exploring the Powerful Partnerships Shaping Culture Vol. 23
You think you’re having a tough Valentines Day, Norwegian Olympian Sturla Holm Lægreid is going viral for tearfully admitting to cheating on his girlfriend and asking to give him another shot. Tough. If your iphone camera roll was not enough of a reminder of your exes, then these brands will do it for you. Valentines Day, as with Easter, Halloween and Christmas is another time for copywriters to really shine, long gone are the simple ‘love’ brand activations, replaced by a diverse array of double entendres, anagrams and straight up word play. Here is a run down of a few that took our fancy. Pun obviously intended.
they had been dating 3 months.
I told you there would be innuendo! Wild Deodorant knows how to generate content, and they have excelled. Your morning commute is accompanied by a little tongue in cheek action. The brilliance lies in the restraint. It invites the audience to complete the joke themselves, which is always more powerful than spelling it out. It also turns a functional category like deodorant into something culturally participatory.
A ketchup heart. A bottle placed just so.
Heinz took a different route, opting for simplicity and asset power. The execution is minimal, almost understated, but that’s precisely the strength. Heinz doesn’t need heavy copy when its brand codes are this distinctive. The red swirl is instantly recognisable. The joke is visual and it travels across languages without explanation. That is the ultimate goal for brands.
IKEA knows how to make furniture fun. There I said it. I said potentially one of the driest sentences alive but a fact is a fact. IKEA keep putting out winners. This particular winner, a raunchy visual of two of their chairs lets us do the imagining. The humour lives entirely in the composition. IKEA hasn’t changed the product. They haven’t manipulated the image beyond arrangement. They’ve simply positioned two everyday dining chairs in a way that allows the audience to do the mental leap themselves. This is successful as not only does it elicit a unique response from every viewer, it does nothing to harm their image - it is not smutty. In a feed full of overwrought romance, IKEA proves that sometimes all you need for Valentine’s is good positioning.
I now want lego flowers. I want to stand on pieces of lego for the rest of time.Lego posted three different stories on their socials this week to mark the opening of their Valentines lego flowers Pop Up. This genius marketing, another example of longer form, more premium content, cultivates a narrative outside of lego’s youth centric focus. Tapping into an audience beyond your usual demographic is complex, yet Lego’s multi faceted approach does just that. The ‘product’ of lego flowers is positioned organically within every trailer, but translated differently so there is never creative stagnation. Lego we are begging you to make a whole film!
POST OF THE WEEK
Tweed Mill Textiles you are the real MVP of this week’s round up. These are my favourite posts because they never fail to make me smile, and clearly 17’000 other people thought the same. Simple, effective, social first, and genuinely funny Tweed Mill Textiles you killed it! I might buy a blanket.
OLIVIA’S OPINION
The Winter Olympics are insane.
dream
FOUNDERS THOUGHTS
our segment where we hear from Mythos Founder George on his thought of the week
McDonald’s is chic. Read that again.
For the past year, people have been pairing McNuggets with caviar like it’s the most normal thing in the world. TikTok turned it into a flex. A meme. A low-key luxury ritual.
And this Valentine’s Day, McDonald’s made it official. https://lnkd.in/eESaNMNw
McNugget® Caviar. Golden, crispy nuggets. Baerii Sturgeon Caviar. Sourced with Paramount Caviar. Sold out instantly. That’s not a gimmick. That’s cultural fluency.
What’s actually happening here?
Luxury codes are being remixed. Caviar used to signal exclusivity. Now it signals irony, taste literacy, and internet awareness.
Fast food understands participation. This trend started in the comment sections and kitchens. McDonald’s simply validated what culture had already approved.
Premium is no longer about price. It’s about context. Pairing £5 nuggets with high-end caviar collapses the hierarchy. It says you can have both. High and low. Serious and unserious. And when it sold out, they marketed straight back to Hot Honey sauce. Because the point isn’t the caviar. The point is relevance.
The smartest brands right now aren’t trying to invent culture. They’re watching what people are already doing, then stepping in at the perfect moment to amplify it.
From value menu to Valentine’s luxury. Different price point. Same golden arches.
