Brawny's 'Summon the Strongest' campaign, created by JOAN Creative in 2025, relaunches the Brawny Man as a speaking character and introduces Brawny 3-Ply paper
Brawny Summons Its Most Integrated Campaign in Years With 3-Ply Launch
Brawny's 'Summon the Strongest' is a 2025 integrated brand platform created by JOAN Creative that reintroduces the Brawny Man as a living, speaking character across television, digital, social, and audio channels in the United States, anchoring the launch of Brawny 3-Ply, the brand's strongest paper towel product to date.
The campaign launched nationwide on May 5, 2025, as reported by Marketing Dive, marking what the publication identified as Brawny's most integrated effort in years. Owned by Georgia-Pacific, a Koch Industries company, Brawny had maintained a relatively quiet national presence in the years before this relaunch. 'Summon the Strongest' represents a deliberate return to cultural visibility, built around a single mechanical conceit: a consumer blows through an empty paper towel tube to summon the Brawny Man into their world. The gesture is immediate and universal, rooted in the kind of instinctive play that children perform with cardboard tubes from a very young age.
In the United States, the campaign ran across connected television, over-the-top streaming, digital platforms, social media, and audio channels, according to campaign documentation cited by jessestanton.com. Two thirty-second hero films, titled 'Birthday' and 'Treehouse,' anchored the launch phase, supported by social videos, creator-style content, and influencer partnerships. The campaign also introduced updated packaging and a redesigned Brawny Man, repositioning the character as, in the words of JOAN Creative's own team, a three-dimensional figure with a rich inner life rather than a static brand symbol. Clapboard, which archives and scores global advertising work, assigns 'Summon the Strongest' a Clapboard Score of 66 out of 100.
Brawny entered 2025 competing in a crowded and growing household products segment. The global paper towel market is estimated at approximately 12.13 billion US dollars in 2025, growing to 17.41 billion dollars by 2032 at a compound annual growth rate of 5.3 percent, according to ReAnIn. Expert Market Research places the 2025 figure closer to 14.94 billion dollars, projecting a 5.2 percent compound annual growth rate through 2035. Within the United States, the category is dominated by Procter and Gamble's Bounty, which holds the leading market position, and by Kimberly-Clark's Viva, both of which invest heavily in performance-led messaging centred on absorbency and durability.
Brawny's strategic response was not to compete on functional claims alone but to reassert the brand's emotional and cultural distinctiveness through its most recognisable asset: the Brawny Man. Rather than retiring or abstracting the character, JOAN Creative and Georgia-Pacific chose to literalise his presence, making the act of summoning him the campaign's central mechanic. This approach sidesteps the category's tendency toward demonstration-led advertising and instead builds brand equity through character and narrative, positioning Brawny 3-Ply as the strongest product in the brand's history while giving consumers a reason to engage beyond utility.
The insight driving the platform, as articulated by Jaime Robinson, co-founder and chief creative officer at JOAN Creative, was elemental: the way any consumer has interacted with a paper towel tube since childhood, blowing through it, became the literal mechanism for brand contact. That behavioural observation transformed a mundane product truth into an invitation, grounding an aspirational brand platform in an action every American household already performs instinctively.
JOAN Creative produced two thirty-second films for 'Summon the Strongest.' The films, titled 'Birthday' and 'Treehouse,' each dramatise the moment of summoning: a consumer blows through an empty Brawny tube and the Brawny Man arrives, fully present, to assist with a domestic challenge. The creative approach deliberately avoids the static iconography the character had occupied for decades, presenting him instead as someone with interiority, warmth, and agency.
Jaime Robinson, co-founder and chief creative officer at JOAN Creative, led creative development for the campaign. Robinson described the genesis of the concept in terms that foreground its simplicity: the team asked whether it was possible to literally summon the Brawny Man and, if so, how. The answer they arrived at was the paper towel tube itself. Robinson noted that the creative drew directly from childhood behaviour, stating that the way any consumer has interacted with the paper towel tube since approximately age four is to blow through it, and that this universal gesture became the brand's new mode of contact, as reported by Ground News.
