-step campaign where they're announcing these heads, community gets involved. You can kind of see the full span of a way to a group that really understands marketing. I would give that a 10. And then this Anthony Davis style on this, I would also be giving what they are doing, putting out his shoes and the marketing around it. I would give that a 10 as well. All right, so I'm gonna teach you about a piece of software you can add to your marketing toolkit. This is super useful if you're trying to stay relevant with everything that's going on right now. So this is Particle who is the sponsor of this video. But why they're really interesting for marketers is you can go into any brand that's on the platform, which is the majority of the brands that are on Shopify. And you can actually see the data like I look at here, which will show you things like rates sold and average discounts, see what people are doing for sales. They also have this events tab in here where they basically summarize changes that get made from the brand. So for instance, Glossier launches this new merch item on April 11th. It tells you the revenue, they saw sales revenue of $3.1,000. That merch item generated 6.7K in sales and 5.8 the following day. It notes when they put launches on their homepage. You can go back and get historicals about where brands did what. And right over here, I can click into assets and I can see things like meta ads and emails that they're running and the styles that they're using. For instance, now I can go through them on the our place site. I can go look at all the emails that they've sent and when, show you more emails from the company. I can scroll through a whole bunch below. If you're trying to basically competitively audit what's going on with companies, you can see the direct sales numbers of what they're doing per product. You can see the average discounts on those products in case you were curious about that. But really, this event summary is actually one of the most useful ones because you really want to understand what has the company been doing? How frequently do they make changes? This year, where you can look at basically every new product arrival, their this launch and then how well the launch actually did. And having that all in a summary that you can have is a really great way to just keep up with everything happening in your brand and landscape. If you want to learn more about Particle, which is a tool I use constantly for everything from researching niches to launch products in, to just diving into competitive data, it is the link that is in the description of this and I've also pinned it as a comment. So next up comes this IKEA You Up campaign where IKEA slid into Canadian DMs and I believe text messages by asking them if you are up. Anyone who responded on how they chose them between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. is rewarded with a free mattress. And this is one of those where it's like that fine line between like ad agency bullshit and stuff that might actually resonate, right? Where so any brand that has SMS knows like SMS is a really rough channel, even DMs is a rough channel. No one wants to receive a bunch of extra stuff from a brand. I feel bad enough sending stuff into my broadcast channel on Instagram. Nonetheless, sending text messages to people's phones to buy your ----. And someone like IKEA, same thing. What are they really going to announce? And someone's going to go, I really have to open this IKEA text message. But developing a sense of humor and a personality with that, I think is a really, really interesting concept. And then doing it like in a way that again is sort of culturally relevant and like the You Up after the club way and actually giving someone a reward if they respond within a timeframe and utilizing this time component of marketing, I think is a really interesting idea. Now, this wasn't a campaign that I feel like really grabbed the zeitgeist or tons of people talked about it. Definitely has that like, hey, the ad agency that put it out, if you like, you search for it, it's like they're all talking about it, but not a lot of actual people are. So I will give this a seven. I do think it's a strong concept. And I think what we're going to see in the SMS channel is that how do you get like nuanced and interesting and get cool enough that people are actually going to open your text messages, which as a brand is a pretty hard proposition. Moving down the list into event marketing. This Pinterest campaign was an interesting one. To kick off Coachella, they invited Chappelle Rohn's creative director to create an installation where people could collage together. You can remix yourself at Coachella. Now, I do love this idea. They're connected to the brand and they're giving people something they can leave the event with. I'm a massive fan of this for events. Events where you actually get to create something, where you get to leave with a thing that you are proud of from a creative standpoint, where people get to participate in something and we learn skills beyond them. I absolutely love. I spent some time working with a group called The Shoe Surgeon. We used to do these workshops and we had like the NFL would come to a workshop or a brand would come to a workshop. They'd customize sneakers at the actual spot. You could see anything from like the NFL events or with like disenfranchised kids or whatever it is. And they would be so stoked and happy that they got to go create this thing. But also even when you did a corporate workshop, people would like put a lot of care and intensity like making something interesting for them and be like, wow, I'm capable of more than I expected. So I love that for brands. It was an amazing way to have it resonate. Arc'teryx did something like this back in the day too, where they partnered with artists. You could bring your Arc'teryx and they would like screen print it or do customization. Love that. And this is a fun idea too for Pinterest at Coachella. I am curious to see what the social element of this is. Are they gonna be able to get a bunch of people here? Are people gonna be posting these really sick collages? Can they get them sent to their house? Whatever it looks like. But it was a creative and interesting campaign to do for a festival activation more so than just having a house that people can hang out at. So I'm gonna go ahead and give Pinterest an eight here. We'll follow up once the actual campaign is finished. So speaking of campaigns that have interest or attention, I think that's like half the battle, right? You can come