Forwarded this email? Click here to get your weekly slice.

 

🪩 Volume 136 | May 13, 2026

 

News flash!!! The brands we grew up with are suddenly trying reaaaally hard to get our attention again. Legacy names that have been around for decades—brands you recognize immediately, trust instinctively, and maybe haven't thought about in years—are stepping back into the conversation.

 

The tried and true recipe for mass exposure here is hiring someone a generation already trusts. Someone we grew up watching…

 

Let's get into it.

 

 

Setting the stage: Luna Bar → founded 1999 under Clif Bar as a snack bar specifically made for women → acquired by Mondelēz International in 2022 → seven years pass with zero major campaigns → May 2026: first major creative effort since 2019, starring Jessica Alba as inaugural brand ambassador.

 

Seven years is a LOOOOONG time to go quiet in the snack bar category, and the category didn't wait for them. Quest, RXBar, Chomps, my personal and best friend Barebells, and every other iteration of ”clean protein snack” flooded shelves and feeds while Luna held their spot on the shelf doing essentially *nothing* to court new customers. So when they came back, they had a choice: go broad and try to compete on protein specs, or lean into the one thing they actually have that no new challenger brand can manufacture—legacy.

 

They chose legacy. Fun!

 

Luna Bar's “Easy to Love” campaign—their first major creative effort in nearly a decade (and upon further digging, this appears to be linked to the acquisition of Luna by Mondelez)— runs across paid and organic social on TikTok and Meta, plus display and shopper ads at national retailers. It’s a mega precision play: meet her where she already is, and make the brand feel like something she chose, not something she was sold.

 

The ambassador strategy here is the interesting part. Jessica Alba has been an unofficial fan of Luna Bar for years—keeping one in her bag and on set before she ever had a contract. The campaign literally leans into it—she's framed not as a celebrity spokesperson but as a “brand fan turned ambassador.” Alba herself said it was “an easy yes” because she'd already loved the bar for years.

 

Also smart: Jessica Alba isn't a fitness celebrity or a health influencer. She's a millennial cultural figure—Honey, Fantastic Four, The Honest Company, author, and entrepreneur. She lives at the intersection of “woman you grew up watching” and “woman who has her life together.” For Luna's core audience—women who want a good snack, not a PhD thesis on macros—she's the perfect person to make the bar feel aspirational but accessible.

 

For your business: If you're relaunching something, reviving a product, or trying to reclaim attention after a quiet period—who in your audience's world would they already trust? Who is the person or company or brand whose values already overlap with your brand, who would've bought your thing anyway. THAT'S your collaborator.

 

Setting the stage: Ladder → strength training app launched in 2018 → over 400,000 members → 80% women → April 2026: first ever celebrity partnership, starring Hilary Duff.

 

Let me walk you through exactly what happened in my brain when I started seeing Hilary Duff pop up for Ladder:

 

 

That's not me being gullible, k? This is marketing working exactly the way it's supposed to. The moment a brand gets seeded into your consciousness, you start noticing all the other signals around it.

 

It's the same reason the week after you decide you want a certain car, you see it EVERYWHERE. It was always there, you just started paying attention.

 

Ladder's campaign marks their first celebrity partnership ever, and it launched against a real behavioral shift—women trading cardio for the weight room and redefining what fitness success actually means. This isn't a made-up trend; among Ladder's female members, the share defining fitness success as gaining strength has quadrupled since joining—from 9.7% to 41.5%—and more than half have a fitness goal beyond weight loss entirely.

 

So instead of inventing a moment, Ladder is amplifying one that's already happening. And Hilary Duff is the exact right person to carry that message.

Here's why: Duff is 38, a mother of four, preparing for a world tour, and relatable in a way most fitness spokespeople aren't. She's not a trainer, she's not someone who has made fitness her entire personality, she's framed as someone with a full life trying to make everything work—which makes the whole campaign land as practical, not aspirational in an alienating way.

 

The campaign's actual message is also just so damn refreshing: Duff said she avoided the weight room for years because she believed lifting would make her bulky—then she shifted to strength training and “everything changed.” For the woman who has been doing endless cardio because it's “what women do,” that framing is awesome.

 

Ladder isn't selling transformation or six-week miracles. They're selling practicality—the idea that you open the app, follow the plan, and move on with your day. Decision fatigue is REAL, especially for people running businesses, families, and everything in between. “Removes the mental load” is a quality-of-life pitch. And that's so much stickier!!

 

For your business: What behavioral shift is already happening in your customer base that you haven't spoken to yet? Not a trend you want to predict—one that's already measurably underway. Ladder noticed the move toward strength training in their own data and built a campaign around it. Your customers are already telling you where they're headed. Are you listening?

 

 

That whole Ladder spiral I just walked you through: I didn't end up downloading the app (although I bet the retargeting is about to get real loud lol). But Ladder is now LIVING in my head, and when the right moment arrives—a trip, a schedule change, a fresh start—it's going to be the first thing I think of. That's brand awareness working exactly the way it's supposed to.

 

There's actually a name for what happened to me: the frequency illusion, sometimes called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. The moment a brand gets seeded into your consciousness, you start noticing all the signals around it that were always there.

 

Luna, Ladder, and McCormick (yes—Paris Hilton signed a multi-year deal with McCormick in January, and “that's hot” + “slivin” + spices is so obvious it's almost offensive that it works this well on me) are all running the same underlying play: get in front of the right person, repeatedly, through a face she already trusts, until the brand becomes part of her mental furniture.

 

Most marketing is, at its core, a brand awareness play. And that can feel super frustrating when you're a small business owner trying to justify every dollar. I encourage you to think about brand awareness like this: it’s NOT the thing that happens before the sale, it’s the thing that makes the sale feel inevitable when the moment finally comes.

 

For your business: You don't need a celebrity to run this play. You need consistent, repeated presence in the right places—so that when your customer hits their “I need this” moment, your name is already in the room.

 

 

 

1. The frozen yogurt I want in my freezer immediately. I have been underwhelmed by Greek yogurt ice cream for YEARS. Like, I want to like it. I WANT it to be the thing. And it never quite is. Enter Chara Froyo—I am convinced it’s the one that's going to do it for me. The packaging is gorgeous. The premise is simple. The positioning feels premium. I want this in every Publix in Florida, stat. If you're in CPG and wondering what “elevated but approachable” looks like: go look at this.

 

2. The muffin mix I would absolutely buy as a gift. Birdie Bakes Co. is a banana muffin mix brand that sneaks fruits and vegetables into the mix, and the branding is SO CUTE I want to give it to literally everyone I know. There's something happening in the CPG space right now where small brands are nailing the ”gift-able everyday product” positioning—and Birdie Bakes is doing it beautifully. It's not trying to be Whole Foods Premium. It's trying to be the thing you'd grab at a boutique and give to your neighbor.

 

Something to sit with: Both of these brands are small. None of them are in major retail distribution (yet). But they have branding strong enough to make me, a complete stranger, want to root for them immediately. What is it about a brand that makes you feel like it deserves to win? I'd argue it's specificity—the sense that it was made for SOMEONE in particular, not everyone in general. Are you building something that feels that specific?

 

Til the next cake drop,

 

🍰 Lauren