Meet 15 companies that are turning ads and marketing into cultural moments

It’s easy to say that the name of the advertising game has always been attention. But the level of skill, belief, strategic rigor, creative confidence, and sheer will required to win this game has never been higher or more complex.

Effectively engaging with culture in this pursuit has never been more important or desired by brands and marketers than it is right now, thanks to an ever-fragmented media landscape. There is almost nothing better at attracting our attention and, importantly, keeping it. Why? Because we care. We talk to our friends and family about it. We engage in online and IRL communities about it. The brands and agencies on this year’s list are finding more unique and impactful ways to genuinely embed their work into culture, or make our experience with it better, more interesting, helpful, or entertaining. That’s what’s really earning our attention.

But there is a difference between engaging with culture and chasing it. This year’s honorees have kept their work from feeling late to the game or as if it’s capitalizing on stale trends. Every brand is seemingly into collaborations, but Liquid Death comes at its unpredictable iterations from a comedy angle. Airbnb managed to create a product extension through its own cultural intermingling, and now its Icons platform allows guests to book stays in IRL pop-cultural locales. Yeti’s product quality is its baseline, but it wears its heart on its sleeve with films that can defy marketing logic yet make perfect brand emotional sense. Norwegian agency NewsLab flipped our expectations for a tourism ad on its head and uses sarcasm to hilariously sell Oslo to the world.

The work and companies honored this year have shown that there is no single magic bullet when it comes to utilizing culture, but you do have to know where to aim.

1. Liquid Death

For giving the brand collab new life

In a scene straight from the ’90s, two girls fawn over a heartthrob in a teen magazine. But instead of looking like Freddie Prinze Jr., the object of their affection is covered in Gene Simmons-style black-and white face paint. Suddenly, he materializes in the room holding a coffin-shaped, heavy-metal makeup kit from E.l.f. Cosmetics and water brand Liquid Death. Launched in March 2024, the ad hit 12 billion impressions in two weeks, and the limited-edition Corpse Paint sold out in less than 45 minutes. 

Founded by marketing veteran Mike Cessario, who copied the language of energy drinks while bringing his heavy-metal-themed water brand to life and has internalized the absurdities of commercial culture, the company spent 2024 using its collabs and other campaigns to spoof our culture’s entire relationship with advertising while still producing great creative. With ice cream brand Van Leeuwen, Liquid Death debuted a hot-fudge-sundae-flavored sparkling water last August that sold out in seven hours, cementing the questionable beverage as Amazon’s most successful limited-time grocery product. Alongside Depends, it launched the $75 Pit Diaper—a spiked pleather diaper made for moshing and avoiding dive-bar bathrooms. The product was a plug for Depends’ adult incontinence products, naturally. 

Being a strong collab partner has been good business. The company hit a record $333 million in sales in 2024, with a growth rate nine times the overall bottled water category. With its $1.4 billion valuation, the company is eyeing an IPO, retaining Goldman Sachs last summer to explore the possibility.

Read more about Liquid Death, honored as No. 43 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2025.

2. Superconnector Studios

For pioneering a way to make brand work genuinely entertaining

If you want to know what the future of brands infiltrating entertainment will look like, keep an eye on Superconnector Studios. Nearly two years since its 2023 launch, the company is is uniquely reshaping the relationship between brands and Hollywood. 

Last year, Superconnector worked with LVMH to create the luxury goods company’s new entertainment arm, 22 Montaigne, to explore content possibilities and Hollywood partnerships for its 70 brands. Now, it has 30 active film and television projects with A-list entertainment partners, such as Oscar-winning producer Stacey Sher, Imagine Entertainment, and Box to Box Films, across multiple LVMH brands, including Tiffany & Co., Hennessy, Dior, Moët & Chandon, Belmond, Marc Jacobs, Bulgari, and Sephora.

Beyond LVMH, the company has been working with AB InBev’s Draftline Entertainment division, Box to Box Films (the studio behind Drive to Survive), Netflix, and Stella Artois on an upcoming sports documentary series focused on Wimbledon. The company has formalized its sports connections by launching Superconnector Sports, a division in partnership with 32-year Nike veteran and Nike’s longest-serving global CMO, and two-time Olympic athlete, Dirk-Jan “DJ” van Hameren.

