‘A safe bet’: Brands are digging into their ad archives for creative inspiration

Everything old is new again—or, maybe, made new again.

In recent brand campaigns from brands including Columbia Sportswear, Gushers, Pringles, Tootsie Roll, and Acuvue, marketers have dug back into the brand archives, sometimes even tapping into existing fandoms around past campaigns, to both reimagine the work for today’s audiences and lean on nostalgia to try to connect with past fans.

Take the snack brand Gushers, which expanded upon its surreal ’90s ad “Fruitheads,” with a short horror film for Halloween this year. The ad, a faux origin story directed by Mike Diva and starring The West Wing and Get Out’s Bradley Whitford, was designed in part because of the fandom and conversation that already existed around the original commercial, Stephanie Lensing, brand experience manager for Gushers at General Mills, said.

“For a long time, we’ve watched the Gushers ‘Fruitheads’ commercial live this wild, second life online as one of the strangest commercials of the ’90s,” Lensing told Marketing Brew in an email. “The original had this dreamlike, almost unsettling quality that was so ahead of its time. Our goal was to capture that same energy through modern storytelling and bold visuals that live naturally online.”

Given how difficult it can be for ad campaigns to break through, ad agency execs say it’s no surprise that brands are taking an interest in reviving their marketers’ work of yesteryear. If something appealed to brand audiences previously, especially if there’s a fandom or nostalgia for the time during which that work was produced, it can be a quick way for marketers to move the needle.

“It’s really hard for brands to stand out today, and it’s really hard for brands to build resonance,” Daryl Giannantonio, chief strategy officer for VML in New York, told Marketing Brew. “If brands have something that has been true to their ethos and people still recall it today, why wouldn’t you lean into it?”

To the archives

Earlier this year, Columbia Sportswear took inspiration from its past work for a campaign called “Engineered for Whatever,” Columbia Sportswear’s SVP and head of marketing, Matt Sutton, told Marketing Brew at the time. As part of the campaign, Columbia rolled out zany spots inspired by commercials featuring Gert and Tim Boyle, the mother and son who founded the company, in which they tested products in extreme situations, like walking through a carwash.

Late last month, Pringles revived its ’90s tagline, “Once You Pop,” with a slight addition: “Once You Pop, The Pop Don’t Stop.” While the Pringles team and its agency, FCB New York, were researching potential campaign ideas, the original tagline came up again and again, according to Mauricio Jenkins, US head of marketing for Pringles.

“There’s an inherent power to that idea, to the way we express it, and also the way we were able to modernize it,” Jenkins told Marketing Brew.

For many marketers, there is a line to carefully walk between making a past campaign work with today’s audiences while not making a brand feel dated.

“Every good strategist will go back into a brand’s history and archive to see what you can reprise, to see where the brand was built, to see if they have a really strong legacy story that can be repurposed, to see where the epicenter of the brand is,” Wanda Pogue, global chief strategy officer at VaynerMedia, said. “The trick is really making it relevant for today’s audience.”

It’s a trick that can be especially resonant as many CMOs face increasingly short tenures, which can make it difficult to create distinct brand assets that have continuity in the market.

“You’ve seen a lot of disjointed efforts,” Dan Lucey, chief creative officer and co-CEO of Havas New York, said. “When marketers are looking for ways to ensure ROI in ever more tight business markets, I think that leaning back on past campaigns that worked and that resonated with audiences, in one way, it’s kind of a safe bet.”

Modern spin

How best can marketers tap into the past? For some brands, there are options to pick an unexpected route, like in the case of Gushers’s short film, or modernizing it, like in the case of Pringles’s updated tagline. Or it could come down to recognizing where audiences who might appreciate a blast from the past could be spending their time.

The disposable contact lens brand Acuvue opted not to remake an ad but rather partner with creator Kate Steinberg, who often references and makes skits about the early aughts, to revisit an ad from the mid-aughts starring twins Kelly and Sabrina, one with astigmatism. In Steinberg’s new skit from late last month, the twins appear next to Steinberg, where they offer her some new contacts before leaving to help another millennial.

For brands considering looking back, doing so should feel like a natural fit, experts advise. “What comes up in culture? What are people resonating with, and what do people still remember about the brand that has been our center of gravity?” Giannantonio said.

“It shouldn’t feel forced,” she added. “If people don’t recall it, or it doesn’t have any role in culture today, then it doesn’t mean anything. But I think [when] you see there’s cultural conversations happening around these things, and therefore it gives the brand the opportunity to bring back those and lean into them.”