Brand Waves This Week
adidas turns football into a generational imagination, The Ordinary deconstructs beauty industry pricing logic, and Huda Beauty enters the fragrance category.
Welcome to The Brand Waves, your weekly snapshot of the most innovative marketing campaigns from around the world. In this edition, discover stories, strategies, and creative ideas that are redefining how brands connect with audiences.
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Today’s newsletter includes: adidas presents Backyard Legends for the FIFA World Cup 2026; Zendaya and On build a Dream Lab; The Ordinary deconstructs the pricing logic of the beauty industry; Lulu and Georgia launches There’s an Art to It; NikeSKIMS redefines studio wear with Studio Stretch; ROSÉ returns as the protagonist of PUMA H-Street’s lifestyle narrative; Bottega Veneta brings Venice back to the center of its new campaign; Huda Beauty enters the fragrance world; and Canva launches The Thing That Makes Anything A Thing.
adidas presents Backyard Legends campaign for the FIFA World Cup 2026
adidas launches its new Backyard Legends campaign for the FIFA World Cup 2026, shifting the focus from the major sporting event to the cultural meaning of football, transforming neighborhood pitches into symbolic spaces where identities, collective imaginaries, and legends are born.
The campaign brings together personalities from different worlds with a cast including Timothée Chalamet, Lionel Messi, Bad Bunny, Lamine Yamal, Jude Bellingham, Trinity Rodman, Zinedine Zidane, David Beckham, and Alessandro Del Piero.
The message You Got This represents the strategic core of the campaign, aiming to inspire athletes around the world to bring freedom and joy to every pitch. The film leans heavily into nostalgia, with its soundtrack, streetwear, and 1990s terrace-inspired aesthetic creating an emotional imagery capable of connecting different generations.
“Everyone remembers that feeling: playing for the joy of it, no pressure, no expectations. With Backyard Legends, we celebrate that freedom. It’s a reminder that self-belief and playfulness are the real winning mindset,” explains Florian Alt, Vice President Global Brand Communications at adidas.
Zendaya and On unveil their first co-created collection
On presents its first co-created collection with Zendaya, a project that merges performance and personal style through refined, essential silhouettes.
At the center of the campaign is the film Shape of Dreams, directed by Spike Jonze and set within the Dream Lab, an imaginary space that functions as an extension of Zendaya’s creative process. Here, the product is not simply presented but “generated”: garments and footwear expand, contract, and transform until they reach their final form, turning design into an almost cinematic experience.
Tracking The Brand Waves - On
In the sportswear industry, competition is increasingly defined by the ability to build cultural desirability. On is a particularly interesting case because it is a relatively young brand that is accelerating its relevance through a strongly entertainment-driven strategy.
Tracksuit data (April 2025 - March 2026) shows that the brand is still in a build phase within the category. In the United States, On reaches 22% awareness, well behind established leaders such as Nike (96%), New Balance (85%), and Asics (64%).
The real strategic signal, however, is not awareness but desirability: 52% of consumers considering On say “It is a brand I want to be seen wearing”, the highest figure in the category, ahead of Nike (51%) and Hoka (41%). This is a key indicator, as it measures not only purchase intent but status-building potential.
The gender breakdown is also notable: among women, this perception rises to 56% for On, surpassing Nike at 53%. A gap that appears closely aligned with the brand’s increasingly editorial and cultural direction, where collaborations like the one with Zendaya do not function simply as endorsements, but as accelerators of desirability and aesthetic coding.
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The Ordinary opens The Markup Marché
The Ordinary launches The Markup Marché, an activation developed in collaboration with Uncommon Creative Studio. The project takes the form of a modern, minimalist supermarket that reveals the mechanisms behind extreme price markups in the beauty industry.
Inside the activation, everyday products are reinterpreted as luxury objects through deliberately exaggerated naming. The items become a physical metaphor for how sophisticated descriptions and inflated language can influence both pricing and perception: a banana becomes an All-Natural Magical Energy-Boosting Bar, while a coconut is turned into an Exotic Thirst Defying Hydration Vessel.
The experience unfolds as an immersive journey that also includes a dedicated “naming” area, where visitors can create intentionally over-the-top product labels, and a Jargon Bar, an ironic reinterpretation of a juice bar through the lens of beauty marketing.
The project will travel to six global cities - Toronto, London, Paris, Melbourne, São Paulo, and Mexico City - expanding its cultural reach and reinforcing its critique of the industry.
Lulu and Georgia launches the campaign There’s an Art to It
Lulu and Georgia presents There’s an Art to It, a film choreographed with professional ballet dancers, designed to represent the delicate dance that accompanies the creation of a home.
