This week's biggest marketing moves

Purses, prisons, and a costume Target regrets.

27 Aug 2026

This week's biggest marketing moves

Purses, prisons, and a costume Target regrets.

Case Studied Brief
August 27, 2026

Case Studied Brief 💼

Cake purses, a prison sentence for equal pay, and Target's costume regret

This week in marketing, an early-2000s sitcom got a second act, two major brands reshuffled their marketing leadership, and the FTC set its sights on persoanlized pricing.

In today's edition:

Starbucks pairs Martha Stewart with an "Off Campus" star for pumpkin spice season ☕
The FTC cracks down on personalized pricing 🏷️
Salesforce data shows how fast AI agents are multiplying inside companies 🤖

Campaigns of the week 📺

Betty Crocker turns a packaging refresh into a handbag drop.

Betty Crocker is refreshing its packaging with bolder colors and new photography, calling it the 'Bettier Than Ever' era. The brand marked the launch with The Betty Ate Collection: three $89 vegan-leather handbags shaped like slices of cake. The first drop launched ahead of New York Fashion Week, with a second round scheduled for September 10. It’s the brand's second limited-edition accessory tie-in in less than a year, following a "SuperMoist" apparel line in November 2025. Source: People

ZIJkant sends women to prison to make its equal pay point.

Belgian women's rights group ZIJkant and agency mortierbrigade built its Equal Pay Day film around one fact: prisoners who work in Belgium earn a fixed, gender-equal wage, while women outside earn roughly 20% less. The film follows women going to increasing lengths—shoplifting, announcing a heist, joining a bank robbery—to get themselves arrested. Source: Famous Campaigns

Starbucks pairs Martha Stewart with an "Off Campus" star for PSL season.

Starbucks marked the August 25 return of the Pumpkin Spice Latte with a video pairing Martha Stewart with "Off Campus" actor Belmont Cameli. The collaboration puts Stewart's decades-long "queen of fall" persona alongside Cameli's younger, streaming-native fan base in a single short spot. Source: Starbucks

Michaels names a "The Office" star director of party planning.

Michaels tapped Angela Kinsey, who played Angela Martin on "The Office," as its Director of the Party Planning Committee. On the TV show, Angela was both head of accounting and head of the Party Planning Committee, giving the casting a built-in wink for anyone familiar with the character. The campaign targets Millennials, following a 2026 IHA survey that found 62% of the generation hosted celebrations this year, up 13 points. Source: Michaels Newsroom

Industry news 🤝

🏷️ The FTC tells retailers to come clean on personalized pricing.

The FTC is seeking public comment on a policy requiring businesses to disclose when they use personal data to set individualized prices. It can't ban the practice outright, but undisclosed use could violate federal law. One investigation found Instacart prices varied by as much as 23% for the same item.

Source: Grocery Dive

👋 Dentsu's chief marketing officer departs.

Jeremy Miller, Dentsu's global chief communications and marketing officer for the Americas, has exited after joining in 2022 from McCann Worldgroup. His duties will split between chief of staff Manus Wheeler and brand chief Jean Lin.

Source: Campaign

🤡 Target pulls offensive Halloween costume, admits "we got this wrong."

Target removed a $25 clown costume from its Hyde & EEK! Boutique line after critics said it evoked blackface and minstrel-era imagery. Actress Viola Davis rejected the apology on Threads, and Target shares fell roughly 5% the next day. It's the latest flashpoint for a retailer still recovering from its 2025 DEI-related boycott.

Source: Newsweek

🍔 Wendy's hires ex-McDonald's CMO as chief marketing, customer growth officer.

Wendy's named Tariq Hassan, formerly McDonald's U.S. marketing chief, to a newly created role succeeding CMO Lindsay Radkoski. The hire follows six straight quarters of same-store sales declines, including a 7% drop last quarter.

Source: Marketing Dive

MarTech moves 🤖

🏢 Travelers built its own LLM to stop overpaying for AI.

The insurer Travelers built TravelersLLM, a model trained on company documents to handle insurance-specific queries more cheaply than routing through frontier models. Chief Technology and Operations Officer Mojgan Lefebvre said it gives the company more flexibility and less vendor dependence.

Source: CIO Dive

📡 Verizon taps Google for enterprise AI, infrastructure deployment.

Verizon is expanding its Google Cloud partnership to deploy Gemini Enterprise and data infrastructure across customer service, network operations, marketing and internal workflows. Gemini already handles most of Verizon's inbound consumer calls and chats.

Source: CIO Dive

🤖 AI agent headcount triples in 15 months, Salesforce finds.

Salesforce's Agentic Enterprise Index found average AI agent deployment nearly tripled between February 2025 and April 2026, with setup time falling to under two days. Retail agents now account for 22% of total agentic work output, though under half of organizations call AI essential to their core work.

Source: CX Dive

Editors Choice 👀

💼 Estee Lauder claims it has a "winning playbook" as 10,000 jobs are cut. Source: Marketing Week

⛳ Callaway pulled a product amid backlash over an ad showing a woman shoved to the ground. Source: Inc

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