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🪩 Volume 155 | October 7, 2026

 

It started with a text from Hope on our team: "CPG brands did soooo good at ACL." Naturally I responded with something cool, calm, and collected like "OOOO ok wait anything standout that I can Google????"

 

Not a whole lot fills my marketer cup like brands activating around local events and moments, a la Out of Home (OOH, which I'll keep referencing below). And 2026 has been a literal BUFFET. ACL, the FIFA World Cup, a Harry Styles takeover in NYC, all "events" where brands got SO creative this year (and that's just naming a few).

 

So this week we're reverse-engineering the best of them: who actually showed up vs. who actually STOOD OUT.

 

 

 

 

ZocDoc's been around for, idk, a while? (I didn't feel like Googling the founding year, but let's just say it's the platform I used to find doctors once I couldn't rely on mom to book them for me at the ripe age of 18.) If you're not familiar: it helps patients find doctors by filter—location, specialty, the insurance you actually have—with reviews right in the platform. GREAT for patients, and even better for doctors trying to make their practices more discoverable (one of our clients uses it!).

 

Well, well, well. They just launched a new campaign "Ready to Be Seen?" running mid-September through early November across New York City and Houston, spanning TV, OOH, streaming audio, and social.

 

What caught my attention: it's a gorgeous campaign, but the MESSAGING is where it earns its keep. They tapped a micro-moment with an MSG marquee takeover aimed at concertgoers (Zocdoc's own writeup hangs the whole idea on a Harry Styles show), think "I need a PCP for the voice I'm going to lose tonight" and "I need an ENT because my ears are about to ring."

 

Then the neighborhood-specific stuff: "I need a podiatrist who appreciates shoes make the outfit" in shopping districts, "a dentist with an opening during lunch" on downtown kiosks, and an allergist who "gets the girlfriend and cat are a package deal" in residential areas. 

 

And they're backing it with cold, hard stats: 42% of patients say finding a doctor feels like a needle in a haystack, and 48% flat-out dread it. The copy isn't cute for cute's sake!

 

For your business: where could you rewrite your message to match the exact moment your customer is in, not just the place they happen to be?

 

 

 

Three ways brands showed up at ACL, ranked by how hard they actually landed:

 

1) The utility play (the hero): Favor's free pedicab rides. Favor is H-E-B's delivery app, a Texas-native brand showing up at a Texas-native festival. Pedicabs at ACL are normally PAID (there's a whole mobile-billboard pedicab economy around Zilker, because the walk from the park is BRUTAL). Favor made the single most painful moment of the day, the schlep, completely free. Just flash the app! A convenience brand literally delivering you. 

 

2) The experience play: Hacienda Patrón. A two-story pop-up modeled on their distillery in Jalisco, a signature "Headliner Margarita" served in a limited-edition collector's cup, vinyl DJ sets, a taco cart, and a free taco for the first 100 people to order the margarita at happy hour. It's a gorgeous setup, and it's their SECOND year, which is the tell that it worked.

 

3) The Barton Springs Road “commodity” aisle. The free-EVERYTHING blitz on the walk-in. Hope's haul: C4, Bloom, Mike & Ike, free fans… and LLAMAS. This is where most brands live: a free can in a sea of free cans. Show up with a sample table and a banner and you get ignored; build an experience and you get photographed and covered for weeks.

 

For your business: before you buy and set up the booth, ask: am I solving a real pain in this moment (Favor), or just adding to the pile of free stuff everyone forgets by the next set?

 

 

FIFA was a breeding ground for this, too, and the brands that won weren't necessarily the official sponsors.

 

Uber "Sorry for Your (Team's) Loss": part billboard, part street spectacle; Uber-branded tissue packs handed out to heartbroken fans across nine cities (plus a "Consolation Corner" in NY/NJ).

 

Stella Artois "Work From Bar": Stella reallocated $100K of its "marketing budget" to expense fans' bar tabs during weekday matches; bring your laptop to the pub 9-to-5, buy a Stella, and submit a "WFB Expense Report" for reimbursement (LOL). Pure behavioral-context read: the matches were during work hours, so Stella made the workday the promotion.

 

For your business: you don't ~need~ to sponsor the event. You need to own a feeling inside it.

 

 

At a hyper-local event, proximity is the lowest bar. Everybody's there. Showing up is NOT standing out. To actually crush the moment, you either solve a real pain in that exact moment (Favor) or build something worth walking toward (Patrón).

 

And think back to Zocdoc: a brand doing this WITHOUT an event at all, just by reading the micro-moment you're already in. Relevance to the moment beats simply being present.

 

 

🛒 PRIME DAY-S, Y'ALL → It's Prime Big Deal Days and I have been waiting for this SO hard. I'm about to have a third kid, we're demo-ing a chunk of our house to turn a weird den (that has a fireplace… in Florida… yes the fireplace is GOING) into a master bedroom, and I'm not traveling for anything but work, so I cashed in a mountain of credit card points for Amazon gift cards and YA GIRL IS FINALLY GETTING A FANCY ESPRESSO MACHINE. Fully automatic, might I add, because with three kids under five I do not have time to weigh out espresso grounds lol. Also in the cart: Christmas gifts for the kids, new headphones (RIP the AirPods I left on a plane), and… possibly a vacuum? And here's your ANNUAL reminder to install Keepa; it drops a price-history graph onto every Amazon product page so you can see if that "deal" is actually a deal.

 

☕ WHAT NOT TO DO: Dunkin' x L.L.Bean → I'm still mad about this one. The first-ever Dunkin' x L.L.Bean collab dropped and I tried to grab Sarah on our team a limited-edition L.L.Bean x Dunkin' Boat and Tote THE MOMENT it went live — 10 a.m. ET on Sept 29. I placed my order at 10:01. One hour later: a "refund" notice, because they'd run out of inventory. In. One. Minute. The comments on their posts were… a lot. I even emailed customer service like, how?? HOW? Have we as a society learned NOTHING from the Stoney Clover x Dunkin' drop??? (And of course, me Googling an article for y'all, I immediately stumbled onto resale listings, a ~$60 tote going for multiples of retail. L.L.Bean's own site just says "sold out" across the board now.)