How’s everyone’s autumn going? I’m kinda ready for New York to decide if it’s cold enough for hot cocktails—still novel to me after growing up in SoCal. T-minus 12 days til I turned 36, too, so I’m busy contemplating existence & planning my next endeavor (which is launching very, very soon).

But hey, let’s talk about donuts. In this issue, you’ll find:

• My new favorite social media character, Dunkin’s Spidey D.

• Some Adobe AI updates every creative needs to try

• Why Instagram lowers video quality on unpopular posts

—Jack Appleby

How Dunkin’ turned one photo into an entire social campaign

It’s spooky season, which means two things: I threw together a last-minute home-made costume (taped a white circle with a sharpied 8 on a black tee), and Dunkin’s back with the cutest donut you’ve ever seen.

And you just knew Dunkin’ would swing thorugh with something wildly creative for their social. They’ve long been best-in-class, routinely going viral & enjoying big budget talent—not every brand can get Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Tom Brady to star in behind-the-scenes social content.

But what’s brilliant about their Spider Donut social content?

The turned a single product shot into an entire campaign.

Have a look for yourself.

So many brands have seen social success by creating characters and inventing IP—the Duolingo Owl and Scrub Daddy come to mind from modern times, as well as classic mascots like Chester Cheetah and Tony The Tiger.

That Spider Donut was just begging to become a character, so Dunkin’ gave it the internetish Gen Z language and set it loose on the world.

I love it so much, and I just can’t get over how they turned one lil’ product pic into a week’s worth of consecutive social posts, all beloved by dunkinites. It’s a mini campaign that wins based purely on the idea—not because of big spend, or fancy editing, or crazy creative skillsets. You don’t even need a photo editing tool to make these assets.

As if making absurdly cute social content wasn’t enough, Dunkin’ even figured out how to use a Halloween character to transition their seasonal selection into their Christmas menu. There’s Spidey again, parodying the popular “x amount of likes to unlock” content format with the forever-compelling “leak” language into a creative reveal (please keep those cookie butter donuts away from me, I’m trying to get in shape).

Even better: Dunkin’ ran back one of their best social plays, releasing limited edition merch tie-ins for their marketing campaigns. A little clever copywriting atop that same product shop, plus a smart 2-day shipping offer so purchasers got their creepers in time for Halloween. I’m willing to bet these sold out instantly.

So we’ve got a new character for the brand’s IP, an entire campaign from one photo, and limited edition merch, and a clever campaign transition to the holidays. As if that wasn’t enough, Dunkin’ added a storyline to the whole thing.

The only video from the whole campaign was the penultimate post, where the Dunkin’ social team caught Spidey making more social posts before capturing him in a bucket.

dunkin

View more on Instagram

And that wasn’t just cute stop-motion—that was the end of the itsy bitsy.

With one last trend parody, the Dunkin’ Social Team wrote an apology style text post on Instagram, pretty much firing Spidey D for leaking that holiday menu. They even got an social industry wink in there by explicitly mentioning they removed his credentials.

Throw this campaign on your vision boards. It’s inexpensive, effective, terribly fun, and likely inspired a character we’ll hear from again next fall.

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Adobe launched a bunch of AI tools for their Creative Cloud products

My pals over at Adobe brought me out to their Max conference in Miami for some live demos of their new tools, and boy, they’ve got some powerful stuff.

This robotic pal? He’s not the result of expensive hours from a CGI artist. All it took to make this little video was entering some text in Adobe Firefly. They even told us the prompt they used:

“cinematic realistic detailed shot of a cute robot holding up a red glowing heart. The lighting is gorgeous and sun-kissed, with dappled lighting on the robot's face and a strong sunny backlight. realistic details and textures. the color grade dreamy, sunny, warm tones. shallow depth of field. film grain. shot on 35mm film. Sunlight filters gently through the window, creating a delicate and ethereal atmosphere. Out-of-focus green plants in the foreground. Slow-motion, gentle motion. Camera is static and locked-off.”

I’m a Creative Strategist without an ounce of graphic design or illustrative training, so the advancements of text-to-image and text-to-video generative AI products are incredibly interesting to me. Being able to turn words into gorgeous, commercially-viable assets isn’t a reality I’d ever imagined.

While text-to-video is still in beta, I’ve quietly used Adobe Firefly over here for the last year to make a few cover images for this newsletter. Take my issue on how brands should handle the election (which you might wanna brush up on this week). I toyed around in Firefly with various prompts til I came up with the idea of creating candidates with phones for heads. The result?

The biggest win of all, though, is Adobe’s promise that everything that comes out of their platform is commercially-safe. You’ve probably heard about companies banning ChatGPT or other tools as they figure out if their inputs are being used to train the programs? Adobe has ensured that they’ve never used customer creations to teach their AI, and that all training material was used with permission. That means anything coming out of Firefly can be used in social content, paid ads, or even TV commercials.

Head right over here to read about Adobe’s other AI updates in product, including some reallyyy cool distraction removal tools that easily erased unwelcome trashcans from one of my selfies last week. I’m feeling bullish that they’ll be AI platform of choice for marketers.

Social Cues

There are so many social big thinkers out there, writing all kinds of amazing strategies, analysis, and breakdowns. All ships rise with the tide, so here are a few reads from other places I think you could learn from.

Why no productivity hack will solve your overwhelm (Lenny’s Newsletter). This one hit me hard. I’ve tried so many ways to get on top of my ish, and nothing’s worked when my brain’s not working. Read this if you’ve struggled to be productive despite your best efforts.

Gen Z turns to TikTok to find the perfect college (Business Insider). I’m sure we all figured this to be true, but the depth of it is so fascinating—searching to see what dorm rooms are like, creators getting paid for building followings based on their college life—they’re little ecosystems all their own.

Instagram is lowering video quality on unpopular videos (TechCrunch). Your content better get those views if you wanna be in ultra HD4K 3D smell-o-vision. This intrinsically makes sense—they can’t just forever keep every video pixel perfect—and really, as Mosseri calls out, you won’t even know it happened, but it is interesting.