Marketing Moves Catching Our Attention

What makes you stop and pay attention to a brand? It might be a great visual, a clever tagline, or a campaign that happens to show up at exactly the right moment. But lately, there seems to be another ingredient at play: giving people something to actually do.

As audiences become more selective about the brands and content they engage with, some marketers are experimenting with campaigns that feel less like a message being delivered and more like an invitation. Instead of simply asking people to look, watch, or buy, these campaigns create a small opportunity for people to participate. A brand might give you a reason to meet up with friends, interact with an advertisement, or experience a product in a way you normally couldn't.

Two campaigns from this past week offer an interesting look at what that can look like in practice.

Dove: Making a Sponsorship Feel Like Something You Can Join

Dove's return as the Official Underarm Sponsor of the 2026 US Open could have centered primarily around traditional sponsorship visibility: branding throughout the tournament, product placement, and social content tied to the event. Instead, the brand is finding ways to bring the partnership into the experiences happening around the tournament. Through its “Don't Sweat It. Make A Racket.” campaign, Dove is picking up the tab at ten women owned bars across the country, giving fans complimentary food and drinks while they watch the Women's Finals.

There's something interesting about choosing bars as the setting. Watching a tennis match with friends becomes an opportunity to interact with the brand without the experience needing to feel like a traditional activation.

The campaign also extends into social media through “Racquet Report,” a series created with the USTA that looks beyond the matches themselves and into the culture surrounding the US Open, including the fashion, conversations, and personalities around the tournament.

Together, those pieces give the sponsorship a little more room to live. Instead of existing only within the boundaries of the tournament, Dove becomes part of how people experience the event outside the stadium too. The campaign is exploring an interesting question: How can we give people a reason to want to be around the brand?

Rare Beauty: Giving People a Reason to Stop

Rare Beauty approached participation in a much more literal way for its Rare Beginnings fragrance launch. In New York City, the brand turned billboards into interactive scratch and sniff placements, allowing people walking by to physically experience the fragrance rather than simply seeing an image of the bottle.

The idea works because it takes a familiar advertising format and gives people a reason to interact with it. A billboard is usually something you pass on your way somewhere else. Here, the person walking by has to make a small choice: stop, scratch, and smell.

That tiny interaction changes the role of the advertisement. Instead of only communicating what the product is, the billboard becomes part of the product experience itself.

It also creates the possibility for the campaign to travel beyond the physical billboard. An unexpected moment on the street can become a photo, a TikTok, a conversation, or something someone sends to a friend. The interaction gives people a story to tell, rather than simply another advertisement they've seen.

Both campaigns are approaching participation in very different ways, but they raise a similar question about where marketing can fit into people's lives.

Maybe it doesn't always need to interrupt what people are already doing. It can give them something worth doing.

A night out with friends can become part of a brand campaign. A billboard can become something you stop to experience. A sponsorship can become a reason to gather.

And perhaps that's an interesting direction for brands to explore as audiences become harder to impress: what if the campaign isn't something people simply see, but something they get to be part of?