The Weekly Marketing Report

Chase remade the opening of Scream for the film's 30th anniversary, with Drew Barrymore back as Casey Becker and Kevin Hart as a Ghostface who only calls about her cash back. The scene ends in a shopping spree instead of a murder. It is the only work this week that was covered outside the trade, by genre and entertainment outlets that wrote about it as a moment rather than a launch. Whether the film is licensed from the studio is not stated, which is why it enters the tracker as the third case of brand participation in third-party IP with that caveat. It did not reach Google Trends in either country.

The second edition of a heist film in which nine menu items from eight countries are the loot. The responded-to-culture part is narrow but real: social listening chose the "Most Wanted" items, so fan demand preceded the spend. The 2025 original was adapted by more than 40 McDonald's markets, which is the best evidence of effect the campaign has, and it is evidence from inside the system. Eight weeks, every channel, a second film promised next month.

ChatGPTO, a chatbot that refuses every task because it is out of office until its humans come back from Advertising Week, and tells users to go and talk to a person. The line: "Give the GPUs a three-day weekend." An industry event answering its own AI fatigue, and a new case for the anti-AI aesthetic entry, which is substantiated and contradicted in the same week by Meta Connect and YouTube Made On, both built around AI features.

Netflix's America's Sweethearts made the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders an audience, and three brands moved in: Sally Beauty as official beauty retailer, Charlotte Tilbury paying individual cheerleaders for routine content, and Abercrombie & Fitch restocking a closet in their locker room every month. The only numbers are the show's: 3.2m views in six days, No. 4 on Netflix's global English TV chart. That is the point of borrowing an audience, it arrives already counted, and it is also the limit: none of the brands has published what it got.

Ben Stiller arrives at Katz's Deli in full Broadway Cats costume because he misread the email. Three mostly improvised minutes, a Shirley Temple flavour pitched as the first new soda at the 138-year-old deli in decades, and a director who says the film "pokes fun at the concept of marketers reaching out to social media personalities". Muse made it Ad of the Week and Adweek picked it independently, which satisfies level 4 on the ladder's roundup rule. Read that level carefully: it is editorial agreement, not audience behaviour. It did not reach trending in either country.

The Spokescandies are dropped into three TV genres (a telenovela, a crime scene, a Survivor-style vote) and each spot ends with a human who wants to eat them. The creative is ordinary; the asset is not. These mascots were paused in January 2023 after a political backlash and brought back, and three and a half years later they are the centre of the work again. That is the longest test in this series of a mascot under pressure, and it goes on the tracker as the strongest case yet on duration.

Dieux reissued its cult reusable under-eye patch with blue sardine drawings, packed in a collectible tin shaped like tinned fish, at $25, or $69 with three tins of sardines. It is a format extension of a cult asset (the tracker's seventh case) and one of three food x beauty collaborations in a single weekly launch list. Inside Retail ran a piece asking whether it was a flop or a brilliant move, which is coverage of the collab as a phenomenon, but it cited no reaction and no sales.

A navy bomber in Aldi's colours that folds into a shopping bag in about ten seconds, given away by entry until 6 October. It is built on a commissioned statistic, 46% of UK shoppers forget their bags, and every outlet that covered it repeated the release. Many outlets syndicating one press release is still level 2. It continues Aldi's merchandise run and says something about the discounter's brand: it is confident enough to be worn.

A Tesco billboard that appears to have slipped out of its frame and emptied the weekly shop into a giant Uber Eats bag underneath. The structure is the demonstration, which is the best kind of outdoor idea: you understand the partnership without reading a word. One outlet covered it, and no figures were published.

Alan Cumming leafs through a magazine called Bitter and finds Campari's 1970s print ad, rewritten: "9 out of every 10,000 Americans prefer a Campari Negroni", and a Negroni without Campari is a traitor, a nod to the show he hosts. Timed to Negroni Week. The sixth case of format extension of a cult asset: the brand returns to its own archive and argues with it.

The entry sat at Building for six weeks waiting for a decisive case, and H&M supplied it: operating profit +23% on sales +1%. ASOS lifted EBITDA more than 25% on a year of GMV −5%; On set a 65% gross margin target while its growth slowed from 36% to 13%; Stitch Fix grew revenue from fewer clients. Four businesses, one method: repair the numbers from the inside. Next test: Nike on 1 October, the company most likely to show the opposite.

