This week’s marketing moves
Walmart’s Members Only jacket, Away’s Chief Destruction Officer, and Call of Duty’s Korean alley
22 Oct 2026
This week’s marketing moves
Walmart’s Members Only jacket, Away’s Chief Destruction Officer, and Call of Duty’s Korean alley
Case Studied Brief by Vendry
October 22, 2026
Case Studied Brief
A $120 bundle, a $2.2 billion deal, and a $1 trillion forecast
This week in marketing saw membership bundles and launch stunts ahead of the holidays, new terms for ad data and AI crawling, and more ways to buy on Netflix, Meta, and ChatGPT.
In today’s edition:
🧥 Walmart and Sam’s Club bring back the Members Only jacket
⚖️ The FTC sets neutrality terms on Publicis’ LiveRamp deal
💬 ChatGPT Ads expands to 89 countries
Campaigns of the week 📺
Walmart bundles two memberships and a Members Only jacket
As of Oct. 20, Walmart+ and Sam’s Club Plus are available together for $120 a year. Bought separately, Walmart+ costs $98 and Sam’s Club Plus costs $120, so the bundle is priced the same as Sam’s Club Plus alone. New members can receive a limited-edition Members Only jacket while supplies last. Two ads featuring the jacket star Walton Goggins and Jason Sudeikis. Publicis Groupe’s Walmart agency teams, Dept W and PubW, created the campaign with Member One, the dedicated Sam’s Club agency team. Walmart CEO John Furner said the company is “giving people a reason to expect more from their memberships.”
Source: Fast Company
Away hires the DJ who torched a Rimowa
Earlier this year, DJ John Summit took a hammer to a damaged Rimowa suitcase and set it on fire after what he described as repeated luggage failures while touring. Away says the partnership came about after it noticed his posts. Summit now fronts a campaign as Away’s Chief Destruction Officer, putting its Aluminum luggage through a series of exaggerated durability tests. Away describes the scenarios as deliberately outrageous versions of its standard testing. The brand says the collection’s aluminum shell goes through more than 900 hours of testing.
Source: EDM.com
Call of Duty rebuilds its opening level in two cities
Activision and Omnicom Media built a replica of the Korean back alley from the opening level of “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4” in London’s Shoreditch. A twin alley was built on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Visitors matched symbols to clues in the alley to get a six-digit code that opened a custom-wrapped Amazon Loot Locker. Prizes ranged from limited-edition merchandise to in-game codes, packed in Amazon Fresh bags. Amazon Ads’ Brand Innovation Lab developed the lockers and a gamified Brand Store, while Twitch Brand Partnership Studio built a CCTV-style livestream. The pop-ups ran Oct. 15–18, ahead of the game’s Oct. 23 release.
Source: The Drum
Dollar Tree’s first national campaign lives in a tree
Dollar Tree named Tombras its creative agency of record in August, marking the retailer’s first work with an outside creative agency. The first work from that partnership, “It’s All in the Tree,” is set inside a giant oak tree. The tree’s branches are big enough to hold shopping carts and serve as aisles stocked with products. One spot follows a couple exploring the tree, and a second gives it a Halloween makeover. Both were directed by Autumn de Wilde of Anonymous Content. The campaign runs across TV, online video, and social.
Source: Muse by Clios
📘 TBWA’s Backslash published “Becoming Uninfluenced,” a report on consumers pushing back on engineered virality and an oversaturated creator economy. Source: Backslash
🛍️ NRF forecasts holiday sales will grow 4.2% to $1.013 trillion; last year it forecast 3.7% to 4.2% growth, and sales rose 3.1%. Source: NRF
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