In a shaky economy where marketing budgets are often first on the chopping block, outdoor gear and apparel retailer Backcountry has found that survival is rooted in numbers.

The company isn’t chasing splashy ad metrics like total spend or overall sales. Instead, its marketing playbook is focused on media mix modeling—using data to figure out which marketing channels are the ones actually helping with sales—and incrementality testing to show exactly what drives new ad revenue.

“In the current economic environment [we’re] very focused on profitability, obviously,” John St. Juliana, SVP of marketing at Backcountry, said during Retail Brew’s recent virtual event. “The metrics that we tend to look at are what is the incremental ROAS [return on ad spend] of our channels.”

One marketing channel that has proven useful in terms of converting shoppers for the adventure brand is Facebook and Instagram parent Meta. Backcountry—which sells skiing, snowboarding, and hiking equipment—has doubled its Meta ad spend in the last few years, according to St. Juliana.

Keep reading here.—VC

For shoppers looking to buy American-made this holiday season, a new gift guide is available with exclusively homegrown goods.

The Alliance for American Manufacturing released its 2025 guide on Wednesday. It features 148 manufacturers from across all 50 states. Customers can search the report by state or product category, which range from toys and hobbies to apparel and jewelry.

It’s the 12th guidebook from the trade group—though this year, it’s pitching the resource as a way to avoid tariffs in a marketplace dominated by importers.

It’s an especially challenging environment for US manufacturers, according to Alliance for American Manufacturing President Scott Paul, who said the “US advertising space is dominated by importers and large retailers.”

Keep reading here.—AV

Everything old is new again—or, maybe, made new again.

In recent brand campaigns from brands including Columbia Sportswear, Gushers, Pringles, Tootsie Roll, and Acuvue, marketers have dug back into the brand archives, sometimes even tapping into existing fandoms around past campaigns, to both reimagine the work for today’s audiences and lean on nostalgia to try to connect with past fans.

Take the snack brand Gushers, which expanded upon its surreal ’90s ad “Fruitheads,” with a short horror film for Halloween this year. The ad, a faux origin story directed by Mike Diva and starring The West Wing and Get Out’s Bradley Whitford, was designed in part because of the fandom and conversation that already existed around the original commercial, Stephanie Lensing, brand experience manager for Gushers at General Mills, said.

“For a long time, we’ve watched the Gushers ‘Fruitheads’ commercial live this wild, second life online as one of the strangest commercials of the ’90s,” Lensing told Marketing Brew in an email. “The original had this dreamlike, almost unsettling quality that was so ahead of its time. Our goal was to capture that same energy through modern storytelling and bold visuals that live naturally online.”

Keep reading here on Marketing Brew.—KM

Tired of one-size-fits-all job boards? CollabWORK highlights roles that reflect your interests and goals—delivered through communities like Retail Brew. Click here to explore the full job board.

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