The week in marketing: what moved, and what to do with it

Edition: Monday 26 – Saturday 31 October 2026. This week's marketing news, and there was a lot of it. Two Disney Channel friends sold a blush bundle by remaking their old YouTube videos. Seth Rogen got lost in a Sephora. Instagram decided a video can last ninety minutes, TikTok turned forty million food videos into a restaurant guide, and two of the biggest ad platforms in the world started rewriting advertisers' ads by default.

We read the campaigns, the app updates and the ad-tech news, kept what will still matter in a month, and wrote each one up the same way: the facts, then our view in three parts. What it's good for. Where the edge is. What you can do if you don't have the budget, the market or the access. Sources are linked; where they disagree, we say so.

Part one: campaigns

1. Rare Beauty: Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato, still making each other blush

What happened. On 28 October Rare Beauty launched Still Making Each Other Blush, a campaign with its founder Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato. It recreates the poster of their 2009 Disney film Princess Protection Program and, for the first time in nearly two decades, the vlogs the two used to post together as teenagers. The product is The Delena, a $50 bundle of two Soft Pinch Liquid Blushes, Hope (the nude mauve Gomez wears) and Virtue (the beige peach Lovato wears), plus a blush brush, sold on Rare Beauty's site. The collaboration reportedly grew out of Gomez turning up at the opening night of Lovato's tour in Orlando in April. (The Hollywood Reporter; Variety; Billboard; Hypebae)

Our view. Most coverage called it nostalgia. Look closer and it's a product idea. Rare Beauty didn't put two famous faces next to one product. It made a product out of a friendship: two shades, one for each of them, sold as a pair. You're not buying a blush. You're buying the version of the two of them that a generation grew up watching, and probably buying it for a friend.

The format is just as clever. The campaign's centrepiece is a vlog, the most homemade format the internet has, made by two people who were doing it before anyone called it content. The fans already had the original footage in their heads. The campaign only had to press play.

What it's good for. Any brand with a real relationship at its centre: co-founders, a maker and her first customer, two sisters who run a shop.

Where the edge is. Memory is media you've already paid for. Recreating something your audience remembers costs a fraction of making them remember something new.

If you don't have two pop stars: look in your own archive. The first photo of the workshop. The founders' first market stall. The customer who has bought the same thing every year since 2019. Remake it, today, with the same people, and put it next to the original. Then think about a product built for two: a set meant to be shared, given or split.

2. Sephora: Seth Rogen and the people who don't know what to buy

What happened. Sephora's US and Canadian holiday campaign, We All Sephora, launched on 29 October across TV, streaming and social. Made with GUT New York and directed by Jason Woliner, it casts Seth Rogen as an unlikely beauty shopper hunting for gifts, with his picks shoppable on Sephora's site and app. Before launch, the store at The Grove in Los Angeles swapped its sign for Sethphora. In Europe, Sephora's holiday face is John Legend, with an original song, Here It Is. (Marketing Dive; Adweek; ContentGrip; Hypebae)

Our view. In December a beauty shop's most valuable customer is often someone who has never set foot in it. Sephora cast that person and made him funny. Rogen doesn't play an expert. He plays the partner, the brother, the friend who's standing in the aisle with a list and no idea. The campaign speaks to the buyer, not the user, which is exactly who's paying in gift season.

What it's good for. Any category where the person buying isn't the person using: beauty, jewellery, kitchen, kids, anything wrapped.

Where the edge is. Most brands keep talking to their regulars in December. The ones that make outsiders feel welcome get the extra baskets.

If you can't hire a movie star: write one page of your site for the nervous gift-giver. Three questions, three answers, a price filter, a "safe bet" and a "they'll be surprised". Put it in your newsletter with the subject line your customers will forward: send this to whoever is buying for you.

