Brand Insider

My toxic trait is that I do not replace things on any sort of schedule. Cars, phones, sunscreen past its expiration date. I live and die by frugality’s motto: “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it.” This is not my husband’s motto. He is routine, schedule, and order though and through. He changes air filters every three months and knows when to change the batteries in our smoke detector before it starts beeping. Bless him for carrying the load of that quiet, recurring maintenance that keeps things running. I just don’t have that gene.Most of the time, these opposites complement each other, but last year it came to head when he said it was time to buy a new mattress. Our thirty-year-old mattress, I should add. Calm down, we’ve cleaned it; I’m not a monster. Still, it wasn’t broken. It was doing the job. We were sleeping. Case closed.My husband did not agree, and over the course of many months, it caused more arguments and more headaches —something that might have been caused by the mattress in question — than I care to admit.In the end, we bought a new mattress, one with all the latest gizmos and gadgets. Turns out, mattresses have come a long way in thirty years. Our next guest knows that first hand.He’s the CMO behind some of the most recognizable names in the industry. He knows that comfort is personal, sleep is a necessity, and that trust is earned over decades, not quarters. He’s modernizing a portfolio of legacy brands during a time when shopping, discovery and intent looks drastically different than it did thirty years ago.Tim Oakhill, CMO at Serta Simmons, told us all about it.

I went to college at University of Florida from 2005 to 2009, which was one of the single greatest eras in the history of college athletics. Tim Tebow. Urban Meyer. Billy Donovan. Two football national championships. Two basketball national championships. We were insufferable – we had every right to be – and we took our celebrations very seriously. We stormed University Avenue. We painted ourselves orange and blue. We coined the phrase Tequila Touchdown, so we had every excuse to raise a glass with every Gator score. (And there were a lot of them back then.)Still, we were broke college students, so this tequila wasn’t exactly top brass. It was the kind of tequila that came with a worm and warning label, the kind you’d shoot fast, not the kind you sipped and savored. It didn't matter. It wasn't about what was in the glass. It was about the moment the glass got raised.That instinct, that tequila belongs in the biggest, loudest, most euphoric moments, is exactly the territory this week's guest lives in. Don Julio 1942 has spent years showing up organically in the moments that matter most in sports: that moment the confetti drops. Super Bowl locker rooms, NBA championships, and this year, they went global, building a full campaign around the World Cup. They partnered with Thierry Henry to bring the campaign to life. There was a gold-plated bottle modeled after the trophy itself. There was a luxury megayacht takeover in Chelsea Piers.How do you build a celebration brand with intention instead of just chasing the next big game? How do you turn a sponsorship into a cultural moment people want to be part of? And once the confetti settles, how do you stay top of mind?We sat down with Julian Garcia, VP of Marketing for Don Julio at Diageo, to find out.

My parents were strong believers in after-school jobs. If I wanted something, I was expected to earn it myself, not ask for it. I cleaned a fabric store, I scooped ice cream at Bruster’s, but my favorite job was working at American Eagle. Shout out to Store 885 at North Point Mall. Sure, the $10 per hour was great, but what does a 16-year-old girl like more than money? Clothes. And the 40% employee discount paid dividends to me when I was in high school. So, for two years I paid my dues to the retail gods in sacrifice to fashion. I folded (and refolded) graphic Ts. I worked overnight on floor sets, swapping out inventory when the season changed. I clocked in at 4 a.m. on Black Friday back when people still lined up outside malls. To this day, I still fold my jeans the American Eagle way.After I graduated, I left for college at University of Florida, but that first summer home I went right back to American Eagle. Sure, I needed some cash, but more importantly, I needed that 40% employee discount for my Rush outfits the following August.When I Rushed, RushTok wasn’t a thing. Hell, this was before TikTok and Instagram were a thing and when Facebook was still limited to .EDU email addresses. Our Rush dance routines looked like bad backup dancers in a Mandy Moore music video.RushTok, from where I sit now, is a genuinely terrifying place for a millennial. I do not recommend this for the faint of heart. For American Eagle, showing up for Rush isn’t foreign territory. They belong there. They’re running sorority house takeovers, content studios and DIY denim drops, treating RushTok not as a moment to capitalize on but an economy to build.How do you take a viral, fast-moving moment like Rush and turn it into something durable? What does the creator economy unlock that a traditional media buy never could? And when dozens of brands are chasing the same audience, how do you make sure yours sticks out?We sat down with CMO Craig Brommers to find out.

I'm Southern through and through, which means I take my comfort food seriously. Fried chicken. Cornbread. Sweet tea.  A simple mayo and tomato. And of course, mac and cheese.When I was a kid, homemade mac and cheese wasn’t always an option, so I found my way to the boxed variety. You know the one: blue box, orange cheese, one flavor. It was my go-to when I was on my own for dinner when my culinary skills consisted of boiling water and not burning the house down.My palate's grown up since then, and I’m pretty good in the kitchen, so most of the time, I make my own mac and cheese, but every once in a while, the old craving creeps back in. I need a specific nostalgia that only a powdered cheese packet can trigger. And when it does, what's in my cabinet these days isn't the mac and cheese of yore. It's Twist My Parm. It's Shella Good. It's Here Comes Truffle.When Goodles decided it was time to disrupt this Southern staple, they didn’t just update the box. They leaned in, hard. They called out the category for coasting on nostalgia instead of earning it. They realized they can’t out-spend the competition, so they wanted to out-weird, out-good and out-community them, turning these little acts of good into cultural moments.How do you convince consumers that a decades-old category needs disruption? How do you build a brand that wins over a four-year-old and her mom in the same bite? And what does it actually take to out-good instead of outspend? We chatted with Executive Creative Director, Dan Chodrow, to find out.

In December 2014, I matched with a guy on Hinge that I had 19 mutual friends with. Back then, Hinge was built on matching you off of your Facebook network. They only matched you with friends of friends, so there was some built-in reassurance that whoever you were meeting wasn’t a total stranger.We got drinks, and we had a great time. We kissed, said our goodbyes, and went on our way. We tried to meet up again, but our schedules never lined up. There was an entire saga when he accused me of faking watching my friend’s 5-year-old to avoid seeing him, which for the record, I was not doing. A couple of weeks went by, and we just stopped trying. Four months later, on a total whim, I texted him to see if that dinner offer still stood. Shockingly, he said yes. (Turns out we'd both still been seeing other people the night we met, so maybe some space is all you need.)I married that guy in 2019. We had our daughter in 2021. We laugh at it now, looking back, but if I’m being honest, somewhere in the middle of the silence, the vetting and the wrongful babysitting accusation, I was pretty skeptical it would go anywhere.That's the emotional territory Hinge is leaning into with its new campaign, "I Can't Believe We Met on Hinge." It's not the tidy, love-at-first-sight version of the story. It's the version where you’re tired from dating, you’re half-convinced to delete the app, but still, somehow, hold onto hope. It’s real couples, real footage, real names. It’s the truth of what dating actually feels like when it finally works out.In this week’s Brand Insider 1:1, we sat down with CMO Tamika Young to hear more.