One person excited about the new sports division is Omaha Productions founder and NFL Hall of Famer Peyton Manning, who’s worked with Superconnector on a partnership between Bud Light and the next season of Omaha’s Netflix show Quarterback. “The team over at Superconnector has been great partners,” says Manning. “We’ve teamed up on several projects, and they’ve delivered on every single one. I’m excited to keep working together to help tell great sports stories.”

3. Airbnb

For turning iconic locations like the Roman Colosseum into epic marketing and a place to sleep

Two years ago, Airbnb learned an important lesson when it rented out an IRL Barbie Dreamhouse, garnering twice as many impressions as the company’s IPO announcement: People get excited about iconic, unique locations tied to pop culture and history. That insight led to Airbnb launching a permanent feature called Icons. Combining experiential and brand partnership opportunities—such as giving people the opportunity to rent the house from Pixar’s Up or the X-Men mansion—it started in May with 11 experiences, with more added throughout the year.

Each Icon opportunity has a countdown for when the listing goes live, and guests can request to book through the app. Guests are then picked from a drawing, and those picked get a digital golden ticket. Most Icons are free, and those that charge are priced under $100 per guest. All told, the company made 4,000 tickets available in 2024.

More than a new product, Icons has fueled visitor growth for Airbnb. From May to September, there were nearly 57 million viewers of Icons on Airbnb’s site and more than 1 billion social impressions. It was also a major factor in the company registering 1.7 million new customer profiles between the Icons launch in May and the end of the year.

4. NewsLab

For completely and hilariously changing the vibe of what a tourism ad can be

When it comes to tourism slogans, odds are that “I wouldn’t come here, to be honest” would rank pretty low among marketers, but it’s the line at the center of the tourism campaign for the Norwegian creative studio NewsLab.

Launched in June 2024, the commercial follows Halfdan, an indifferent native Oslovian as he shows a camera crew around the city, questioning whether it is “even a city,” and lamenting the area’s walkability and beach access. He also finds fault in the city’s public amenities as he sullenly gazes out at beautiful landscapes. The ad quickly went viral for its dry humor and reverse psychology, which flipped the script on the often overproduced, and, frankly, corny approach that’s typical for American tourism spots.

The result was more than 20 million views, global news coverage, and a complete vibe shift in what a tourism ad can be. And now we all know a bit more about Oslo than it being the hometown of Edvard Munch and A-ha.

5. Johannes Leonardo

For teaming with Anthony Edwards to put the swagger and fun back into basketball sneaker ads

Ad agency Johannes Leonardo’s 2024 campaign for Adidas made one thing clear: the sportswear brand has a bona fide star on its hands with Minnesota Timberwolves player Anthony Edwards. Not only does he have the skills to be a future face of the NBA, he’s got a sense of humor, is a natural on camera, and talks just the right amount of trash.

The campaign was strategically released only on Instagram in order to truly tap into the online communities of hoops fandom culture.The first spot had Edwards and his pal digging in a bag of other stars’ debut kicks—Ja Morant, Luka Dončić, and LeBron—and declaring the superiority of his own new shoe.

In another spot, Edwards is shooting hoops while his pal reads out receipts of people criticizing him. Edwards reacts to real comments from legend Carmelo Anthony and rapper Cam’ron. Most brands shy away from controversy. But it’s exactly what Johannes Leonardo was going for. Stir the pot. Get people talking. What makes this campaign great is the brand and Edwards’s willingness to name names. Having Edwards respond to critics a day after being eliminated from the NBA playoffs was a bold move. But Johannes Leonardo and Adidas used the opportunity to remind everyone, as Ant says, that this is just the beginning. 

The work helped propel The AE 1 to be Foot Locker’s bestseller in 2024, generating 443 million impressions, and five sellout drops—without a dollar spent on traditional advertising media like TV ads.