up with interesting campaign ideas. Ikea can do this U-Up campaign, but the only people to talk about it are advertising people, advertising executives. Does it actually matter? It's like a tree falls in the woods, but only ad executives are talking about it. You know, all right, anyway. Metaphor doesn't quite work, but you understand the point. This is another example of that. So Frasier, I believe that's how you pronounce it, have a really popular bag at the moment, this butter bag. And they were gifting it to influencers in Los Angeles on a platter with engraved butter, which actually that was a really interesting concept. It looks really cool. It's naturally viral. I had actually seen some of the debut images of this bag. They had the person holding it like with baguettes as they like entered an apartment. They were kind of bringing this butter theme into it, which I love from an art direction perspective. I did a food and art direction video a while back. If you want to dive deeper on that. But something like this is I only know about this because it's on an aggregator Instagram. I've never seen this. You actually go search for it. I looked up a bunch more stuff about this. So I was like, hey, it's actually a cool idea. I wonder if that's popular. Is it going viral anywhere? It's on the brand's page. It's nowhere to be found. And so I will say that this is a really cool concept. They should be making content about it on their feed. That hits. It should be easier to find the influencer content about it. And because it is good, like do a bunch of it, like get it out there. So this is one where a good concept, I feel like it's poor execution. I'd give that a four. And speaking of interesting concept for execution, California Pizza Kitchen, CPK, they launched a fake rebrand. They basically did a Malibu's Most Wanted style CPK rebrand where they put out this really, you know, like corny, unexpected blights, etc. type content. But then kind of saying, hey, it's sort of all of a joke. And it's funny, like in the PR review, it's like one might have assumed these were new Liquid Death or Mischief Launch. Like, no, no one was assuming that. And here's what I want to talk about something with this false flag. This is one of those things that happened, like when the Jaguar campaign came out and everyone was talking about it. They're like, wow, they're getting a lot of attention for how bad this is. Immediately, a bunch of like agencies and marketers were like, we're going to do that. We're going to take advantage of that same thing. But the hard part is like if it's not actually bad enough that people really get into talking about it, you're not going to get that same value. Like this is just like, oh, it's like some stuff. If you're going to do something really bad, it needs to be like really bad. And like attention getting and you just stick with it and like run with the game. This is too much of a like, here's this campaign. Ha ha, it's a joke. No one quite understands what's happening. And it's not interesting enough to be relevant enough to get that huge level of attention. And so if they had dialed this campaign up significantly and then run with the joke for a longer piece of time or like debuted one of the stores being like completely redone or like really just leaned into the side of this, you may have gotten people talking about it. What is going on with CPK? But I never got to the point to have that moment. I think it's kind of too bad. CPK is a brand that I love and have a long history with. And I don't think they managed to pull this one off. And nor do I think anyone is using this to then contemplate eating more CPK pizza. We're going to go to two. Speaking of relatively out of touch campaigns, Coors with this misspelling campaign. I talked a bit about this in the Grandfather's podcast. But they launched all these ads at mountain cold refreshment. So refreshment, people correcting them. They've all these big billboards and out of home. And then they basically said, oh, this is a case of the Mondays. It's like a case of the Mondays campaign and LinkedIn and all that stuff. This is like classic ad agency slop. This is the stuff you just cannot be doing in this day and age. This is not inherently viral. No one cares if something is spelled wrong. It's not encouraging people to get more Coors Light. No one understands the this through line into a case of the Mondays into this other campaign. We are doing too much here. This is why you can't have these old school ad agencies trying to do stuff that resonates for your brands. You need to get younger, more interesting, creative and smaller firms giving you ideas that might actually work. We go to one for young Coors Light. Speaking of unique ideas, I'm gonna pull this one from Reformation. So Reformation did a collab post with Letterboxd where they're actually showing off all the wedding dress, like dress related content from brides on like certain Letterboxd movies as part of a promotion for Reformation bridal dresses. And I thought this was really fun. It ties in a culturally relevant fandom and really like Letterboxd attaches to those movies. It gives them the ability to access some of these moments. It fits Restoration's kind of fun voice, lets them tap into culture in a different way without merely just like posting those pictures and having a connection to it. I think they had a little more in-depth stuff that was happening on the in actual Letterboxd itself. I like it. It's a fun and interesting, different way to do it in a content collab, fun way to leverage a fandom on social media. I'll go ahead and get that. And over in the world of celebrity, Havianas is trying to bring flip-flops back. I think we are actually in the natural order of things in the hey, trends come back every nine years or 13 years, whatever the cycle is. We are at the time where flip-flops may just come back this summer. If it's not this summer, it's probably next summer. I say this for better or for worse. But Havianas has a vested interest in wanting to make that as aggressive a campaign as possible that we are gonna bring back Havianas. So like this summer, Havianas, eye shadow, God knows what we're gonna have come hit, but like, this is what's happening. And I said, Gigi Hadid is the person we're gonna ask, is our global spokesperson to actually push this over the limit. She's in ad campaigns. She's saying, talking about her love for Havianas and how this is coming back. It's a good looking campaign. My biggest question is something like this, is like, does she have the influence level to push