The film celebrates how curation becomes an exercise in surprise - starting from tradition and then subverting expectations.
At a time when much of the industry is moving toward speed and AI-generated content, the campaign takes a more intentional approach, placing human craftsmanship at its core and elevating it.
Using ballet as a visual language, the film explores the rhythm of a room: how movement, balance, and intuition contribute to defining its space.
NikeSKIMS unveils the new innovative Studio Stretch collection
NikeSKIMS introduces Studio Stretch, the new line designed for studio workouts such as yoga and pilates, while also being made for all-day wear.
Made with innovative ultrasoft and lightweight materials, Studio Stretch speaks to a consumer increasingly drawn to the wellness lifestyle, where training, leisure, and everyday dressing merge into a single aesthetic and functional experience.
The use of Lycra Adaptiv and Dri-FIT technology allows the brand to maintain the technical credibility that is central to Nike, without giving up the fashion-forward and body-centric identity that defines SKIMS.
“With Studio Stretch, we set out to create something that feels beautiful on the body — a buttery-soft, lightweight material that almost feels like a second skin. The material is so comfortable it almost feels like wearing nothing at all,” says Kim Kardashian, Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer, SKIMS.
ROSÉ returns as the star of the second chapter of the PUMA H-Street campaign
For the second chapter of the campaign dedicated to the PUMA H-Street, ROSÉ returns to the center of PUMA’s narrative, reinforcing the sneaker’s positioning as a new lifestyle icon tied to contemporary street culture.
The campaign is built around a precise aesthetic, where quiet streets, trimmed hedges, and seemingly ordinary daily routines are transformed into a slightly surreal setting.
Originally born from an archival running shoe, the sneaker traces its roots back to PUMA’s late-1990s Harambee silhouette, a heritage that now becomes a central storytelling asset.
Bottega Veneta presents the Fall 2026 campaign
Bottega Veneta chooses to return to its cultural and visual roots by arriving in Venice for its new Fall 2026 campaign. Through the lens of British photographer Chris Rhodes, Venice is portrayed in an intimate and everyday way, defined by vintage wallpaper and terrazzo flooring.
The campaign replaces ostentation with a more authentic, cultural, and understated narrative. In doing so, Bottega Veneta continues to reinforce the language of quiet luxury that has defined the maison’s positioning in recent years.
The accessories follow the same narrative strategy. The Madison shoulder bag, named after Bottega Veneta’s first New York store, returns with the iconic original Intrecciato weave. The Barbara tote embraces a more contemporary silhouette, while the Veneta highlights its archival spirit.
Huda Beauty enters the fragrance world with the launch of Easy Bake Intense Eau de Parfum
For the launch of its first fragrance, Easy Bake Intense Eau de Parfum, Huda Beauty opens a new strategic chapter by leveraging one of the brand’s strongest assets: its relationship with its community.
The new product, initially introduced as an April Fool’s joke, quickly gained traction, with fans asking for the fragrance to become a real product.
Instead of rushing to capitalize on the hype, the brand returned to development to refine the formula, making it more sophisticated, layered, and long-lasting.
“Fragrance is the final step of feeling fully glamorous, it’s what brings everything together and makes you feel completely irresistible and powerful,” says Huda Kattan. “I wanted Easy Bake Fragrance to feel rich, s#xy, and intense. Because when it’s truly you, it’s never too much.”
Canva presents the new campaign The Thing That Makes Anything A Thing
Canva launches The Thing That Makes Anything A Thing, a campaign built around the idea that anyone can turn an intuition into something real with the support of the right creative partner.
It all began with the appearance of a large squirrel statue, installed without any branding or explanation at Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York, leaving people wondering what was going on.
A few days later, it was revealed that Canva was behind the activation. The brand then unveiled its hero film, which follows a woman whose chance encounter with a squirrel evolves into a full-blown squirrel movement. What starts as a single idea quickly expands into posters, social posts, billboards, and merchandise from the Squirrelites, ultimately forming a community of followers.
The Thing That Makes Anything A Thing becomes an invitation to take your ideas and turn them into something the world can see, share, and experience.
If you’re looking for even more inspiration, check out last week’s edition of Brand Waves This Week for more standout campaigns and unmissable creative ideas!
Brand Waves This Week
Samsonite presents the new Chocolate Mauve collection starring Olivia Culpo; Sprite launches the It’s That Fresh platform; Burberry and Hunza G redefine swimwear as visual storytelling.
The wave doesn’t stop here.
We’ll be back next week with more stories shaping the future of brands, tech and culture. Catch the next one with us.