3. Prada draws its Christmas by hand

What happened. Prada launched *Drawing Prada: Animated by Hand*. Glen Luchford directed Sadie Sink, Maya Hawke, Chen Haoyu, Kelvin Harrison Jr. and Luther Ford into hand-drawn winter scenes animated under the veteran John Pomeroy: a fox follows Hawke through the snow, three mice run off with Sink's dalmatian-print loafers, a snow lynx stalks Chen's bag. Prada calls it "a celebration of craft and process". (Campaign; WWD)

Our view. Everyone wrote about AI; Prada didn't mention it once in anything we could find. What it did is the oldest trick in fashion advertising, played as a picture book: every animal wants something one of the people has. Each scene sells one object, and nobody feels sold to, because a mouse is doing it.

Where the edge is. In a season of generated images, visible decisions get looked at.

If you don't have Prada's budget: give your product a character who wants it, and show one thing a person obviously made. The long version: Prada reminded us how to draw.

4. Lisa designs a PlayStation controller

What happened. The DualSense Wireless Controller – Lisa Limited Edition went on sale on 30 October at $84.99 in the US, with a merchandise collection rolled out through the month. Lisa, who became a PlayStation ambassador in 2025, worked on the design herself, and the launch follows her EP Press Play on 23 October. (PlayStation Blog; God is a Geek; Dot Esports)

Our view. The interesting choice is the object. PlayStation didn't make an ad with Lisa in it. It made something fans hold for hours, every day, and timed it a week after her music. The ambassador deal became a product, and the product became the ad.

What it's good for. Turning a partnership into something people own rather than something they scroll past.

Where the edge is. A limited object outlives a campaign. It's photographed, unboxed, resold and talked about long after the media budget stops.

If you can't sign a global star: make a small edition with someone your customers already love. A local illustrator's version of your packaging. A ceramicist's take on your bestseller. Fifty pieces, numbered, launched the week their own work is in the news.

5. Lego launches next year's sets in a café in a park

What happened. From 29 to 31 October the Lego Group ran a free LEGO Friends Unicorn Café at Potters Fields Park in London, built around its live-action special LEGO Friends: Heartlake The Musical, which premiered on Lego's YouTube channel on 16 October. Three new LEGO Friends sets, on sale from 1 January 2027, were shown there first. (Brick Fanatics; Brickset)

Our view. A toy company showed January's products two months before Christmas, to the people least likely to keep a secret: children, and parents with phones. The musical is the long content, the café is where you meet it, the sets are the reason to come back in January. Three channels, one story, no ad.

Where the edge is. The photos are taken by the guests.

If you're not Lego: borrow a friendly shop for one Saturday, show the next collection on a real table before it's online, and invite your best fifty customers by email. Ask them not to post. Some will.

6. Halloween ends, and the season gets longer

What happened. Halloween closed out a month of unusually good seasonal work.

• Twix brought back Hallowmas (adam&eve\TBWA), with Zombie Claus handing out Twix in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on 31 October and a contest running to 8 November. (Adweek)
• Pringles ran Once You Drop (BBDO New York, Weber Shandwick): one fan wins a can-shaped urn and a 200-year supply, a nod to the can's inventor Fredric Baur, whose ashes were placed in a Pringles can in 2008. The winner is due around Halloween. (Fox19)
• Rivian turned its in-car Halloween mode into Ghostbusters, with Sony Pictures and Bill Murray as Venkman, live until 2 November. (Electrek)
• M&M's Halloween: Scary Movie was named the most effective ad of 21–27 October in Adweek's weekly column, ahead of its category average by 533%. (Adweek)

Our view. Each found something to own that no media budget buys. Twix owns the gap between two holidays. Pringles owns a true story about its own inventor that sat in the archive waiting for a brief. Rivian owns the screen inside the product; the campaign arrives as a software update.

If you have a small brand and no agency: find one true, slightly odd fact in your own history, and the touchpoint you already own that nobody treats as media: the receipt, the box, the order confirmation. That's where your next seasonal idea lives.