Havianas over the edge into being something everyone wears or would they have been better off just sending like 5,000 pairs of Havianas to every conceivable influencer and then sponsoring several TikTokers for the same rate that comes up to it and probably gotten a bigger and better cultural response. Someone I've seen do some stuff like that really well as coach. I definitely think so. If you are gonna do all this work to have Gigi Hadid and just having like a photo shoot without having some like more clever instances of content or a full campaign, which maybe we'll see later. I think they are not doing enough with what they are given. Go ahead and give that a four. Speaking of relevant celebrity, we have Patrick Schwarzenegger from White Lotus and his wife or fiance, I forget which, for Skims, which they debuted right after one of his popular White Lotus episodes where his character is quite the talking point. Every time I talk about Skims on short form, I'll lose like 1,000 followers. People just hate hearing about the Kardashians in any way. But the Skims just executes at a absolutely legendary speed of which they do releases, how they do campaigns, the quality of their art direction. Can't speak to the quality of the product, but they do an excellent job with marketing. And this is one of those examples where they're like, hey, who are we going to have to debut our collection? We're going to get someone relevant. He's not huge. He's having a moment right now as part of this thing that's happening. We're putting him with his significant other in a very Skims way with little pieces of Skims iconography kind of spread throughout to promote Skims bridal at exactly the right cultural time. Touche. I'm going to give them an eight and a half, nine here. They probably get done a little bit more with this campaign, but it doesn't matter if they crushed it. But they were not the only brand leveraging the White Lotus. Also, The Gap with Parker Posey, other of the many viral characters happening from there. And this is a Gap, like a classic Gap dance campaign. So Gap is always known for these kind of big dance routines. She's a very viral person, very relevant to the older Gap demographic. I feel like Gap is trying to split how they're doing their sales. Half towards like, can we get the Tyler crowd? Half towards, hey, can we just maintain these like millennial Gap people who have some Gen X or some favorable thoughts on our brand? And they are definitely going for the higher end of that here in a kind of fun way. You'll notice they try to circumvent it but they're staying true to the brand. They're using a culturally relevant person in a culturally relevant moment who might actually wear their clothes. And for Gap, this is an excellent job. I will give it a nine. I did ask my wife if this would be convincing her to buy some khakis. The answer is no. Over to the wide world of events. Hero Cosmetics was doing a human claw inside their actual events. To that note of getting people to leave with something from event activation, like we talked about with Pinterest. This is another fun idea. I think we're only going to see brands doing more and more at these events to make it work. I thought this was a fun application. Perhaps one of my favorite event campaigns is this from Merit, another cosmetics company. So at Paris Fashion Week, they had these Merit branded Vespas and they were driving them around giving deliveries to editors of these different cosmetics packs. This is the Merit. Merit has their own kind of branded bag. It's part of their marketing and their giveaways. They would actually be delivering and giving these Vespa deliveries to all the editors around Fashion Week with this fun branded Vespa. And this is why when I talk about, hey, how do you do something also has a content resonance, like they're making these fun little videos with this cute little object that didn't cost them that much to wrap. They're just doing seeding with this. It isn't like some huge expensive campaign, but it's extremely fun. It's very social friendly. It's clever and something they'll probably do anyway, trying to go ahead and get these kits in the hands of editors and celebrities at one of these shows. Why not do it with a little bit of style and perhaps some virality? And the last campaign that I want to talk about was this one. It was April Fool's related, typically not an April Fool's fan may have gathered, but I did enjoy this from my friends at Ladder who had talked about basically gym bodyguards or ladder guards available through the app for people that are tired of getting looked at in the gym. I like this because it's so social friendly because it's such a funny skit. And I don't know if y'all had seen, there was a video of like these girls traveling somewhere and they were having their bodyguards like bring them matcha, which I imagine is part of the inspiration for this. But that whole concept of like bodyguards doing something for somebody is like always, I think, a fun social vehicle. And the fact that they were able to kind of do this, they put out two videos around it, but it works so well for like funny social stuff. And they're able to throw the ladder branding and show the app in there in a way that doesn't hurt their virality with the concept whatsoever. And I think that is a great note as well. So I want to shout out to them for like a native first, making one piece of content to get their entire piece. I guess there's two videos, one concept to get this like quick campaign out there. I think they did an excellent job with this. Good software marketing for social media. But that is all my favorite and some less favorite campaigns that happened so far this year in marketing. Ones that you've seen that you've liked that I haven't talked about or didn't cover in my second rule video, please feel free to drop them below. I'm going to do another kind of end of year recap. I'm sure if some increasingly poor things come out, I will definitely hop in and talk a bit about the moments. But I always find it interesting to actually break down a bit like why I feel something is resonant, how you see it works, how brands can do different things and what the budgets are. That helps you enjoy it. If you're trying to learn about marketing for the first time and dive in deeper how these things happen, I do have this video about all the different types of marketing explained. It is an amazing deep dive video that is so much knowledge. I wish I'd have it. I was like 21 and you can watch it now. I will link here. Thank you all so much for watching.