3. Burger King — Moldy Whopper, February 2020. Burger King ran full-page ads and billboards showing a Whopper decomposing over 34 days — green mold, white fuzz, the works. The message: no artificial preservatives. The campaign, created by INGO Stockholm, David Miami, and Publicis, launched just before the pandemic and earned 8.4 billion impressions globally. It won the Grand Prix at Cannes Lions. Critics called it disgusting. That was the point. By showing the opposite of food-porn advertising, Burger King generated more earned coverage than any fast-food campaign that year. The "ugly truth" approach reframed transparency as a competitive weapon — and proved that repulsion can be a PR strategy.
4. Ryan Reynolds / Maximum Effort — Aviation Gin Peloton Response Ad, December 2019–2020. When Peloton's holiday ad sparked a cultural backlash in December 2019, Ryan Reynolds and his agency Maximum Effort produced a response ad for Aviation Gin within 36 hours — starring the same actress, now "free" from her Peloton husband and drinking gin with friends. The spot earned 7.6 million views in 48 hours and cemented Reynolds' reputation as the fastest brand-response operator in the business. Maximum Effort went on to apply the same rapid-response model to Mint Mobile and his 2022 Wrexham AFC documentary. Reynolds eventually sold Maximum Effort to MNTN in 2023 for a reported deal worth over $300 million. The lesson: speed is the new creative currency in PR.
5. Ben & Jerry's — Political Activism as Brand Strategy, 2020–2024. While most brands posted black squares on Instagram during the summer of 2020, Ben & Jerry's published a 500-word statement titled "We Must Dismantle White Supremacy" — naming specific policy demands and calling out the President by name. It was the most-shared branded social post of the summer. The company followed up by opposing voter suppression legislation, calling for refugee protections, and criticizing the Supreme Court. Parent company Unilever clashed publicly with the brand over its Israel-Palestine stance in 2022, ultimately restructuring the subsidiary. Ben & Jerry's proved that political conviction — not hedged "purpose" — drives the deepest brand loyalty, even when it creates corporate tension.
Purpose and Social Impact
6. Patagonia — "Earth Is Now Our Only Shareholder," September 2022. Yvon Chouinard transferred 100% of Patagonia's ownership — valued at $3 billion — to a trust and nonprofit dedicated to fighting climate change. The announcement, made via a simple open letter on September 14, 2022, generated over 4.5 billion media impressions in 72 hours. It was the most-covered corporate story of the month. Patagonia framed it not as charity but as a restructuring: "Instead of going public, you could say we're going purpose." The move redefined what "stakeholder capitalism" could look like — and gave every B-Corp on the planet a new benchmark to be measured against.
7. Mattel — Hearing-Aid Barbie / Rose Ayling-Ellis Partnership, May 2022. Mattel launched a Barbie doll with behind-the-ear hearing aids in its Fashionistas line, partnering with deaf actress and Strictly Come Dancing winner Rose Ayling-Ellis as the face of the campaign. The doll sold out within weeks of its May 2022 launch. Media coverage spanned BBC, CNN, and every major parenting outlet. The campaign extended Mattel's long-running inclusivity push — which also included dolls with vitiligo, prosthetic limbs, and wheelchairs — but the Ayling-Ellis partnership gave it a human story that resonated far beyond the toy aisle. It earned Mattel a reputation point that money can't buy: authenticity in representation.
8. Fenty Beauty — Shade Expansion and Inclusive Beauty Standard, 2020–2023. Rihanna's Fenty Beauty launched in 2017 with 40 foundation shades — already a market-disrupting move. But the 2020s saw Fenty expand to 50+ shades, launch Fenty Skin, and become the beauty brand most associated with inclusivity worldwide. By 2023, Fenty Beauty was valued at $2.8 billion. Rihanna's Super Bowl LVII halftime show in February 2023 doubled as a Fenty launch event — she visibly applied Fenty products on stage, generating $5.6 million in media impact value in real time. Competitors like L'Oréal and Estée Lauder expanded their own shade ranges in direct response. Fenty didn't just run a PR campaign — it forced an industry to change its product line.