Part two: platforms and apps

7. Instagram tests 90-minute videos, and calls them Features

What happened. On Monday Adam Mosseri and product chief Tessa Lyons announced a test of Features: horizontal videos of up to 90 minutes, aimed first at podcasters and comedians. Reels can point to the full video, the long videos show up in Explore, and creators can carry their own sponsorships. The test runs with a limited group of creators and has no date for everyone else. (The Next Web; AV Club; Android Headlines)

Our view. Everyone read it as a fight with YouTube. Look at the mechanism instead. For fifteen years a short video on Instagram could send you nowhere but a link in bio. Now a Reel can be the trailer and the long piece sits one tap away, in the same app. Instagram is building a place for the second date.

What it's good for. Anything that needs more than thirty seconds to be believed: how a thing is made, a founder who's better in conversation than in captions.

Where the edge is. New formats are generous while the platform wants them to work, and the brands that look natural there already have something long to say.

If you're not in the test: record the long version anyway. Twenty-five minutes with your maker, horizontal, good sound. Cut five Reels from it now and keep the master.

8. TikTok turns forty million food videos into a restaurant guide

What happened. On 28 October TikTok launched Must Eat, an in-app restaurant guide built from about 40 million posts, reviews and comments. It covers New York, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, splits each city into Everyday Eats and Elevated Dining, filters by cuisine, price, rating and whether a place is open, and appears in search, the Local feed and on location links. Restaurants can't pay to be listed. (Nation's Restaurant News; Tubefilter; eMarketer)

Our view. The story isn't that TikTok wants to be Yelp. It's that a feed of entertainment has quietly become a database of opinions, and TikTok has started to index it. Every honest review a creator posted about a dumpling became, this week, a vote in a ranking.

What it's good for. Local businesses of every kind, not only restaurants. Today it's food in three US cities; the structure works for bakeries, barbers and bookshops anywhere.

Where the edge is. You can't buy your way in, so the places already being talked about honestly win.

If you're not in New York: behave as if the guide were coming to your street. Make it easy to film your place: good light by the window, a dish or object that looks like itself on camera, your name visible. Tag your location properly. Answer the comments under other people's videos about you, kindly.

9. Instagram's Rings go to 25 people. We'd keep them for creators.

What happened. On 29 October Instagram named the 25 winners of its second Rings award, chosen by a fourteen-person panel including Donatella Versace, A$AP Rocky, Chloé Zhao and Adam Mosseri. Winners include Little Simz, Salehe Bembury, Renell Medrano, Jordan Firstman, Bhavitha Mandava, the freestyle footballer Muhammed Riswan and Erling Haaland. Each gets a ring and a gold circle around their profile picture in Stories. (Business Today; The Hollywood Reporter)

Our view. The gold circle has no separate name. Instagram named the whole award after it, which tells you what it's worth. We'd keep it for the people who make Instagram worth opening, and give public figures their own honour. Our full case is in Who gets the gold circle?

If you work with creators: put Instagram's own criteria (originality, creative risk, craft, influence on other makers) into your next brief, and look at accounts of 5,000 to 50,000. The smallest 2025 winner had about 109,000 followers.

10. Meta switches on product browsing in ads you're already running

What happened. From 28 October, product browsing is on by default in existing Facebook and Instagram ads unless advertisers opt out: someone tapping an ad may see product details and suggestions inside the app before reaching your site. Meta cites an average 3% lift in conversions, its own figure. (PPC Land; MediaPost)

Our view. For a big catalogue, fewer steps is good news. For a brand whose product page is part of the product, it's a trade made on your behalf.

If you sell atmosphere more than inventory: split the test, half with browsing and half without, for two weeks, and look past conversion rate at returns, basket size and repeat purchase.