6. McCann Worldgroup

For teaming up with Xbox to turn soccer gaming skills into an IRL job

Football Manager is widely considered the most realistic game simulating what it’s like to manage a soccer team. So when it came to the launch of Football Manager 24, McCann had an incredibly ambitious idea for its Xbox client. If the game really was the closest thing to the real deal, why not make it that much closer? 

So McCann used the launch campaign to help the small English club Bromley FC recruit its next tactician from an untapped talent pool: gamers. The campaign invited gamers to apply for the job of a support performance tactician for the South London club. Eventually, 23-year-old Nathan Owolabi won the job, and his experience was chronicled in a three-part doc series called Everyday Tactician, which aired on TNT Sports in the U.K. 

Now, that would’ve been cool enough. But Owolabi used the data skills he honed while playing the game to help Bromley achieve its best season ever, getting promoted to League Two for the first time in its 132-year history. This is an incredible result. Global soccer is dominated by rich clubs that can afford to hire top coaches and analysts, so this campaign gave Bromley a massive boost. And for Microsoft, McCann’s work helped Football Manager 24 become the most-played edition in the history of the game franchise.

7. Wieden+Kennedy

For helping to launch Caitlin Clark’s WNBA era

Wieden+Kennedy continued to prove this past year that it knows how to help huge brands show up in big ways, in big moments. 

The agency in 2024 continued to flip the script on how McDonald’s shows up in culture by actually celebrating something that it didn’t create. For years, many famous manga books, anime films, and shows have featured references to “WcDonald’s,” a fictional chain with upside-down golden arches. W+K decided to collaborate with big names in anime and manga to re-create WcDonald’s IRL across more than 30 different markets with manga-inspired packaging, a special sauce, and anime episodes. A near perfect execution of a brand celebrating and collaborating over co-opting pop culture. 

The agency also helped McDonald’s ride an unexpected wave of newfound Grimace popularity. When Grimace threw the first pitch at a Mets game in June, it kicked off a seven-game win streak for the team, and a beautiful—and branded—relationship was born. As the team kept winning, W+K kept hyping the connection—across social media and IRL by turning the Empire State Building purple, and sending Grimace on the 7 train ahead of a playoff game. The Mets didn’t win the World Series, but the Grimace work got 9.6 billion impressions across social and earned media.

For longtime client Nike, W+K effectively tapped into the incredible waves of hype surrounding Caitlin Clark’s final season of NCAA basketball. The “You Break It, You Own It” and “This Was Never a Long Shot” work around Caitlin Clark’s record-breaking college season generated more than 21 million impressions and views across Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram.

8. Saucony

For replacing screen time with running time

What does a running shoe brand have to do with the ongoing discussion around the impacts of screen time? This was a question Saucony answered with “the Marathumb Challenge.” It created the world’s first branded experience that measured the distance you scroll on your phone, and then compared it to the distance you move in real time. The goal was to gamify the idea of replacing at least some of your screen time with a run. Within the platform, users could track their daily and weekly progress, check out past wins, and motivate others by sharing completed challenges on their social media channels. Each week, if consumers moved their feet more than they scrolled through their feed, they were driven directly to the Saucony site and rewarded with exclusive swag.

The risk of such a project is that it will come across less as a utility for a healthier life balance and more like a corporate scolding. But Saucony threaded the needle perfectly. Participants in the Marathumb Challenge collectively ran more than 739,431 miles, and the app boasted an impressive 75% retention rate, completely eclipsing the average of 35%. The entire effort garnered over 1 billion earned impressions, including more than $11 million in advertising value.

9. New York Liberty

For making its mascot the MVP of the marketing team

She rocks the pregame tunnel, is one of the most popular members of the WNBA champion New York Liberty, and is widely considered one of the most marketable sports stars in the Big Apple. With apologies to Sabrina Ionescu, the real star has been a 10-foot pachyderm named Ellie. 

The Liberty increased the number of sponsors by more than 60% year over year this season, which just happens to coincide with the team’s mascot Ellie the Elephant becoming a key part of the team’s partnership marketing efforts for the first time.