Last week this was five launches in five days. This week it became a fight: Amazon started blocking Meta's Muse on 20 September, saying the agent never asked permission, does not identify itself and can route shoppers around sponsored listings, and Google's free Shopping carousels vanished from organic search in most of Europe. Kroger said AI users build bigger baskets and gave no number. ACI found 7% of fashion shoppers would let AI buy unassisted. Incumbents fighting over a channel tells you what they think it is worth. It is still not demand.

Sephora US opened a TikTok Shop storefront on 23 September, limited to its own label and POV Beauty; Boots goes live on 28 September. The one independent table available, Charm.io's H1 ranking of beauty livestream sellers, shows who wins there: brands and creators, led by Medicube at $19.4m, with Ulta in 334th place. A retailer on TikTok Shop is a middleman on a platform built to remove middlemen. The entry opens on the moves; the number to wait for is Sephora's rank.

A correction first. No. 38 opened this entry on two cases in one day, and one of them, Estée Lauder v Walmart, is a counterfeit case, not a lookalike one. The entry had one founding case. This week brought two real ones: Crocs v Five Below, filed 18 September over clogs and charms, and Birkenstock v Lidl, a Dutch injunction on 23 September covering five models that contradicts Germany's highest court and splits the EU. Two of the three genuine cases are against discounters.

The falsification condition is one shoppable runway outside a show season, and this week sits inside Milan, so it could not be met. What did arrive is quieter and more telling: H&M's nine-month report does not mention its London show at all, and Glossy's London numbers show buyers +19% while social posts fell 57%. Whatever the show did, H&M did not claim it. The entry stays Emerging and cannot be tested until after Paris.

M&M's paused its Spokescandies in January 2023 under political pressure and brought them back within weeks; this week they carry a whole campaign again. As a test of a mascot as a long-term asset, surviving an attack and returning to the centre is stronger evidence than any single campaign, and it is the best case this entry has had. Blu's twelve-month test, logged in September, is still running.

The entry was closed as unmeasurable, and this week tested the closure twice. e.l.f. released a second original album, Mirror Mix, with a Latin Grammy winner as ambassador. Cakes Body launched Cakes Media with a feature documentary about its own rise. Cakes published business figures ($100m a year in gross revenue) and e.l.f. published credits, but neither published how many people watched or listened. The closure holds. Reopen on a number.

Lidl rewrote Lill-Babs' "Leva livet" as "Leva Lidl", following its awarded 2022 platform that did the same to Anita Lindblom's "Sånt är livet". A German discounter borrowing Swedish popular song so that shopping cheap feels like belonging to Swedish everyday life. The marketing director says the rational choice "går hand i hand med det emotionella värdet i att välja smart" (goes hand in hand with the emotional value of choosing smart). 212 stores, target 300, and Advertiser of the Year at StockholmMediaAward two weeks ago.

Fraud against people over sixty runs on politeness, so the Swedish Police gave a polite generation permission to be rude: well-known Swedes of their own age (Suzanne Reuter, Lennart Jähkel, Claes Elfsberg, Christina Schollin, alongside Lasse Åberg and Lotta Engberg) hanging up, saying no and not calling back. "Det är inte otrevligt, det är självskydd" (it isn't rude, it's self-protection). The week's best-built brief: find the social norm that blocks the behaviour, then have in-group figures break it. Fraudsters took SEK 5.7bn in 2025.

During national preparedness week Red Cross volunteers went into ICA stores across the country, and ICA published its own survey to give the problem a number: 67% of households would last under a week on the food and water at home, 73% of 18 to 29 year olds. The grocer as the place where preparedness actually gets done. The survey is brand-commissioned (Verian, n=1,063), which should be said every time it is quoted.

Swedish e-commerce turnover fell to SEK 12.3bn in August, −9%, and the share buying from abroad dropped from 23% to 16%. Purchases from Temu and Shein have halved since the EU's €3 duty on small parcels, and Svensk Handel says the duty "har levererat önskat resultat". No absolute figure for the two platforms is published, so the direction is substantiated and the size is not.

