The internet has been giving marketers a lot to work with this month

Hot off the Ink Drop

May marketing has been filled with World Cup nostalgia, basketball deep cuts, summer cookout campaigns, and brands building entire content ecosystems around internet culture.

Keep reading to see what we’re loving.

Adidas turned the World Cup into neighborhood mythology. “Backyard Legends” brings Timothée Chalamet into a crazy street football universe that feels straight out of the late ’90s and early 2000s sports-ad era.

⚡ Get inspired: Big campaigns work better when every system behind them is connected. This blog breaks down what a strong CRM stack looks like, from content updates that flow across channels to personalization that keeps moving without constant manual work.

Kraft Heinz made patriotism taste like a cookout. “The United Tastes of America” is the company’s biggest portfolio campaign yet, bringing together Kraft, Heinz, Oscar Mayer, Ore-Ida, Jet-Puffed, and more through summer barbecue nostalgia, limited-edition products, and cross-channel creative built for Memorial Day season.

⚡ Get inspired: At Home took a similar always-on approach to relevance. By connecting behavioral signals, live site content, and social data, the team built dynamic email experiences that adapt at open and reduced hours of production work down to minutes of setup and QA.

More from the week

CeraVe is turning “Hoodie Melo” into skincare canon. The brand’s latest social-first campaign leans into long-running NBA fan lore, joking that Carmelo Anthony’s iconic hoodie era was actually about hiding dandruff all along.

⚡ Get inspired: Static campaigns are aging faster than ever. This blog breaks down five email tactics that used to work and why responsive, behavior-based messaging is replacing them.

E.l.f. is treating competitive dance like the entertainment category it already is. Its new partnership with the International Dance League spans livestreams, content studios, social storytelling, and real-world activations, all designed around how audiences already engage with dance online.

⚡ Get inspired: Inbox behavior is evolving just as quickly as customer behavior on social. In this on-demand webinar, we break down how Gmail’s new AI-powered experiences are changing the way emails are ranked, summarized, and surfaced, and what marketers need to do now to stay visible before a customer even opens the message.