Part three: AI and the money

11. Two platforms start rewriting your ads by default

What happened. OpenAI switched on creative enhancements for new and existing self-serve ChatGPT ads, unless advertisers opted out: ads can be rewritten to fit the conversation, and reports say the click can be sent to a different page on your site. Sources disagree on whether it started on 29 or 30 October, and OpenAI offers no preview of every variation. The same week, multi-image ads opened in beta in ChatGPT's Ads Manager. (Search Engine Land; PPC Land; Relevant Audience)

Meanwhile Meta's revised commercial terms make advertisers solely responsible for anything Meta's AI creates or changes in their ads, including features Meta switched on. They were due on 30 October; after complaints from publishers and advertisers, Meta pushed them to 20 November, Reuters reported, with the wording unchanged. (The Keyword)

Our view. Put the two side by side and the direction is clear. The machine writes more of the ad, and the advertiser answers for all of it. That isn't a scandal; it's a new job description. If your name is on the ad, your name is on what the model wrote.

What it's good for. A reason to write down, finally, who approves creative. Most small teams never have.

Where the edge is. Brands that check generated variations catch the wrong price or the invented material before a customer screenshots it.

If you're a team of two: this week, open both Ads Managers. In ChatGPT's, decide at account level whether enhancements stay on, and if they do, check which landing pages they may send people to. In Meta's, before 20 November, list every Advantage+ creative feature that's on, switch off what nobody has looked at, and give the rest a named person who reviews them on Mondays.

12. Earnings week: the money follows people who are deciding

What happened.

• Alphabet (28 October): revenue $127.6bn, up 25%; Search and other about $63.3bn; YouTube ads about $11.2bn against $10.3bn a year earlier. PPC Land reports that Google Network, the ads Google places on other people's sites, fell 1%. (Alphabet; PPC Land)
• Reddit (29 October): revenue $895m, up 53%; advertising $847m, up 54%; daily active uniques up 12% to 130.3 million. (Reddit, SEC)
• Pinterest (29 October): revenue about $1.17bn, up 12%, and a record 661 million monthly users. (Pinterest, SEC)
• Meta (21 October, for context): Partnership Ads, run through creators' accounts, grew more than 97% to a $15bn annual run rate, an annualised pace rather than booked revenue. (PPC Land)

Our view. Read together, the growth is where people make up their minds: a search box, a thread of strangers arguing about which boots survive winter, a board for a kitchen, a creator they trust. What shrank is the ad that interrupts you on a page you came to for something else.

Where the edge is. A brand people search for by name, and talk about unprompted, pays less for the same customer.

If you can't buy intent: earn some. Read this week's Reddit threads about your category and put the exact words people use on your product pages. Give one product a name worth typing. Ask three customers if you can share what they told you.

13. Also this week in marketing tech

Sprinklr opened a beta of six marketing AI agents on 27 October, for ideation, creative, campaign execution, compliance, community and budget. Oracle launched an AI platform for repurposing marketing assets and personalising ads on 29 October. (The Agile Brand Guide) Both are vendor announcements; we'll judge them when someone outside the vendor has used them.

Coming next

• 2 November: 7-Eleven starts A Convenient Love, a seven-episode Instagram miniseries about two students on late-night snack runs, each episode tied to a dish from its Flavors of Korea menu. (Adweek)
• 4–15 November: the window in which John Lewis has released its Christmas film every year since 2014, according to Radio Christmas. Debenhams went first in mid-October, and Walmart has started its A Who Knew Carol season, inspired by The Muppet Christmas Carol. (Ads of the World)
• 20 November: Meta's new commercial terms take effect.

What we left out

LinkedIn's connections-only Network tab is interesting, but it was announced in September, not this week. A redesign of Meta's ad ranking was widely discussed, but we couldn't confirm it from Meta or a second outlet. A few launches came from a single source, or with dates that contradicted each other; they'll wait. If we couldn't explain what a brand would do with something on Monday, it didn't make the edition.

Next edition: Saturday 7 November. Sources checked on 31 October 2026. If something here has changed by the time you read it, tell us and we'll correct it, with a note.