9. Volvo — "Equal Vehicles for All" Safety Campaign, 2021. Volvo announced in 2021 that it would share 40 years of crash-safety research data — including data on female and pregnant crash-test dummies — with all automakers, free of charge. The "Equal Vehicles for All" campaign highlighted a dirty industry secret: most car-safety testing had historically used only male-proportioned dummies, leaving women 47% more likely to be seriously injured in crashes. The open-data move earned Volvo coverage in The New York Times, The Guardian, and every major automotive outlet. It reinforced Volvo's 60-year safety brand positioning while forcing competitors into an awkward silence — how do you argue against sharing safety data?
10. Vaseline — "See My Skin" Dermatology Database, 2021. Vaseline and the Harkness Foundation launched "See My Skin," a searchable database of 900+ skin condition images across diverse skin tones — addressing the longstanding problem that most dermatology textbooks show conditions only on white skin. The campaign launched with support from dermatologists and earned endorsements from medical associations. It generated 1.5 billion earned impressions and won a Cannes Lions Grand Prix for Health. Vaseline used a product-adjacent insight — skin health expertise — to create a genuine public-health utility. It was purpose marketing that actually served a purpose.
Brand Stunts and Viral Moments
11. Warner Bros. — Barbie Movie Marketing Blitz, Summer 2023. Warner Bros. spent an estimated $150 million marketing Greta Gerwig's Barbie — reportedly more than the film's $145 million production budget. But the PR strategy went far beyond paid media. Over 100 brand partnerships — from Barbie DreamHouse listings on Airbnb to Xbox controllers to Burger King pink burgers in Brazil — turned "Barbiecore" into a global cultural moment. The AI selfie generator alone was used 13 million times. The film grossed $1.44 billion worldwide, making it the highest-grossing film of 2023. The genius was making the audience the campaign: everyone wearing pink to the theater was a walking billboard. Barbie proved that in the 2020s, the best marketing makes consumers want to participate, not just watch.
12. Coinbase — QR Code Super Bowl Ad, February 2022. Coinbase spent $14 million on a 60-second Super Bowl spot that showed nothing but a bouncing QR code on a black screen — no logo, no voiceover, no product explanation. Over 20 million people scanned the code in the first minute, crashing the Coinbase app. The ad drove a 279% spike in crypto app downloads that week, per TechCrunch. It won multiple advertising awards. The simplicity was the strategy: in a Super Bowl cluttered with celebrity-packed spectacles, a silent bouncing square commanded more attention than any of them. Coinbase proved that in the attention economy, mystery outperforms exposition.
13. Tubi — "Interface Interruption" Super Bowl Ad, February 2023. During Super Bowl LVII, Tubi ran a 15-second spot designed to look like someone had accidentally sat on a remote — the screen appeared to exit the football broadcast and open the Tubi app interface. Social media erupted with confused viewers posting videos of family arguments over who had the remote. The ad generated 4.3 billion impressions and was the most-discussed Super Bowl spot on Twitter that night. Tubi, a free streaming service most viewers had never heard of, vaulted to the #1 free app on the App Store the following day. Cost of the spot: roughly $7 million. Value of national name recognition: incalculable.
14. MSCHF — Big Red Boot and Satan Shoes, 2021–2023. Brooklyn collective MSCHF turned product drops into cultural PR events. The Lil Nas X "Satan Shoes" — Nike Air Max 97s containing a drop of human blood — launched in March 2021 and triggered a Nike lawsuit, conservative outrage, and 3 billion earned impressions in a week. All 666 pairs sold out instantly at $1,018 each. Then in February 2023, the Big Red Boot — a cartoonish, all-red rubber boot — became the most-photographed fashion item of New York Fashion Week, despite costing just $350. MSCHF's model is pure PR arbitrage: manufacture controversy, let the outrage cycle do the distribution, and sell out before anyone catches their breath.
15. Duolingo — Unhinged TikTok Owl, 2021–2024. Duolingo's social media team turned its green owl mascot into TikTok's most chaotic brand character — posting thirst traps, threatening users who missed lessons, simulating the owl's "death," and feuding with other brands. By 2024, Duolingo's TikTok had over 12 million followers, making it the most-followed brand on the platform. The strategy, led by social media manager Zaria Parvez, drove a 62% increase in daily active users between 2021 and 2023. When the Duolingo owl "died" in a February 2025 stunt, it earned coverage from every major news outlet. The lesson: on TikTok, brands don't need polish — they need personality. And a willingness to be genuinely weird.
