July
The air was fresh and cool, the sky was a soft pale blue and the residential suburb in Manchester was almost completely silent given the early hour. The only sound was the low hum of an electric car parked up on the corner, letting Natasha know her Uber had arrived. The car took her to Manchester Piccadilly train station, where she was met with Wonderwall-to-wall advertisements all featuring one of the Gallagher brothers. The long-awaited reunion tour from the iconic British band had descended upon Manchester, and a supernova of Oasis-themed billboards had accompanied it.
Natasha was on her way to an in-person workshop in London, all about the power of storytelling. (And now she will stop writing in third person.)
Despite the 5am wakeup, the day was a great variation from the usual 9-5:30, and I wanted to share my favorite take away from the day. Which is about giving yourself the space, and the grace, to intentionally switch into creative mode.
Like many of my colleagues, I pursued a career in marketing to be creative (although our recent report revealed that marketers work with an almost uncanny balance of creativity vs data). So, why then does giving yourself the time and space to be creative feel unproductive and self-indulgent? In the workshop we got encouragement and I guess permission to carve out the space to be creative, to find what works for us, and to recognize that it’s a conscious shift.
It's a cliché for a reason that the best ideas come to you in the shower, away from your desk. Yet there’s something uncertain about giving yourself time to think. What if I don’t think anything good and it’s a total waste of time and I have nothing to show for it? It’s a concern, but just powering through and doing work uninspired isn’t necessarily better.
I really appreciated the reminder that thinking is working, and that creativity requires conscious nurturing and encouragement. Think about when you are your most creative and identify some conscious things you can do to build that space more often. This can be things like putting on a certain playlist, putting on do-not-disturb, or going out for a walk. For me, I always write the first draft of this newsletter from the sofa or the dining table. When I need to get my head down and write, having only one screen really helps, and stepping away from my desk allows me to tap into a different headspace.
Let’s talk about some of the standout campaigns and marketing news from July, including space, supernovas, and SEO.
An astronomical PR move
This month, a meme was born when the (now ex-) CEO of tech company Astronomer was caught canoodling with a colleague who isn’t his wife at a Coldplay concert. I’ve seen a pretty equal amount of memes joining in on the incident and those denouncing anyone turning this moment into content. However you feel about the incident and subsequent pop-culture adaptations, you can’t deny that Astronomer’s team has handled it well.
Reacting fast to the moment in the spotlight, the brand hired Gwyneth Paltrow, yes, the ex-wife of Coldplay’s Chris Martin, to redirect the spotlight from their team’s personal lives to the brand’s product offering and upcoming event. Taking the spotlight from oops to Goops.
I’m impressed with the brand’s quick thinking and fast turnaround to get something positive out of the new media attention. At a time when the brand was being talked about for all the wrong reasons, Astronomer was quick to remedy the conversation, and it did so in a way that was guaranteed to get views. If a regular staffer had fronted the video, it wouldn’t have been news at all. Yet, hiring the ex-wife of the man who started the whole thing as a temporary spokesperson added another layer of interest, humor, and virality.
The short video leans into the scandal just enough, without giving it any legitimate airtime, and playfully but decisively redirects attention. Our latest report revealed that building brand identity and increasing social media presence are key priorities for marketers in the next year. If you haven’t got the budget for Gwyneth Paltrow, there’s still a lot to say for personality-led growth. Get more insights and hear from our experts on how to get senior leadership bought into this in the free report here.
To serve 💅or to serve 📈
This month, Instagram released an update that makes captions on business and creator accounts open to indexing from search engines. So social captions are now SEO material. As if finding the balance between accurate, informative, witty, and on-trend captions wasn’t hard enough, now you need to get those optimization key terms in there too! But really, this is a great update as search continues to evolve and gives us marketers the opportunity to combine the increasingly popular shift towards social search with traditional SEO.
Social search has grown rapidly as 46% of American GenZers go to social media over search engines, and 66% of all adults in the US are using both social search and search engines. Now as well as in-platform search, these captions will be surfaced on search engines when done right, meaning your captions are now working double time.
The year of the throw-back
Oasis have kicked off their reunion tour and as you’d expect, there’s a lot of hype. Sidenote, when I googled Oasis tour dates, Google popped up with this:
As someone who lives in Manchester I can attest to the fact that yes, parkas and bucket hats were everywhere in July. Manchester billboards were taken over with a campaign from British fashion brand Berghaus. The brand have recently relaunched the red colorway parka that Liam Gallagher wore in the 90s, when parkas became synonymous with BritPop culture. The ads show Liam in the red jacket, and Noel in a blue one, both accompanied by the line ‘the Meru jacket. Debut 1994. Comeback 2025.’
The brand has expertly aligned itself with the Oasis hype and it seems to be paying off. Fans are loving the relaunch of the Meru parka, the first review for the jacket on Berghaus’ website reads:
“Feeling Supersonic I received my red Berghaus Meru parka today and it’s every bit as awesome as when Liam wore it onstage! Too bad it’s the hottest day of the year here in the states because I can’t wait to rock it like I’m in Oasis come fall and winter!”
When Liam first wore the jacket back in 1997, social media and influencers weren’t yet a thing. Yet now 28 years on, Berghaus has expertly revived a celebrity wearing their product decades ago and made it a moment again in 2025, tapping into the hype around the tour of course. It’s a great example of piggybacking on existing hype and creating a modern-day campaign to both sell a product for direct revenue and also for brand building. This campaign highlights the brand’s longevity, celebrity fandom, and its relatability to fans.
I love all of the nostalgia that’s happening at the moment, as well as Oasis fashion coming back, we’re also getting a ton of movie sequels going into production. Freaky Friday 2 is out in August, Devil Wears Prada 2 is currently shooting in New York City, and even a sequel to Meet the Parents has just been announced, featuring Ariana Grande no less. These big-budget movies all made it big in the early 2000s, and have chosen now to come back over 20 years later. I am a huge fan of nostalgia, I think for a lot of us, modern life can feel overwhelming and honestly scary at times, and these reboots offer the warm fuzzy feelings of an era gone by. However, original ideas need to happen too or it’s going to get real boring, real fast. If we all remember to give ourselves a bit more time and put more value on the ritual of getting into a creative headspace, we’ll have room for some new iconic moments to come through too. Until next month, have a great one.