What made a marketing campaign innovative in 2025 and 2026
The most innovative marketing campaigns of 2025 and 2026 turned audiences into participants, were built for the feed rather than adapted to it, and proved their value in sales, earned media or ROAS. Below are 19 of the best examples, from Duolingo and Spotify Wrapped to KitKat, Uber Eats and Cloetta, grouped by the idea that made them work.
October 31, 2026
Each entry gives the brand, the idea and the result. Each one shows a different way to earn attention that paid media alone cannot buy.
| Campaign | The innovative idea | Headline result |
|---|---|---|
| Duolingo, “the death of Duo” | Killing the mascot, then asking users to revive him | 1.7 billion impressions |
| Spotify Wrapped | Listener data turned into 50 fan destinations worldwide | Millions of unpaid shares |
| Uber Eats, Build Your Own Super Bowl Commercial | Fans assemble the ad inside the app | Best-ever Super Bowl sales |
| KitKat, “The KitKat Heist” | A stolen truck turned into a public tracker game | $224M earned media |
| Rare Beauty | Scratch-and-sniff billboards with free samples | Millions of views within days |
| Canva at Waterloo Station | Billboards about designers’ frustrations | Shared as social content |
| Canva 2026 Design Trends | A Hollywood creator playground built in two weeks | 100+ earned posts |
| The North Face × Loyle Carner | A city-wide music scavenger hunt ending in a concert | 471% uplift in audience interest |
| MAC Cosmetics × Jet2holidays | A grounded aircraft turned into a beauty experience | Influencers cast as cabin crew |
| Levi’s, “Nobody’s Gonna Know” | A covered stadium logo turned into the campaign | 9M-view TikTok |
| Cloetta, Ahlgrens bilar | A “new car brand” reveal that turns out to be candy | Nationwide Target launch |
| Dove, “r/eal reviews” | Unedited Reddit reviews as the creative | 1 billion+ impressions |
| Jacquemus and Liline | The founder’s grandmother as first ambassador | A casting no rival can copy |
| Bundesliga Creator Academy | A season-long academy for international creators | 166.9M organic views |
| Heineken, “Could Have Been a Heineken” | A WhatsApp bot trading long voice notes for beer | Cannes Social & Creator Grand Prix |
| OPPO | Always-on creators across sport, lifestyle and entertainment | 7.4% engagement rate |
| MCM | Trend-led TikTok content, then a US sales program | 14:1 ROAS in the US |
| Bosch Home | One global TikTok account, built from zero | 213K+ followers |
| Subito.it | Curated creators plus real-time trend content | 700M+ impressions |
Campaigns that turned the audience into participants
The biggest campaigns of the period gave people something to do, not just something to watch. Our top 10 marketing campaigns of 2025 and best marketing campaigns of 2026 so far cover several of them in depth.
1. Duolingo: the death of Duo (2025)
In February 2025 Duolingo killed its own mascot, then challenged users to earn 50 billion XP to bring him back. Users passed the goal with 50.9 billion XP across 15 countries, and the stunt generated 1.7 billion impressions.
2. Spotify Wrapped (2025)
Spotify turned a year of listener data into 50 fan destinations worldwide, from Rio’s Copacabana Beach to New York’s Union Square. Millions of users shared their Wrapped results voluntarily, reach that paid media cannot buy.
3. Uber Eats: Build Your Own Super Bowl Commercial (2026)
For Super Bowl LX, Uber Eats let fans assemble their own commercial inside the app from more than 1,000 combinations of scenes and celebrity cameos. 325,000 people built one, and Uber Eats recorded its best Super Bowl sales ever and $290 million in earned media value.
4. KitKat: The KitKat Heist (2026)
When a truck carrying 413,793 KitKat bars went missing in March 2026, KitKat announced it publicly and launched a tracker where anyone could check a bar’s batch code. In ten days the story earned $224 million in earned media, and it won the PR Grand Prix at Cannes.
Experiences built for the feed
The best physical activations were designed to be filmed and posted, so every visitor became a distribution channel.
5. Rare Beauty: scratch-and-sniff billboards (2025)
To launch its first fragrance, Rare Beauty put scratch-and-sniff billboards across New York, with QR codes that sent passersby free rollerball samples through Shopify’s Shop app. Out-of-home became a sampling channel, and the activation drew millions of views within days.
6. Canva: billboards at Waterloo Station (2025)
Canva took over London’s Waterloo Station with 14 billboards that turned designers’ everyday frustrations into product features. Commuters photographed and posted the copy, turning static outdoor ads into social content.