16. Stanley — Car Fire Quencher Moment, November 2023. A TikTok user posted a video showing her Stanley Quencher tumbler — filled with ice — surviving a car fire completely intact, ice still frozen inside. The video went mega-viral. Stanley's president, Terence Reilly, responded within days with a video offering to replace both the tumbler and the car. That response video alone earned 95 million views. The moment capped a remarkable brand turnaround: Stanley's revenue surged from $70 million in 2019 to $750 million in 2023, driven almost entirely by the Quencher's cult following among millennial women — a demographic the 110-year-old brand had never targeted before. The car-fire response turned a customer-service moment into a masterclass in CEO-led social media PR.
Crisis-to-Opportunity
17. KFC UK — "FCK" Apology Ad, February 2018 (legacy impact through 2020s). When a supply-chain switch to DHL left most of KFC's 900 UK locations without chicken in February 2018, the brand ran a single full-page newspaper ad: an empty KFC bucket with the letters rearranged to read "FCK." Below it: "A chicken restaurant without any chicken. It's not ideal." Created by Mother London, the ad won a D&AD Yellow Pencil, a Cannes Grand Prix, and became the most-taught crisis-communications case study of the 2020s. What made it work was tone: self-deprecating, honest, and funnier than any brand has a right to be during a logistics crisis. Every "our bad" brand apology since has been measured against it — and most have fallen short.
18. Tesla — Cybertruck Window-Break Viral Moment, November 2019 (impact through 2020s). When Franz von Holzhausen threw a metal ball at the Cybertruck's "armor glass" windows during a live unveiling — and the glass shattered on stage — Elon Musk muttered "Oh my f***ing God." The clip went instantly viral, generating more media coverage than any planned vehicle reveal in history. Within 48 hours, Tesla reported 200,000 Cybertruck preorders at $100 each. The "failure" generated an estimated $1.9 billion in free media coverage. By the time the Cybertruck actually shipped in late 2023, it had over 1.5 million reservations. Proof that in the attention economy, a spectacular failure can outperform a flawless launch — especially when your audience already wants to believe.
19. Oatly — Provocateur Brand Voice and IPO, 2020–2021. Swedish oat-milk brand Oatly built its entire U.S. market entry on antagonism. The brand ran a Super Bowl ad in 2021 featuring its CEO singing badly in a field — intentionally amateurish, deliberately polarizing. When critics panned it, Oatly launched a website called "FckOatly.com" collecting all the negative reviews. The brand's confrontational packaging, lawsuit battles with the Swedish dairy industry, and "Wow No Cow" billboards turned every controversy into earned media. Oatly went public in May 2021 at a $10 billion valuation. The strategy proved that for challenger brands, being hated by the right people is more valuable than being liked by everyone.
20. Liquid Death — "Don't Be Scared, It's Just Water," 2020–2024. Liquid Death took a commodity product — canned water — and built a $1.4 billion brand by 2024 almost entirely through PR and content. The brand sold its soul to a random fan on eBay, created a Super Bowl ad from user hate comments, and launched a "Sell Your Soul" campaign offering a lifetime supply of water in exchange for (digital) soul ownership. CEO Mike Cessario spent effectively zero on traditional advertising in the early years. By 2023, Liquid Death was outselling Dasani in some convenience-store chains. The brand proved that in the 2020s, the product is irrelevant — the story is the product.
Category Creation
21. OpenAI — ChatGPT Launch as PR Event, November 2022. OpenAI released ChatGPT on November 30, 2022 — not with a press conference or a Super Bowl ad, but as a free research preview anyone could try. The product reached 1 million users in five days and 100 million monthly active users by January 2023, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. The PR strategy was the product itself: let people experience it, let them share their screenshots, let the conversation build organically. OpenAI spent virtually nothing on launch marketing. The earned media coverage — across every newspaper, broadcast network, and tech outlet on Earth — was worth billions. ChatGPT didn't just create a product category. It triggered a global conversation about the future of work, education, and human creativity.
22. e.l.f. Cosmetics — TikTok-First Beauty Brand, 2019–2024. e.l.f. Cosmetics became the first major beauty brand to launch an original TikTok song — "Eyes Lips Face" — in October 2019, produced by Holla FyeSixWun with Grammer. The hashtag #eyeslipsface generated over 7 billion views and became TikTok's first organic viral branded campaign. But e.l.f. didn't stop there. The brand launched "e.l.f. Cosmetics" as a Twitch channel, sponsored a Super Bowl ad in 2024 with Judge Judy, and maintained a relentless TikTok-first content strategy. Revenue grew from $283 million in fiscal 2020 to over $1 billion in fiscal 2024. e.l.f. proved that TikTok isn't just a distribution channel — it's a brand-building engine, if you treat it as a creative platform rather than an ad placement.
