A childhood bedroom in Ireland has become the set of one of the internet’s best soap operas.

Thea Von Engelbrechten, 23, lives and works from her room full of toys as the creator of Sylvanian Drama, a comedic TikTok and Instagram account that combines the innocent aesthetic of Calico Critters figurines (known as Sylvanian Families outside the US and Canada) with extremely online language and dramatic fictional storylines involving everything from drugs and robberies to murder.

As many soap operas do, it began innocently enough: Von Engelbrechten watched Desperate Housewives during Covid lockdowns and was inspired to create her first video, a story about cheating that ends in homicide that got more than 130,000 likes on TikTok.

“I was at home in my family home and we weren’t allowed to leave, so the Sylvanian Drama account was kind of a boredom thing that I started,” she told Marketing Brew.

The account has since evolved into a full-time job for Von Engelbrechten. Sylvanian Drama now boasts a following of nearly 3.5 million across channels, and the account has attracted notable brand interest. In the last three years, collaborators have included well-known brands like Hilton, Netflix, Asos, Burberry, Cash App, Sephora, Taco Bell, Away, Urban Outfitters, Supergoop, Royal Caribbean, and Marc Jacobs.

“It’s definitely a dream come true for me because this was always what I wanted to do,” Von Engelbrechten said. “I always wanted to work in advertising.”

Continue reading here.—KH

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Doritos is returning to the Super Bowl ad scene in 2025, but instead of relying on an agency or brand executive to come up with the creative concept, the snack brand is looking to fans to create the final product.

From 2006 to 2016, Doritos ran the “Crash the Super Bowl” contest featuring fan-made ads, which landed in the top five commercials on the USA Today Ad Meter for each of those 10 years, including four years in the No. 1 spot, according to Frito-Lay.

This year, the brand is once again putting its Super Bowl ad’s fate in the hands of a fan and is bringing the contest back, starting with a pair of self-deprecating ads seeking submissions and culminating with a winning fan-made ad airing during the broadcast on Fox on Feb. 9.

So you think you can ad: There are plenty of Super Bowl viewers who criticize the ads—or even think they can come up with better ones. So, according to the company, the idea is to challenge people to do just that.

“We still firmly believe that the best ideas often come from the most unexpected places,” Tina Mahal, SVP of marketing at PepsiCo Foods North America, said in a press release.

On Thursday, Doritos began accepting submissions at DoritosCrash.com, and the brand will keep the contest open through Nov. 11. Later in the year, a panel of judges will select 25 submissions, one for each year Doritos has advertised in the Super Bowl, before narrowing the list to three finalists in January. At that point, voting will open to the public to choose the winning ad.

Keep reading here.—AM

Social media is all about followers, but the real followers may be the platforms themselves.

In a report released Thursday, The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said top tech and social media companies—Amazon (which owns Twitch), Facebook, YouTube, Twitter/X, Snap, ByteDance (which owns TikTok), Discord, Reddit, and WhatsApp—“engaged in vast surveillance of consumers in order to monetize their personal information while failing to adequately protect users online, especially children and teens.” Targeted advertising was cited as a main motivator for the platforms’ data collection practices.

• The report, which is the result of an FTC study focused on the nine companies that began in December 2020, found that they collected personal data from users—and non-users in some cases—at a “staggering” level, and that many of them “failed to implement adequate safeguards against privacy risks.”
• In addition to data-sharing, the FTC found that companies were able to “indefinitely retain troves of data,” and that some “did not delete all user data in response to user data deletion requests.”

Additionally, many users “lacked any meaningful control” over how their personal information was being used for AI purposes, the report found.

“While lucrative for the companies, these surveillance practices can endanger people’s privacy, threaten their freedoms, and expose them to a host of harms, from identity theft to stalking,” FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a press release announcing the report.

In the press release, Khan, a fierce critic of Big Tech before she joined the FTC, described some companies’ protection measures around kids and teens as “especially troubling.” According to the report, many children under age 13 remained on platforms despite age restrictions, and teens were often subject to the same data collection practices as adult users.

Continue reading here.—KH

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Executive moves across the industry.

• Comcast Advertising hired former MLB marketer Scott Weisenthal as its new head of global marketing and insights.
• Restaurant Brands International, the parent company of fast-food chains like Burger King and Popeyes tapped Jerry Daykin to be its first-ever head of international media.
• Moonbug Entertainment, the company behind CoComelon and Blippi, promoted Katelynn Heil to head of brand marketing and franchise strategy.