Robinson also described the character direction as aiming for someone who felt like more of a three-dimensional character with his own rich inner life, per reporting via ground.news. This represented a meaningful departure from the Brawny Man's prior role as a passive visual symbol. The production supported the campaign across connected television, over-the-top streaming, digital video, social platforms, and audio, supplemented by creator-style content and influencer partnerships, according to jessestanton.com. The campaign also encompassed updated product packaging and a visual redesign of the Brawny Man himself, ensuring that the character's new dimensionality extended across every consumer touchpoint. Production credits beyond Robinson's creative leadership are not fully documented in publicly available sources.
No independently verified sales or market-share performance data for 'Summon the Strongest' is publicly available at this time. However, the campaign's reach metrics, as cited by jessestanton.com, indicate substantial distribution for a household products relaunch in the United States. Since the introduction of Brawny 3-Ply, the campaign generated two billion earned impressions in total, alongside 2.8 million out-of-home impressions and more than two million influencer impressions, according to jessestanton.com. Instagram engagement rose by 504 percent over the campaign period, per the same source.
The campaign also received trade recognition at launch. Ad Age, Adweek, and Marketing Dive all covered the May 5, 2025 nationwide debut, according to zachthewriter.com, reflecting the degree to which industry observers treated the relaunch as a meaningful brand moment rather than a routine product introduction. The campaign is additionally noted to have won a Bronze Effie Award, as documented in campaign research, which provides external creative and effectiveness validation beyond impression volume.
Structurally, 'Summon the Strongest' demonstrates the kind of platform coherence that gives household product campaigns longevity: a single unifying mechanic — the tube summon — that scales from thirty-second television films to creator content to influencer partnerships without losing legibility. The Clapboard Score of 66 out of 100 reflects solid execution and meaningful ambition within a category not typically associated with character-driven brand platforms, tempered by the constraints inherent in launching a functional product through emotional narrative.
'Summon the Strongest' is Brawny's 2025 brand platform created by JOAN Creative, launching nationwide on May 5, 2025 in the United States. It reintroduces the Brawny Man as a speaking, three-dimensional character and anchors the debut of Brawny 3-Ply, the brand's strongest paper towel, across television, digital, social, and audio channels.
JOAN Creative developed the campaign for Brawny, a Georgia-Pacific brand. Jaime Robinson, co-founder and chief creative officer at JOAN Creative, led creative development. Robinson's team built the campaign around the insight that consumers instinctively blow through empty paper towel tubes, transforming that behaviour into the brand's central mechanic for summoning the Brawny Man.
The campaign's central mechanic involves a consumer blowing through an empty Brawny paper towel tube to summon the Brawny Man. JOAN Creative drew this idea from the universal childhood behaviour of blowing through cardboard tubes, as noted by Jaime Robinson, making a familiar physical gesture the brand's primary mode of consumer contact.
Since the Brawny 3-Ply launch, the campaign generated two billion earned impressions and 2.8 million out-of-home impressions, according to jessestanton.com. Instagram engagement increased by 504 percent over the same period. The campaign also received a Bronze Effie Award and trade coverage from Ad Age, Adweek, and Marketing Dive at its May 2025 launch.
Brawny launched 'Summon the Strongest' across connected television, over-the-top streaming, digital video, social media, audio, influencer partnerships, and out-of-home placements in the United States, according to jessestanton.com. The campaign also included two thirty-second hero films titled 'Birthday' and 'Treehouse,' plus creator-style content and updated Brawny 3-Ply product packaging.
Rather than competing on absorbency demonstrations alone, Brawny 3-Ply is positioned as the brand's strongest product ever, supported by character-driven storytelling. This differentiates the campaign from Procter and Gamble's Bounty and Kimberly-Clark's Viva, both of which rely more heavily on performance-led messaging dominant across the United States household products category.
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