Since being introduced in 2021, Ellie has established herself as a key part of the WNBA franchise’s brand and business model. The Liberty have cultivated her as the ultimate sports celebrity—one that never ages, sells a lot of merch, never demands a trade, and never misses a shot. Her performances go far beyond the home-court crowd, with more than 150,000 Instagram followers and 178,000 on TikTok. Ellie is a distinct star in a sea of mascots, thanks to her celebrity styling and fashion sense. What other mascot wears Nikes and carries a Telfar bag? Vogue chronicled her getting ready for game two of the WNBA finals. 

That distinction has allowed the Liberty to not only unlock new sponsors but give them more ways to engage with fans. Ellie has been in the starting lineup for marketing campaigns for Xbox, Bumble, and Hero Cosmetics.

10. Yeti

For crafting branded content that is also a stand-alone piece of art

The  accessories and gear brand has long produced short films that tell compelling stories tied to the outdoors, but last year it managed to evolve that genre in an inspiring way. It takes a careful eye to spot the brand opportunity in a 34-minute portrait of Jimmy Buffett and his group of friends in Key West, Florida, back in the late 1960s and ’70s.

But with All That Is Sacred, directed by Scott Ballew, Yeti saw a spiritual connection between the people who use its gear in the outdoors and the shared fishing obsession of writers like Tom McGuane, Jim Harrison, Guy de la Valdéne, and Richard Brautigan.

The combination of interviews with those of the group still living, shot over the past few years, and footage from a little-seen 1973 doc called Tarpon, by de la Valdéne and Christian Odasso, is a magical portrait of a specific time and place. It’s also a clear evolution of Yeti’s ambitions with film as well as a signal that brands can push themselves artistically with the right amount of creative courage. 

Yeti produced the film and launched it for free on YouTube last July across its digital channels. When McGaune was asked what he thought of the film being produced and promoted by a brand, he said, “Given that it’s such a lovely piece of work, I hope it isn’t dismissed as a commercial.” No chance.

11. FCB

For racing the past versus the present with F1 and Michelob Ultra

The key to any great brand partnership is to create work that people actually want to watch or experience. In April, FCB worked with Michelob Ultra and F1’s Williams Racing to create an incredibly unique sports TV special called Lap of Legends, the first-ever real-versus-virtual F1 race. Current F1 driver Logan Sargeant raced against the virtual avatars of Williams Racing legends like Mario Andretti, Alain Prost, and Jacques Villeneuve.

The one-hour film used AR, AI machine learning and telemetry, as well as research from more than 720 races, 1,260 hours of footage, and 144,000 miles of racing to mimic the speed, style, technique, and strategy of the drivers and their cars. It was seen across 28 countries, scoring 4.5 billion impressions and 19 million views across all platforms. For FCB’s Michelob Ultra client, it boosted month-over-month growth in organic search by 1,650%, and 23% growth in month-over-month social reach.

Meanwhile, for Dramamine the agency created “The Last Barf Bag,” a delightful short film about the airplane sickness bag through the perspectives of enthusiast collectors, offering a fun, kooky approach to an incredibly tough product category.

12. The Martin Agency

For orchestrating distinct celebrity collabs, even for a pitchman as ubiquitous as Snoop

It all started in late 2023, but continued well into last year. The social post heard ‘round the world, when Snoop Dogg announced he was giving up smoke, lit the internet on fire. For one of the planet’s most notorious weed smokers to even hint at giving it up was actually enough to get covered on the news. The agency’s work for Solo Stove smokeless fire pits eventually attracted 19.5 billion media impressions, more than 10,000 media placements across 68 countries, generating $100 million in earned media while boosting unaided brand awareness by 2.5 times. The brand saw a 500% spike in organic search, a 70% increase in revenue, a 20% higher average order value, a 22% reduction in customer acquisition costs, and its best four weeks of firepit sales. This was an epic pop-culture troll that managed to do two things: First, it found a unique way to utilize Snoop as a brand spokesperson, even though he is arguably the most overexposed celebrity in advertising. And second, it did it in a way that actually boosted results for the brand immediately, and in the long term.

