🕷️🍩 How Dunkin's Spidey D won Halloween (and stole my heart)

An exclusive interview with Dunkin's social agency, Cornelia Creative, the brains behind Spidey...plus "sloots", the great meme reset of 2026, and kermytherizzler

Halllooooo everyone! I am JAZZED for today’s newsletter. This is your sign to go get a Dunkin’ donut to enjoy while reading. Also, I’m chatting with advertising students at my alma mater the University of Texas today. Excited to share more about our convo. Hookem! If this newsletter got sent to you - subscribe below! If you’re already a subscriber, share with a few friends!

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🐝 Pollen [week of Nov 10]

Inspo to get your brain buzzin and make your brands break through.

• Sloots, aka slipper boots. 🤣 I really think I might have to buy these hahah

• A fun social format to try for literally any brand: “Your birth month is what you’re good at” and FWIW, I’m an August birthday and 100% a gold medal Olympian napper so it’s all true.

• Influencer someone should work with to do a tour of something (a store, an experience, your production facility): Liza Banks. She’s a tour guide at the Met and also a comedian and I love her vibe and content.

• Kermytherizzler has 1.4M followers and vids that make you say ??? Would be a fun account to collab with. This is a good ex of what one could look like.

• The best type of internet experiment - a brand should do this and let their fans write their next ad campaign

• I literally love OOH. Given I started my career in media planning I think this was just stamped on my heart from day 1. Loved the Bath & Body works scent takeover in NYC subways (New Yorkers - did this actually smell good tho??) and also Steph Curry shooting the moon billboard

• Loved this “shareability test” framework Rachel Karten and Hootsuite published together about how to make sure a post will make people want to share it (v timely for today’s newsletter!)

• Hduff is back and millennials are rejoicing. NGL, loved having a high school flashback jamming to Come Clean and watching Laguna Beach. Anyone else??

• Gen Alpha is orchestrating the great meme reset of 2026

• If anyone has been reading The Pollinatr for more than 2 seconds you’ll know that B2B is having a moment. One of the coolest startups in this space is Creator Match - a tech enabled agency behind many of the most talked about creator programs with Anthropic, Notion, Fiverr, Zapier, Teachable, Framer, beehiiv, and Gusto. Anddddd they are HIRING, specifically for Account Leads and Campaign Managers. Email hello@creatormatch.com if interested!

• Not marketing but these are THE best November cookies that I make every year: pumpkin spice cookies with cream cheese frosting. They’re practically muffins which means you can eat them for breakfast too!

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🕷️🍩 How Dunkin’s Spidey D won Halloween (and stole my heart)

There are few campaigns I’ve been AS obsessed with in the past year than Dunkin’s Spidey D Halloween campaign.

Doubling down on last year’s success? Genius. The rollout? Genius. The wild content? Genius. The merch items? Genius. The in-app experience? Genius.

Everything about it was not only absolutely hilarious but they kept upping the ante throughout the entire campaign with surprises around every corner. I haven’t shared that much content from an ad campaign to my personal IG account in literally ever because I truly thought it was THAT funny.

The campaign also completely killed it from a social metrics AND sales standpoint:

• Dunkin’ saw the biggest year of Spider donut sales ever

• The social content got more than double the shares YoY

• The Salem post was the most liked post ever on Dunkin’s IG

So naturally I was thrilled when Conor Mason, the co-founder of Cornelia Creative and Dunkin’s social agency responsible for the Spidey D campaign, agreed to chat. (Thank you MaryKate for the connect!)

This is a super fun one and is full of great insights for any marketers who want their brands to break through.

Our convo below covers:

• 🍩 The insight that brought Spidey D to life

• 💪🏼 How they strategically planned the rollout to be ubershareable

• 💥 The key learning that made this campaign successful

Michelle: Tell me about your background and your agency Cornelia Creative?

Conor: My most recent position before starting Cornelia was running digital for Bud Light creating campaigns like the Area 51 cans, hiring a Chief Meme Officer, and our Super Bowl efforts. I partnered with tons of internet creators, especially meme accounts, to fuel our success.

From there, I started Cornelia Creative five years ago with the initial mission of helping brands activate campaigns through meme accounts, as my partner and I saw a huge disconnect between brands making great campaigns but not translating them to how the internet consumes and shares content.

Since then, we have grown into a full-service social agency, helping brands run engaging social channels. We have built a nimble, social-first team that brings a creator-mindset to a brand account. Our team is made up of a unique blend of talent that includes meme creators, agency creatives, social media managers, and other brilliant social media minds!

Some of our current clients include Dunkin’, Sonic, Chomps, Lyft, Crocs, and more.

Michelle: Ok tell me, how did the Spidey D idea come about?!

