The advertising industry, which has never met a celebrity it couldn't put to work, found fresh ways this week to deploy famous faces in service of commerce — though in at least one case, the most memorable performer was someone's 94-year-old mother.
Adidas enlisted Timothée Chalamet, the actor, to assemble what the sportswear giant is calling his "dream World Cup squad," a premise that allows the brand to populate a single commercial with enough soccer talent to field several actual teams. The spot is part of Adidas's continuing effort toeli from Nike in the global football conversation, a contest that has been running, in one form or another, since the 1994 World Cup.
Canva, the design software company that has been expanding aggressively from its Australian roots, chose a different path: staging what it described as an "absurdist squirrel-themed stunt" in Brooklyn to introduce a new brand platform. (One assumes the squirrels were not unionized.) The activation suggests that Canva, which has historically relied on performance marketing and word of mouth, is now prepared to spend on the kind of awareness-building exercises that its enterprise software competitors have long favored.
Elsewhere, Lewis Hamilton, the Formula 1 driver, appeared in an unscripted dinner conversation for S.Pellegrino, the Nestlé-owned sparkling water brand. Liquid Death, the canned water company that has built its identity on performative menace, produced work that "embraced danger outdoors," according to those who track such things. And Disney+, the streaming service, offered a spot arguing that good stories stay with us for a lifetime — a claim that its parent company has been making, in various forms, since 1937.
The week's campaigns shared a common vocabulary: humor, surprise, celebrity. Whether any of them will be remembered longer than the duration of a skip button remains, as always, an open question.
Original story published in adweek.com: "Ads of the Week: 12 Campaigns That Caught Our Eye, From Adidas to Canva"