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🪩 Volume 139 | June 3, 2026

 

I'm writing this from Florida in June, which, if you’ve never experienced it, is less summer paradise and more “why does the air feel like a wet towel smacking my face… and also why is there never enough parking at the beach?”

 

Every year around this time, I temporarily lose my freaking mind and start mapping our annual 6 week trip to New York to remind myself what seasons are.

 

Ironically there’s a business moment here, for summers anywhere if you run a service-based business: the slowdown is coming whether you want it or not.

 

Clients take vacations, inboxes go quiet, and no matter HOW MUCH YOU PREP FOR IT (*collective sighhhhh*), there's still that moment where you check your pipeline and go ...oh.

 

I've stopped trying to fight the slowdown and started asking a different question: what do the most clever of brands DO with this weird window?

 

I’ll tell ya!!!

 

They use the summer to play, and they are the ones who show up in September with gas in the tank. While everyone else is white-knuckling through the slow period, those brands are in a lab somewhere, figuring out how to meet people where they actually are.

 

And where are (a lot of) people in the summer? Outside. Off their phones. Not home.

 

Which is actually a perfect setup for what I want to tell you about, because we've been building something at BGT specifically designed for this moment, and Funnel Cakers are getting the first look.

 

More on that in a sec. First, let's talk about what Uber Eats figured out.

 

 

 

Setting the stage: Food delivery app → crowded market → differentiation problem → summer campaign that went from Times Square to bus stops in LA → textbook case in meeting people where they are.

 

SUMMER. We have a love-hate relationship with it as marketers.

 

Instagram engagement drops roughly 12% during June through August, and that's just one platform.

 

Analytics from spring & summer consistently show that users are typically less active on social media overall, meaning the feed you've been feeding all year is, at best, about to start getting HALF-listened to.

 

People are outside. At barbecues. On road trips. In the pool. Standing in front of their freezer when their AC breaks. At their kids' camp performance.

 

 

If you're Uber Eats and their agency INDUSTRY, you go find the people.

The “Let's Eat This Summer” campaign was built on a deceptively simple insight: summer is a season where everyone wants to be away from their screens and more together, and food delivery is actually perfectly positioned for that… if you frame it right.

 

That means skipping the  “order food because you're alone and lazy” positioning and opting for “order food because you're all together and you want this moment to be GREAT” instead.

 

The creative brief basically wrote itself: take a communal summer situation, add Uber Eats, make it feel like human connection rather than convenience. (Source: industry)

 

What I LOVEEEE about the execution is that they didn't just make cute 6-second videos and call it a day. They made those videos also work as stills, so the same creative could run on YouTube pre-rolls AND on bus shelters AND on a Times Square billboard. The campaign hit high-profile placements like Times Square all the way down to everyday touchpoints like bus stops in LA, which is the summer OOH (out of home) playbook working perfectly for the season change.

 

Whether you're a brand with a $500 budget or a $50,000 one: OOH isn’t just a big-brand game anymore. According to the Outdoor Advertising Association of America, OOH advertising delivers nearly $6 in product sales for every $1 spent, which means it drastically  outperforms most digital channels. (Billboards aren’t dead, folks!)

 

More than two-thirds of U.S. adults notice OOH ads on their route to retailers, with 42% saying those ads directly impacted their purchasing decisions. And because people physically can't put an ad blocker on a bus shelter, you're not fighting an algorithm. Brilliant!!!

 

The scale:

 

Summer is when people are physically out in the world, which means the lowest-tech version of OOH (showing up in physical space) has an outsized ROI compared to any time of year. During summer months, time outdoors increases significantly, driving higher levels of footfall and road traffic, making it especially effective for OOH advertising and giving brands the opportunity to connect with a wider audience.

 

The Uber Eats campaign is just such a great example for what happens when a brand reads the room, and not just culturally, but physically.

 

People are outside. Go outside with them.

 

For your business: Where do your ideal customers physically go this summer? Farmers markets, pools, little league fields, outdoor dining patios, local festivals? One well-placed piece of physical marketing in those spaces, even if it's a flyer, a banner, or a branded popup will outperform three months of Instagram posts that no one's reading because they're at the lake. Meet them where the pool float/pontoon boat/yacht/sandbar/summer sporting event is!!

 

Pulse Mindfulness is a wearable ring that tracks... absolutely nothing. It just vibrates occasionally to remind you to breathe. I genuinely do not know if I can get on board with the price tag for what is essentially a scheduled interruption, but I love that this brand exists. Because it's positioning itself directly against the Oura Rings and WHOOP bands of the world, the entire “optimize your body with data” industrial complex—and saying: what if the problem IS the data? In a market saturated with fitness trackers that make you feel like a malfunctioning algorithm, a vibrating reminder to just be present is either a stroke of genius or a very expensive rubber band snap. Either way, I'm watching this one.

 

 

Bob's Red Mill just unveiled its first major brand redesign in decades, and the internet is doing what the internet does. The redesign, done in collaboration with design agency Turner Duckworth, emphasizes the brand name, introduces color-coded product categories, and significantly increases the scale of the logo. In focus groups, the new branding reduced product search time by nearly half, which is actually a HUGE win for shelf visibility.

 

Here's my take: I don't hate it, but I don't love what they did to Bob. The late founder Bob Moore (who passed away in 2023) went from being the face of the brand to a small stamp-style seal. And yes, they kept him. But there's something very “we didn't want a Cracker Barrel rebrand fiasco but we still had to do something about Bob” thing happening here. Heritage brands, man. The logo is never just the logo. I might opt to dig into the broader “make the logo bigger” trend more next week, because I think there's a thesis here about what's happening across CPG right now. Stay tuned.

 

 

See some of the campaign creative here if you’re not familiar. Does Taylor Swift ever do anything in a chill way? Her recently announced collaboration around Toy Story 5 broke the internet (naturally), but the thing that made me cackle was this TikTok parody imagining the boardroom meeting that led to the decision. What I keep thinking about: the Taylor Swift collab has become its own genre of marketing strategy. At what point does attaching her name to something stop being a brand differentiator and start being table stakes? Something to watch as Toy Story 5's rollout continues.

 

Til the next cake drop,

 

🍰 Lauren