The spider donut is not a new product for the Dunkin’ team, it has been around since around 2019. The Dunkin’ team gave us a brief to drive earned media and buzz around their holiday menu. They always have very cool products, which we sometimes collab with them on as well.

One of the insights the clients shared was that whenever they had posted about the spider donut on social, it always did really well.

So we looked at brands like Duolingo and Sour Patch kids for inspiration because they have seen a lot of success from giving an identity to their characters. So we thought it would be fun to give the spider donut a fun personality and character.

Dunkin’ was really excited and said let’s do it. This is where our team is so special - it wasn’t just about building a few assets, it was about building the holistic story and entire personality by changing the profile picture, the bio, the comments strategy, DMing brands, and all of the crazy content we made.

Michelle: What was your strategic approach going into this year given the success from last year?

Conor: We knew that people loved talking about Spidey last year and the content did really well. This year we wanted to give them things to talk about even more, which is why we did the IRL Salem activation and billboards and flyers in Penn station.

If you have something working, double down on it. The people wanted more content so we gave them more content! Instead of 1 asset per post, we created carousels with 5-6 assets, and we posted more times a day.

The Dunkin’ team gives us a lot of trust and turned feedback around really quickly, like when the Louvre heist happened, our post went up the next day.

[Michelle: I mean just LOOK at all of this content from their IG feed!!! 😍]

Dunkin’ IG feed

Michelle: Walk us through the rollout?

Conor: Because Spidey had become such a fan-favorite in 2024, we had a rare opportunity to build a storyline that fans would follow from start to finish.

We knew we wanted one big moment to be the catalyst for the whole campaign. This is how we landed on the Salem store takeover. It’s a place that creators love to go in October to make content, and more than that, it’s exactly the kind of place that Spidey would re-emerge. The clues and easter eggs we put into the store all had Spidey’s trademark personality, and fans immediately connected the dots and started to get excited for his return.

From there, we created anticipation by putting out billboards and flyers asking for information on Spidey, before ultimately giving him access to Dunkin’s socials.

After millions of likes and shares on his posts, the power eventually got to his head and he had to flex for his audience. Spidey gave out a million free coffees to all of his fans, which ultimately led to his demise.

Michelle: I see Spidey D extending into holiday potentially, is he going to be around for longer?!

Conor: He’s under lock and key at the moment, but you never know with Spidey...

Michelle: It seems like Dunkin’ went even bigger on their end outside of social with in-store and merch?

Conor: Yes! Based on the success of last year, they really did an incredible job going even bigger, releasing merch like the munchkin bucket and t-shirts, a Spidey D onesie costume, Spidey keychains, in-store signage, and more.

They even included Spidey’s personality in the app, which resulted in great TikToks from our audience like this one.

Michelle: How big is the team who works on Spidey D?

Conor: 15

Michelle: How much content did you all create??

Conor: We had almost 1,000 slides of content ideas that we went through with the Dunkin’ team.

Once we had approval from them we got to work. We started content creation in June to get the wheels rolling on the Salem activation and started to build content.

The key was developing a variety of content, like a 10 min video of “im baked”, content reacting to trends like the Louvre heist, 6 7, and Group 7, and just overall unhinged Halloween content. Spidey’s chaos didn’t need to make perfect sense all the time. [Michelle side note: The last slide of this post was my fav of all of them, so bizarro and hilarious. 🤣]

It was a big process of trial and error and finding the sweet spot. We ended up with 50 pieces of content to be the anchor content and built additional content as it went live. Our team made all of the assets.

Michelle: What did the approval process and turnaround times look like once the campaign had kicked off?

Conor: Once the Salem activation started, we had at least one meeting a day at 9 AM and sometimes at 1 PM as well where we’d prioritize the best posts for the day and float new ideas by the marketing team and legal.

Our teams were super collaborative together with the sole focus to make sure we were bringing the absolute best content. There’s definitely no perfect formula of how it gets done - it’s just really smart social people being very dedicated and diligent to figuring it out.

👀 Below the paywall you’ll get access to the juiciest part of our convo where Conor answers these questions:

1. How would you describe how Spidey shows up, and how did you prioritize ideas to make sure they were the most Spidey D?

2. Can you break down one of your favorite posts and why?

3. What was your biggest learning?

4. Can you share anything behind the scenes?

5. What advice do you have for brands that want to break through?

6. What is the most important metric you care about?

7. Your fav Dunkin’ order?!

Thank you so much for such an insightful and fun conversation Conor!!! If anyone is interested in working with Cornelia Creative (which at this point you totally should be), reach out to info@corneliacreative.com to request a pitch deck and set up a meeting, or feel free to connect with Conor on LinkedIn.