Lyko did not repeat last week's creator box; it released five advent calendars at 999 to 2,799 kr against stated values up to about 10,642 kr, and KICKS released its fourth calendar the same day. KICKS said on 17 September that an earlier calendar sold out online in five minutes, without units. Swedish beauty's working playbook this autumn is the scarcity drop, and nobody publishes the result. Lyko's Q3 report is 22 October.

KappAhl is reorganising staffing in about 100 of its 160 Swedish stores, citing changed customer behaviour; job losses are not yet known and union talks run through the autumn. Thirty head-office roles went in the spring. The same week Nelly's CFO resigned, the second senior exit there in two months. Swedish fashion is cutting while grocery is spending.

Operating profit SEK 6,037m against 4,914m, a 10.6% margin; net sales SEK 57,189m, flat in kronor and +1% locally, from about 2% fewer stores; gross margin 54.0%, of which about 1.6 points is a one-off tariff effect. September started at +1%. The Nordics grew +6%, the strongest region. The report does not mention Barcelona or the London show. The Persson family now owns more than 68% of the company.

About 2,300 SKUs, limited to Sephora Collection and POV Beauty: the products where Sephora keeps the margin, not its prestige brands. TikTok Shop is, on its own figures, the No. 4 US health and beauty retailer with more than $4.4bn of sales since 2023. A defensive move rather than a differentiated one; see the tracker.

Boots goes live on TikTok Shop on 28 September with No7 and its own brands, the first major UK health and beauty chain on the platform. It cites TikTok's figures: UK beauty sales on the platform +60% in 2025 and LIVE shopping +55%. Both are first-party and interested.

The first quarter of GMV growth since FY22, low single digits, after a year of −5%. Adjusted EBITDA above £165m, up more than 25%; gross margin above 50% against 47.1%; 16.4m active customers. The margin story again, with the difference that Q4 finally found some growth too.

Three Starbucks Refreshers concentrates for home use, through the Global Coffee Alliance's reach of nearly 80 markets. Refreshers is a $2bn brand in Starbucks cafés; the aim is a new daypart, cold caffeine at home. The $2bn is café demand, not at-home demand, and Nordic availability is unverified.

Price cuts worth $86m from 23 September to 3 November, nearly a third of the range cheaper than a year ago, and Aldi's first seven ready meals (single serve under $8) from October. The discounter widening the price gap while entering a category. General Mills held organic sales flat the same week by cutting prices and giving up 130 basis points of margin: Big Food is buying its volume back.

A Halloween limited edition from Kraft Heinz Europe, on sale through Heinz to Home now, in UK supermarkets from 29 September and at Honest Burgers from 6 October. Novelty as the other lever when price is the main one: a limited edition earns a feature and a listing conversation without a price cut. The quote comes from a Taste Elevation director, so that structure is still in use inside the company.

Kroger's chief digital officer said shoppers who give the AI assistant detailed instructions add more items, and gave no figure. The same article cites Albertsons at +10% (a January earnings call, not this week) and two further figures that could not be verified at source. This is the missing number in the AI discovery entry, now in its second week.

Renude's agentic commerce report quotes an unnamed fragrance brand at +38% conversion and +23% average order value, and attributes it to better product communication, not to an AI assistant. A vendor, an unnamed client and a figure that does not measure the thing the report is about. Marked hype.

Brand Finance puts $73bn of the top 100 food brands' value at risk from GLP-1 drugs, Lay's most exposed at $6.8bn. The inputs are real (11% of US adults, grocery spend −6% in a user's household); the output is a model. The food to beauty version of this entry was closed in No. 38 for want of sales data, and the same standard applies here.

Sweden's top media award went to ACO Spotless, and the only effect claim on record is the jury's: "ökning i både köpvilja och varumärkespreferens" (an increase in both purchase intent and brand preference), with no figures. Four weeks carried; dropped from the watch list. The market rewards the idea while the numbers stay internal.

One: No. 38's Handelsbarometern context line was the September 2025 release, the fourth Svensk Handel year decoy, and its labels were wrong too. Two: "IRM has published nothing since June" was false; its Q2 report (+8.5%) came out on 21 August, and a revised forecast (+7.2% for 2026) followed this week. Three: Estée Lauder v Walmart is counterfeit, not lookalike. Carried here rather than silently fixed.