Everyone’s back to school, literally and figuratively. Lucky for us, that includes the class clowns. The campaigns I enjoyed most this month lended a lil’ tongue and cheek to the usual marathon of fall fashion campaigns that get you to spend a Saturday cleaning out your closet.

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Columbia turned the 35th anniversary of it’s beloved Helvetia Fleece into a scavenger hunt instead of a sweepstakes. The offer: find a working fax machine, send in your order, and one of 91 fleece pullovers is yours. Knowing that most entrants wouldn’t have alive the last time a fax machine actually mattered, adam&eve\TBWA, Digitas, and the in house Social & Influence team invited famous Gen Z creators to share their hunt for a fax machine, leading to calls home, trips to estate sales, and them getting their first library cards. Anyone determined enough to hunt one down becomes a storyteller before they've even won.

In the first 24 hours it was live, they’d received over 4,000 faxes.

🔗 Columbia's fax stunt

HallPass, the new, healthier candy brand from David Protein founder Peter Rahal, debuted new billboards this month that only took up 1/3 of the adspace. The message: one third the calories of a same-size pack of Reese's, no fine print required.

The unfinished billboard gets your attention from the street - where there’s never negative space to spare. A jab at a household name enters with a giggle, and for a product category that hasn’t been disrupted since Justin’s tried in the aughts, HallPass’ competitive advantage is memorable even if you didn’t read the headline.

🔗 HallPass billboard

It all started with a feed swipe. Then, day by day, Rothy’s introduced us to Ivy. A city girl, who walks borough to borough, she’s vegan, and loves to watercolor. The buildup to introduce their new slim sneaker painted a portrait of the mysteriously cool, Ivy, and lead to hundreds of comments saying, “I want what she’s got”. The Ivy sneak was revealed, delivering on all it’s promises. I agree, brand’s can’t have taste, but Rothy’s managed to give some to Ivy with the simple personification strategy.

I think we’ll see a lot of this from brands who already use trending baby names to name their products beyond this year’s collection drops.

🔗 Meet Ivy

People are flying with all kinds of powders now. It’s preferable to avoid having a TSA agent pull an unlabelled ziplock sandwich bag full out of your luggage with a suspicious look on their face, of course. AG1 gets it.

They’ve got new airport security bin ads running through checkpoints in Denver, Austin, and Seattle, asking flyers, "Is your DIY-packed creatine causing delays?" The punchline arrives right as the culprit gets pulled out for a second look. The answer, of course, is AG1 Pro, now packaged in travel-friendly sachets instead of a loose baggy. Perhaps the last great inconvenience of travel, addressed.

I also like that it’s for the wellness obsessed and the weekend obsessed - if you weren’t considering AG1 because it’s not your kind of powder, maybe you’ll give them a second thought.

🔗 AG1's airport ad

Co-founder of the Spanish streetwear brand, Bruno Casanovas, shares the screen with Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada in their latest viral campaign…kind of. The video racked up nearly 600,000 views and over 700 comments within 24 hours of posting. Attention to detail on the set design, lighting, sound and color mixing plus a little split screen action meant that it was easy to borrow some attention.

The right cultural reference at the right moment can do more work than any original casting choice.

🔗 Nude Project's NY announcement

Want more inspo and creative ephemera? There's more campaigns we watched in our monthly moodboard.

Sometimes you just have to say “bravo” when you get gotcha’d. Today it’s taken one step further - today’s gentlemanly reaction is forwarding the gag to your group chat to pass it on. I think that people are missing simpler times, when there were pre-email job, or when 2016 twitter inspired a generation of copywriters, when candy was guilt-free, or when blind item blogs got all the clicks and airport security was lax. September’s got everyone feeling like a kid again, lean into it.

See you online,

Lou

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