That wasn’t the Martin Agency’s only pop-culture play last year. The agency worked with Wyclef Jean for its client TIAA on a sponsored anthem on financial literacy for Black Americans. While it doesn’t immediately sound like fodder for a pop hit, the song was available on Amazon Music, and generated $100K in donations to First Generation Investors within a week, lifted TIAA’s brand awareness by 63%, and website visits by more than four times.

13. Nutter Butter

For making “unhinged” a long-term social brand strategy

A cookie appears dripping over a playground that’s on fire, like a Salvador Dalí clock. A young woman asks, “Nutter Butter, are you guys okay?” and two Nutter Butter cookies with composite faces move up and down in tandem with a rainbow “Yes” dancing above them. This is the mystical universe of absurdist oddities and inside jokes that Mondelez International-owned Nutter Butter has crafted for itself across social since 2023, but really took off this past year. 

To the uninitiated, a visit to Nutter Butter TikTok may feel like The Annoying Orange made by a rogue marketer on acid. But at a time when many marketers are covered in fear-induced flop sweats over the potential to make a mistake or offend, the cookie brand’s calculated shift to the unhinged shows that a distinct vision and commitment to it can yield impressive results. 

The 10 videos posted to Nutter Butter’s TikTok page in September had more than 87 million views, and the brand more than doubled its follower count in 2024. The numbers also added up beyond social. According to Stackline, an AI-enabled retail intelligence and activation platform, Nutter Butter sales on Amazon alone grew as much as 190% in 2024.

14. TBWA\Worldwide

For harnessing AI tools to solve the needs of brands

Last June, the global ad agency announced its CollectiveAI platform, a suite of tools that leverage its insights and lessons from more than 11,000 creative minds in over 40 countries. It’s not the only agency to develop in-house AI tools, but it is one of the most comprehensive and active over this past year. Featured in the suite is a tool that scales cultural research done through almost a decade of daily uploads. Brands can analyze certain cultural trends with a particular audience or product category, then generate ideas that can capitalize on that information. Another tool focuses on social media, trained on detailed case studies and data to provide pointed, expert solutions in research, strategy, and planning. 

It all sounds nice in theory, but TBWA has also been putting these tools into practice. For Moderna, the agency used these tools to build a Virtual Pharmacist to combat vaccine misinformation. For McDonald’s, it built a Fan Truth Bot trained on more than 15,000 guest experiences in 29 countries. The bot identifies themes, suggests variations on existing fan truths, and generates new ones, helping the agency see fans in more creative ways and discover new ideas faster. Speaking of creative new ideas, the agency also created scented billboards in the Netherlands that didn’t feature any outward branding except McDonald’s red and the distinct aroma of the chain’s famous french fries.

15. Uncommon Creative Studio

For grabbing New Yorkers’ attention—by putting rats under their feet

Amid a fight for consumer attention, brand work can often veer into stunt products that don’t fit in with a company’s ethos or celebrity for celebrity’s sake. But Uncommon’s past year has seen it smartly deploy both tactics.

Shortly after the London-based company opened its New York City office, it found a cunning way to capture locals’ attention and demonstrate its work. In February 2024, it put model and self-proclaimed rodent lover Jenny Assaf in its Ratboot—a custom pair of black leather knee-high boots, each with a taxidermied rat in the platform. Garnering more than 100 million views online in less than 48 hours, the boots went up for auction, with proceeds benefiting Mainly Rats Rescue, a nonprofit that finds homes for rehabilitated rats.

Uncommon was equally creative in its work for clients. To celebrate mobile game developer Supercell’s first global launch in five years, Uncommon created a star-studded short film for the new game Squad Busters. Chris Hemsworth, Christina Ricci, Ken Jeong, Will Arnett, and Auli‘i Cravalho play game characters who follow one innocent man around his day, trying to convince him to join the game. At five minutes long, it risked resembling an overcooked SNL sketch. Instead, it’s a hilarious introduction to the game’s universe, while getting Nickelback’s “How You Remind Me” stuck in your head. It also helped Squad Busters become the fastest-ever mobile game to reach 40 million preregistrations.

The company’s work helped it grow its revenue 40% year over year in 2024.

Explore the full 2025 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 609 organizations that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 58 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more.