Nostalgia and Music Collabs Redefine Social Engagement.

How Brands Use Memory and Music to Drive Engagement.

From Nostalgia To Culture Production

The collapse of one-size-fits-all social strategies has forced brands to think of themselves not as advertisers but as cultural producers. In 2025, the brands that break through are those that take existing equity, whether historical stories, beloved characters, or heritage identity, and recast it in formats that feel native to TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. The Marketing Brew Social 2025 report demonstrates that nostalgia, absurd humor, and music-led collaborations are not soft add-ons but strategic growth levers.

American Girl and Teletubbies prove that cultural memory can be weaponized to win attention and revenue. Free People and Gap show that partnerships with musicians and entertainment properties transform brand content into entertainment that travels further than advertising ever could.

American Girl: Historical Memory - a Social Currency

American Girl’s pivot illustrates how even legacy educational brands must adapt. By 2024, its TikTok strategy leaned into meme culture, producing videos where dolls shared “trauma” stories, the Great Depression, family disasters, in formats that mirrored viral trends. This reframing of historical storytelling resulted in a 91% year-on-year engagement increase on TikTok and a 10% engagement increase across all platforms.

Importantly, this wasn’t random humor: it built bridges across three critical audiences. Children aged three to ten remain the purchasing base; millennial mothers re-engage through nostalgia and store visits; Gen Z, who aged out of doll ownership, reconnects through retrospective humor.

The outcome is a brand that should have risked obsolescence in a TikTok environment but instead leveraged cultural memory to amplify relatability. For executives, the case illustrates that cultural history, when reframed, delivers multi-segment engagement rather than confining a brand to one audience tier.

Teletubbies: Absurd Nostalgia Turns into Revenue

WildBrain’s Teletubbies prove that absurdity itself can be commercialized. In 2024, the account generated more than 147 million views and 15 million engagements on TikTok while simultaneously adding 630,000 followers on Instagram. By leaning into an “unhinged” aesthetic, Teletubbies reimagined as Carrie Bradshaw, Dipsy celebrating “brat summer”, the brand found resonance among adults who first watched the show in childhood. Crucially, this engagement unlocked new revenue.

Collaborations with Marc Jacobs, American Eagle, and citizenM hotels extended the characters into fashion and hospitality categories. Nostalgia was not sentimentality here; it was a monetizable growth lever. For executives, the takeaway is that dormant IP can generate commercial partnerships when positioned as absurdly entertaining rather than as relics.

Cultural memory, when modernized, becomes a scalable licensing and revenue platform.

Free People: Behind-The-Scenes as Core Creative

Free People’s 2024 strategy highlights the rejection of polish in favor of immediacy. The Free People Sessions music series, where artists like The Japanese House and Towa Bird performed in brand-styled sets, produced the brand’s highest engagement posts of the yea. The critical insight: performance was strongest when the brand posted collaborative content directly with artists, ensuring exposure to fan bases beyond its own.

Beyond music, Free People filmed on iPhones during campaign shoots to produce behind-the-scenes (BTS) content, outperforming polished campaign ads across TikTok and Instagram. Diversification into YouTube Shorts and Substack created additional cultural footholds. The consequence is measurable: by positioning itself not as a fashion retailer but as a cultural producer, Free People captured sustained attention in the highly competitive 25–34 female demographic.

For executives, this illustrates that unfiltered BTS and cultural collabs convert more reliably than media spend on static campaign creative.

Gap: Heritage Recast Through Music and Dance

Gap’s turnaround hinged on repositioning its heritage as live cultural relevance. Its “Linen Moves” campaign with Tyla and “Get Loose” with Troye Sivan reached nearly 30 million TikTok views each reviving brand commentary such as “Gap is back.” The strategy tapped directly into music and dance culture while also referencing Gap’s own 1990s brand codes, which were built around music and movement. This hybrid approach, part nostalgia, part reinvention, enabled Gap to modernize without nostalgia paralysis.

The campaigns also reached multiple fandoms by pairing musicians with viral dance troupes, expanding cultural exposure. The outcome: campaigns were not just ads but events that generated social replication by users. For executives, the case shows that heritage can become dead weight if treated as museum history but becomes a growth accelerant when recast as cultural participation.

Culture: The New Engagement System

These four cases demonstrate that in 2025, culture has replaced advertising as the operative model for engagement. American Girl and Teletubbies show that cultural memory, when reframed for humor or absurdity, reactivates audiences that had drifted away.

Free People and Gap prove that entertainment collabs generate distribution, ensuring brand campaigns are watched because they are culturally relevant content rather than ignored as ads. The shared executive lesson is clear: brands are no longer in the business of content scheduling; they are in the business of cultural production. The cost of failing to adapt is irrelevance in feeds that reward fluency and punish formula.

Recommendations

• Audit legacy brand assets not for preservation but for reactivation into social-native humor, absurdity, or collaboration.

• Redesign brand marketing teams to function as cultural producers with authority to build live collaborations and BTS content.

• Allocate spend to collabs and entertainment-led assets instead of static campaign photography and media-heavy distribution.

• Tie nostalgia and heritage activations directly to measurable revenue outcomes through partnerships, licensing, or commerce integration.

Bottom Line: Culture is the Only Channel that Scales

American Girl, Teletubbies, Free People, and Gap prove that culture, whether reframed memory or live entertainment, is now the operative channel for social relevance.

Executives who continue to treat social as ad space rather than cultural infrastructure will not only lose engagement but also forfeit revenue growth and long-term equity.