23. CeraVe — Michael Cera Skincare Conspiracy, January–February 2024. Weeks before Super Bowl LVIII, CeraVe and agency Ogilvy seeded a fake conspiracy theory: that actor Michael Cera was secretly behind the skincare brand. Influencers posted "evidence" — Cera signing CeraVe bottles at a store, his name inside the brand name. The stunt earned 9 billion pre-game impressions before the Super Bowl ad even aired. The ad itself, featuring Cera as a delusional "founder" alongside real dermatologists, won the Super Clio for best Super Bowl spot. CeraVe's website traffic spiked 2,500% on game day. Total campaign cost was a fraction of what traditional Super Bowl advertisers spend, because the earned media did the heavy lifting. It was the most sophisticated influencer-seeding campaign the beauty industry had ever seen.
24. Wendy's — Social Media Roast Strategy, 2020–2024. Wendy's didn't invent the brand roast — but the chain perfected it into a sustained PR platform across the 2020s. The brand's Twitter account, known for savage takedowns of competitors and customers alike, grew to over 4 million followers by 2024. Annual events like "National Roast Day" generated hundreds of millions of impressions — the 2023 edition alone earned 4 billion impressions in 24 hours. Wendy's translated the social-media personality into real products: the "Krabby Patty Kollab" with SpongeBob in 2024 earned massive coverage. The strategy proved that a consistent brand voice — maintained across years, not just campaigns — compounds into something more valuable than any single viral moment.
25. Aldi UK — Kevin the Carrot Christmas Ad Wars, 2020–2023. Aldi UK's animated Christmas ads featuring "Kevin the Carrot" became the discount retailer's secret weapon in the annual UK supermarket ad wars — a cultural event as significant as the Super Bowl in the U.S. The 2021 installment parodied a famous John Lewis Christmas ad, sparking a mock "feud" between the retailers that dominated UK social media for weeks. Kevin the Carrot plush toys sold out in minutes each year, crashing the Aldi website in 2021 and 2022. By 2023, Aldi had overtaken Morrisons to become the UK's fourth-largest supermarket, with brand favorability scores that rivaled retailers spending five times more on advertising. The campaign proved that a discount brand can win the cultural conversation — if it's willing to be playful, self-aware, and relentlessly consistent.
The Four Patterns
Strip the 25 campaigns to their mechanics and four patterns emerge:
Reactive speed beats planned scale. Ocean Spray, Reynolds/Aviation Gin, Stanley — the brands that moved fastest on organic moments generated more value than those that spent months planning. The new PR cycle is measured in hours, not quarters.
Earned controversy outperforms paid reach. MSCHF, Oatly, Burger King's Moldy Whopper, Liquid Death — these brands manufactured polarization deliberately. In an attention economy, indifference is the only real risk. Anger, confusion, disgust — all drive sharing.
Product-as-PR replaces PR-about-product. OpenAI let ChatGPT speak for itself. Patagonia made its ownership structure the story. Fenty made shade range a cultural statement. The most powerful 2020s campaigns didn't promote a product — they made the product the message.
Community participation replaces passive consumption. Barbie's pink dress code. Duolingo's TikTok followers as co-creators. Coinbase's QR code that required physical action. The best campaigns turned audiences into participants — because user-generated content scales in ways paid media cannot.
The AI-Era Layer
By 2025, these patterns are already being reshaped by AI. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews now answer brand queries directly — which means PR campaigns need to generate the kind of structured, citable content that AI engines surface. The CeraVe campaign worked partly because the "Michael Cera conspiracy" generated thousands of indexable articles and social posts that AI systems could reference. Patagonia's ownership transfer became a permanent fixture in AI-generated answers about corporate sustainability because the story was covered in authoritative, fact-dense reporting.
The next wave of PR campaigns will be designed not just for journalists and social feeds — but for the training data and retrieval systems that power AI answers. Brands that generate original, well-sourced, widely-cited narratives will own the AI-era conversation. Those that rely on paid placements and thin content will disappear from the answers entirely.
The 25 campaigns above succeeded because they created stories worth telling. In the AI era, the bar is higher: you need stories worth citing.
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