Pokémon has spent its 30th anniversary appearing on coffee tins, trainers, doughnuts and several thousand LEGO bricks. Ordinarily, this level of collaboration might start to feel like overkill. Yet somehow Pokémon keeps getting away with it. So what makes the brand quite so collaboration-proof? There is, apparently, no object Pikachu cannot improve. Over the course of Pokémon's 30th anniversary year, the franchise has found its way onto Grind coffee tins, PUMA trainers, Krisp

Is Summer finally over? Time to put away the fans and ice packs; we're about to hit the Autumn period. For businesses, this often means gearing up for Halloween campaigns and planning for the last quarter of the year. In September, we've seen a few controversies, including the rise of Meta glasses (and the people protesting against them) as well as the most recent Converse campaign. But there's also been some interesting crossovers, new data around content creation and bolder

What colour should rosé be? Apparently, quite a few of us have strong opinions. Aldi turned that oddly specific bit of customer behaviour into its Rosé Swatch campaign and, in doing so, demonstrated why you don’t always need a groundbreaking revelation to find a great marketing insight. Marketers spend a lot of time looking for insights. Ideally, these will be profound revelations about human behaviour that completely change the way we think about a category. The sort of thin

LinkedIn has introduced a button allowing users to report “AI slop”, while its own systems are reducing the visibility of generic, low-substance posts. But the platform isn't telling people to stop using AI altogether. It's drawing a much more interesting distinction between content created with AI and content that feels as though there wasn't much of a human involved at all. There was a brief period when using AI to write a LinkedIn post felt like a clever productivity hack.

Thirty years after Virtual Insanity first appeared on our screens, Jay Kay is back in the moving room, this time with a Beefeater 0.0 in reach. It's a clever bit of nostalgia marketing, but its success isn't simply down to reminding people of the 90s. Marketing has been feeling particularly nostalgic lately. Old logos are being resurrected, discontinued products are returning to shelves and brands are rummaging through their archives for campaigns, characters and packaging th

La Vieille Ferme spent decades building a French wine brand. Then customers started calling it “Chicken Wine”. Instead of correcting them, the brand embraced the nickname, and this summer it has led to perhaps the most obvious collaboration imaginable: KFC. Brands spend an awful lot of time deciding what they want us to call things. There are naming workshops, positioning exercises, brand guidelines and carefully approved terminology, all designed to make sure customers descr

August is usually supposed to be one of the quieter months in marketing. Half the industry is on holiday, inboxes are filled with out-of-office replies, and everyone collectively agrees that anything non-urgent can probably wait until September. Apparently, nobody told the brands. This month we've seen KFC turn a customer-created wine nickname into a real-world collaboration, Aldi attempt to solve the surprisingly serious problem of choosing the wrong shade of rosé, and Busch