7. Canva: a Hollywood playground for 2026 Design Trends
To launch its 2026 Design Trends, Canva opened branded, interactive rooms in Hollywood, built within two weeks. Each room turned a trend into color, texture and props creators wanted to film. 35 creators produced 21.8M+ impressions at a 4.23% engagement rate, and the event earned 100+ posts Canva did not pay for.
8. The North Face × Loyle Carner: a scavenger hunt that ends in a concert
The North Face sent UK fans on a city-wide, live-music scavenger hunt across London that ended in an intimate concert with musician Loyle Carner. The brand showed up inside music culture instead of advertising next to it, reaching 7.2M impressions at an 8.7% engagement rate and a 471% uplift in music and fashion audience interest.
9. MAC Cosmetics × Jet2holidays (2025)
MAC Cosmetics partnered with Jet2holidays and turned a decommissioned aircraft into an immersive beauty experience. Influencers were cast as MAC airline staff, and the familiar Jet2holidays announcer voiced the in-flight messages.
A twist or a constraint as the story
Two of the most talked-about campaigns started from something that looked like a problem: a covered logo and a brand nobody in the market knew.
10. Levi’s: Nobody’s Gonna Know (2026)
FIFA’s clean-venue rules forced Levi’s to cover its logo at its own stadium during the World Cup, yet the tarp still traced the batwing outline. Levi’s leaned into the joke on social and in its stores, and one tarp video reached nine million TikTok views. The brand was not a sponsor and spent nothing extra on media.
11. Cloetta: Ahlgrens bilar lands in the US (2026)
Ahlgrens bilar is Sweden’s best-selling foam candy, shaped like cars, sold since 1953, and almost unknown in the US. The launch was built on one surprise: Americans did not know the cars were candy. It opened like the arrival of a new imported car brand, with social teasers, AI-produced content and creator partnerships.
The reveal came on the Times Square billboards, staged with the visual grammar of a car launch, before the “cars” turned out to be soft, colorful candy. Creators, celebrities, sampling, paid media and out-of-home carried the twist further, and retail made it buyable: Ahlgrens bilar rolled out exclusively at Target stores nationwide and on Target.com from fall 2026 (Cloetta press release). The full story is in our guide on how to launch a European brand in the US.
Community and casting as the creative
These brands let real people, not polished brand assets, carry the message.
12. Dove: r/eal reviews (2026)
Dove asked Reddit to review its Intensive Repair hair mask and promised to publish the first 50 responses unedited, good and bad. Those comments became the creative across out-of-home, film, digital and social. The campaign passed 1 billion impressions and lifted how often Dove appeared in LLM search results.
13. Jacquemus and Liline (2026)
After teasing its first-ever ambassador, Jacquemus named the founder’s 79-year-old grandmother, Liline. For a brand that had already cast Jennie, Kendall Jenner and Bad Bunny, it was a choice no competitor could copy.
14. Bundesliga: a Global Creator Academy
Bundesliga ran a season-long Creator Academy across the USA, Mexico, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia and the Nordics. Creators received kick-off sendouts, matchday visits and club tours, then made always-on content for their own audiences: 166.9M organic views from 24 creators and 847 posts, at a €1.13 CPM.
Native, always-on and measured on results
Not every innovative campaign is a single stunt. These programs won by staying on, speaking each platform’s language, and reporting against a commercial KPI.
15. Heineken: Could Have Been a Heineken (2026)
Heineken built a WhatsApp bot that swapped any voice note longer than three minutes for a free beer voucher and a map of nearby bars. Piloted in Brazil and scaled through 2026, it won the Social and Creator Grand Prix at Cannes.
16. OPPO: always-on creators across 25 markets (2025–2026)
From May 2025 to March 2026, OPPO expanded its creator program beyond core tech into sport, lifestyle and entertainment, staying relevant between launches. 200+ top-tier creators delivered 98.9M+ impressions and 7.3M+ engagements, at a 7.4% engagement rate and a $14.14 organic CPM.
17. MCM: from TikTok attention to US sales
MCM, the German luxury house founded in Munich in 1976, entered 2024 with about 10,000 TikTok followers. Its fix was “trend velocity”: continuous cultural monitoring, short approval paths and creator formats such as fit checks, all anchored in the Cognac Visetos monogram and other brand codes. In 12 months the account grew to 250,000 followers, with 84 million views and 800,000 interactions.
