Seventy-one years after Charlie Brown and his neighborhood of friends, pets, unintelligible adults and kite-eating trees launched, the Peanuts' brand remains among the most recognizable around the world. Peanuts Worldwide, works with over 1000 partners across all borders on a range of properties and merchandise. This brand continues because of the strip's simple, resonant humanity, says Charlie Brown's CMO, Melissa Menta, SVP, Marketing and Communications Worldwide. As consumer brands trendily scramble to find their "meaning" and "align with values," this seems like a good time of year for them to ask a version of Charlie Brown's famous cry - Isn't …

Ok, Boomer! Move over. Time to make room for another aging segment to obsess about their health. Given their sheer numbers and buying power you would think that Generation-X would be overexposed in media. Just the opposite, says Amelia Thorn, VP of Marketing at supplements brand Ancient Nutrition. Her marketing research showed that their brand's target market is woefully underrepresented in commercial images. And so the company's first major brand awareness campaign around the "Superfoods So You Can" tagline lets X-er customers tell their own stories.

Breaking through adversity is a central theme of performance beverage Nutrabolt's new C4 energy drink plan.

Jed Berger, CMO of Foot Locker, doesn't really hate marketing. As he tells Brand Insider this week, it is just that he likes a great idea and a great product more. Product development and product marketing are becoming more intimately connected. When the product comes with relevance, with a story, then the marketing can be more authentic and even more efficient. This evolution is clearest at Foot Locker, which will have dropped literally hundreds of new sneaker model tie-ins just in the second half of 2021. When product relevance is put at the center, then marketing moves more towards demand …

Because of the fires threatening Lake Tahoe this week, we have postponed our Retail Insider Summit. But as our planned agenda suggests, there is so much about the omnichannel marketing experience in retail poised for radical change. I find most fascinating the ways in which our expanded digital interactions with a brand will change not only how we shop but how the retail environment itself is built. This struck home with me when talking with Ideal Image's CEO David Prokupek in the Spring. As he discusses here, the virtual face to face consultations that the pandemic accelerated for his MedSpas …

As we ease back into hybrod and live events this season I recall fondly one of my favorite virtual sessions from this past year of online-only Brand Insider. General Mills' then-CMO Ivan Pollard was thoughtful about how the current buzzword "engagement" is nothing new. Decades ago, Betty Crocker taught us all we need to know.

Here at MediaPost, we have known of Vivid Seats for years. Its team has been invaluable to many of our Email, Search and Performance Insider Summits.

You've seen the Illy brand before. You just may not know it. But with a new and very stylish campaign titled "Welcome on the Road to Happiness," Illy is going direct to consumers with a high concept branding effort aimed at the super-premium coffee buyer.

As brands contemplate a post-cookie future, many rely on their own site dynamics and UX to render more, deeper first-party data. But as we discussed with Visible Wireless's Digital Marketing and Analytics Team Lead, Sarah Baker, this has implications for media buying and creative strategies. Typically, a DTC like Visible would optimize media towards performance. But as Baker explained at last week's Summit, Visible made a deliberate pivot away from that approach to shift more of the conversion work away from media and to its own site and more product-focused marketing.

Even a crusty, jaded critic of the advertising industry like me can be a sucker for a great ad concept like JewBelong out-of-home campaigns on New York streets.