ARCHIVEMacy's All Brand New Back to School Campaign 2019
Macy's 2019 Back to School campaign, titled 'All Brand New', is a United States film campaign created by Chicago-based agency Major Behavior, published in July 2019, that positions the annual return-to-school shopping moment as an opportunity for teen self-expression and individuality rather than a simple product promotion.
The campaign launched officially on August 1, 2019, according to macysinc.com, and remained active through documented activity in September 2019. Its creative platform extended across broadcast television, digital video, social media, and notably TikTok and Snapchat — channels selected deliberately for their dominance among the teen and young adult audiences that define the back-to-school retail moment in the United States. The 'All Brand New' positioning asked young shoppers to treat the new school year not as an obligation but as a fresh start, a blank canvas for identity. That strategic framing sits at the heart of everything the campaign produced.
In the United States, back to school represents one of the most fiercely contested retail windows of the calendar year, second only to the winter holiday season in terms of consumer spending concentration. Macy's entered that window with a campaign built around a singular theme: that getting dressed for school is an act of becoming. The brand commissioned an original song — 'All Brand New' performed by Danger Twins, as documented by marketingdive.com — that served as both emotional anchor and social media hook. Film settings included a school bus, a parking lot, a pep rally, and a woodshop class, grounding the campaign's aspirational tone in recognisable teen experience. The Clapboard Score for the Macy's Back to School 'All Brand New' campaign is 49 out of 100.
Macy's identified individuality as the strategic lever most likely to resonate with a teen audience navigating peer pressure and personal identity simultaneously. The 'All Brand New' platform did not lead with product price or range breadth — it led with the emotional permission to be different, a positioning choice that separates it from more transactional back-to-school retail advertising.
The competitive context in the United States made that differentiation necessary. Nordstrom gained market share during this period, with the department store sector recording a plus-0.7 percentage point movement for Nordstrom, according to studocu.com, while Macy's faced sustained pressure from fast-fashion competitors and direct-to-consumer apparel brands increasingly courting the same teen demographic. Against that landscape, an emotion-led platform offered Macy's something product catalogues and discount mechanics cannot easily replicate: a values-based reason to choose the brand.
The department store sector in the United States was navigating a period of structural pressure in 2019, with North American growth tracking at just 12.6 percent of the global department store expansion forecast, compared with far steeper growth rates in Asia-Pacific and Latin America, according to marketingdive.com. That context underscores why Macy's invested in a culturally resonant campaign rather than a purely promotional one. Major Behavior, founded and led by Creative Director Ken Erke, constructed the 'All Brand New' brief around the insight that back-to-school shopping is a deeply personal ritual for teenagers, one that carries social stakes well beyond the transactional. By naming that emotional truth and building a social media challenge around it, the campaign sought to move Macy's from retailer to cultural ally in the minds of its youngest shoppers across the United States.
Director Maxime Bruneel helmed the film production for the Macy's 'All Brand New' campaign, represented by production company 1stAveMachine, with Agency Producer Maria Xerogianes overseeing production on the Major Behavior side.
Bruneel's direction anchors the campaign's visual identity in a heightened but recognisably real version of American teenage life. The four primary settings — school bus, parking lot, pep rally, and woodshop class — are not aspirational environments in the traditional fashion-advertising sense. They are democratic, familiar, and charged with the social dynamics that make the return to school emotionally significant for the campaign's target audience. That grounding gives the fashion on screen a context that product-led advertising rarely achieves. Executive production on the 1stAveMachine side was handled by Sam Penfield, with Peter Repplier, Lisanne McDonald, and Michaela McKee also credited as Executive Producers, according to adsoftheworld.com. Service production was provided by Capital Media.
The original song 'All Brand New' by Danger Twins, documented by marketingdive.com, functions as a structural device as much as a creative one. In broadcast and digital film it provides emotional rhythm; on TikTok it became the audio track around which the 'All Brand New Challenge' was built, inviting users across the United States to post their own back-to-school style videos. The TikTok and Snapchat activations extended the campaign's creative logic outward, transforming the one-way broadcast film into a participatory platform. Creative Director and Major Behavior founder Ken Erke shaped the overarching creative framework that connected the film, the original music, and the social activations into a single coherent expression of the 'All Brand New' idea. That structural cohesion — between broadcast craft and social mechanics — represents the most technically ambitious dimension of the campaign's creative execution.
ARCHIVENo verified performance data for the Macy's 'All Brand New' back-to-school campaign is publicly available. No sales lift figures, digital engagement metrics, or independently audited reach numbers have been released by Macy's or Major Behavior for this campaign. The analysis that follows is therefore structural rather than empirical.
The campaign's architecture contains several elements associated with effective retail advertising in the United States. The use of an original commissioned song gave the 'All Brand New' platform an audio identity that functioned across broadcast, digital, and social simultaneously — a multiplier that purely visual campaigns cannot replicate. The TikTok challenge mechanic, as reported by mediapost.com, was a strategically sound choice for reaching teen audiences in 2019, a moment when TikTok was accelerating its penetration of the United States market ahead of its eventual dominance among younger demographics. The Snapchat activation complemented that reach by engaging an overlapping but not identical segment of the same audience.
Where the campaign faces structural limitations — reflected in its Clapboard Score of 49 out of 100 — is in the balance between emotional platform and commercial specificity. The 'All Brand New' theme is genuinely felt and creatively coherent, but its direct connection to Macy's as a retail destination rather than a generic celebration of self-expression is not always reinforced with the clarity that drives purchase intent. For a campaign competing in one of the most commercially concentrated retail moments of the United States calendar, that tension between brand building and conversion is worth noting as a point of strategic consideration.
Macy's 'All Brand New' is a 2019 back-to-school campaign created by Major Behavior, published in July 2019 in the United States. It positioned returning to school as a moment of self-expression, running across broadcast, digital, TikTok, and Snapchat, with an original song by Danger Twins as its creative anchor.
Major Behavior, a Chicago-based agency, created the Macy's 'All Brand New' campaign. The agency was founded by Ken Erke, who served as Creative Director on the project. Agency Producer Maria Xerogianes oversaw production, with film direction handled by Maxime Bruneel of 1stAveMachine.
Maxime Bruneel directed the Macy's 'All Brand New' film, represented by production company 1stAveMachine. Bruneel set the campaign across four locations — a school bus, parking lot, pep rally, and woodshop class — grounding the fashion-forward content in recognisable American teenage experience, according to adsoftheworld.com.
Macy's launched the 'All Brand New Challenge' on TikTok as part of its 2019 back-to-school campaign, inviting users to post back-to-school style videos set to the original Danger Twins song. The activation, reported by mediapost.com, extended the broadcast campaign into user-generated content across the United States.
The Macy's 'All Brand New' Back to School campaign receives a Clapboard Score of 49 out of 100. The score reflects a creatively coherent emotional platform but notes a structural tension between brand-building expression and the commercial specificity needed to drive purchase intent in a competitive United States retail window.
Macy's chose an emotion-led self-expression platform for back to school, contrasting with more product- and discount-driven approaches common in United States department store retail. Nordstrom recorded market share gains during this period, according to studocu.com, making Macy's values-based positioning a deliberate attempt to compete on cultural resonance rather than price.
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