Phase two turned that audience into a US sales channel. Prospecting, retargeting and lookalike audiences, TikTok Pixel tracking and paid amplification delivered a 14:1 ROAS and 1,405 tracked purchases. Influencer Marketing Hub breaks down the two-phase model, and the MCM case study covers the results.
18. Bosch Home: one global TikTok account, from zero
Bosch built a single global TikTok account, @boschhomeglobal, for the US, UK and Germany, combining in-house production, creator content and paid boosting. It grew from zero to 213K+ followers, with 600M+ views and 60.8M+ reach.
19. Subito.it: making second-hand go viral in Italy
Italian marketplace Subito.it paired curated creators with real-time trend content, turning an always-on retainer into a national reach engine. The program delivered 700M+ impressions and 23M+ views in one market, plus a vodcast whose first edition reached 550K views.
5 patterns behind the most innovative campaigns
Across these examples, innovation came less from new technology and more from five repeatable decisions.
- Lead with a twist people retell. Cloetta’s candy “car brand” and The North Face’s scavenger hunt gave audiences a story to pass on, not just an ad to watch.
- Make creators hosts and producers. Canva’s Hollywood rooms and the Bundesliga Creator Academy gave creators a place and a reason to make their own content.
- Build owned channels natively. Bosch Home and MCM grew TikTok accounts with platform-native formats, humor and trends, instead of repurposing brand assets.
- Stay always-on. OPPO and Subito.it kept creators posting between launches, which compounds reach and lowers cost per view over time.
- Agree the commercial KPI first. MCM was run against a 4:1 ROAS target and beat it at 14:1. For Ray-Ban, Pulse Advertising’s PI Metrics platform has powered three years of monthly social ROI tracking across 6M+ followers.
Several campaigns in this list were created by Pulse Advertising: Canva’s Hollywood playground, The North Face × Loyle Carner, the MAC Cosmetics aircraft experience, Cloetta’s Ahlgrens bilar US launch, the Bundesliga Creator Academy, and the always-on programs for OPPO, MCM, Bosch Home and Subito.it.
About Pulse Advertising
Pulse Advertising is an independent global influencer marketing and social media agency running multi-country campaigns across 11 offices in Europe, North America, the Middle East and Asia. Founded in 2014 by Chris Kastenholz and Lara Daniel, Pulse Advertising is not owned by any holding group, which lets the team adapt faster to new platforms, formats and creator trends than network-owned agencies.
Pulse Advertising’s 125+ people deliver influencer marketing, paid social, social media management, social commerce, and strategy and creative for brands including Nestlé, MAC Cosmetics, MINI, Ray-Ban, Google and Cloetta. Pulse Advertising is a TikTok Marketing Partner, Meta Business Partner, Google Partner and Xiaohongshu (RED) Partner.
PI Metrics is Pulse Advertising’s proprietary AI-powered platform that quantifies the monetary value of a brand’s social media presence in a single score, with direct API access to TikTok, Meta and Google for closed-loop social ROI tracking.
Planning a campaign? Talk to our team.
Frequently asked questions
Widely cited 2025 examples include Duolingo’s “death of Duo” (1.7 billion impressions), Spotify Wrapped’s 50 fan destinations, and Rare Beauty’s scratch-and-sniff billboards, all covered in our top 10 marketing campaigns of 2025. Strong creator-led examples include OPPO’s always-on creators in 25 markets (7.4% engagement rate), MCM on TikTok (14:1 ROAS), and Canva’s Hollywood creator playground (100+ earned posts).
KitKat’s “Heist” ($224 million in earned media) and Uber Eats’ build-your-own Super Bowl commercial ($290 million in earned media value) led the first half of 2026. The full list is in our best marketing campaigns of 2026 so far.
An innovative campaign gives people a reason to share it and proves its value in numbers. In 2025 that usually meant a surprising idea, creators producing content on their own channels, and a KPI such as ROAS, CPM or sales agreed in advance.
Most combined TikTok and Instagram creator content with paid amplification, live events and, for consumer goods, physical retail. Cloetta’s Ahlgrens bilar launch added Times Square out-of-home and Target distribution.
Measure against the commercial goal set at the start: ROAS for sales, CPM for reach, follower growth for owned channels, or earned posts for events. Pulse Advertising tracks these in PI Metrics, its proprietary platform with direct API access to TikTok, Meta and Google.
Start from the one thing about the brand Americans would never expect, then build creators, paid media, PR, out-of-home and retail around it. Our guide to launching a European brand in the US walks through the Cloetta example.