Our objective was to re-establish JanSport as the backpack of choice for a new generation.
JanSport, a beloved American brand that invented the modern backpack, needed to evolve from a brand that parents trusted to one kids couldn’t live without. Facing a market saturated with sports and outdoor brands, JanSport needed a creative approach that would break through and resonate with college-aged Gen Z audiences.
Gen Z craves authentic, relatable content. They reject over-produced traditional advertising, instead gravitating toward raw, vulnerable, and personal storytelling. With 67% of this audience favoring authentic over polished content and 78% more likely to share humorous ads, we aimed to tap into these preferences. Our campaign focused on the deeply personal and often mundane moments where backpacks, like JanSport, are silent witnesses to life’s messiest and quirkiest experiences.
The goal was to blend humor and music to create a highly relatable emotional connection with Gen Z, ultimately driving engagement, purchase intent, and brand relevance. Humor wasn’t just a creative layer—it was the campaign’s heartbeat, capturing Gen Z’s unserious, self-deprecating style. At the same time, music became a core storytelling device, with original songs that mirrored Gen Z’s love for offbeat, DIY-style content. Together, these elements transformed everyday backpack struggles into laugh-out-loud, hyper-relatable moments that felt native to digital culture.
To resonate with Gen Z, we made humor and music the beating heart of the Always With You campaign—specifically, their kind of humor: self-aware, unfiltered, and deeply relatable. Rather than relying on traditional advertising tropes, we leaned into Gen Z’s preference for absurdity, self-deprecation, and hyper-specific storytelling while using music as a storytelling vehicle to heighten emotional impact and drive shareability.
Gen Z humor thrives on two core elements:
We positioned JanSport not just as a backpack but as an unwitting sidekick to life’s most embarrassingly real moments. Whether it’s being trapped in a bathroom stall with a backpack too big for the space, stuffing your JanSport with emotional baggage after a breakup, or offering it as a peace offering to a disgruntled friend, each execution transformed everyday mishaps into laugh-out-loud storytelling.
Then, we structured the campaign around humor that felt native to TikTok and driven by music:
By combining humor’s relatable absurdity with music’s emotional resonance, the campaign created a unique blend of storytelling that felt unmistakably Gen Z. It wasn’t just about selling backpacks—it was about making JanSport a part of Gen Z’s world through the language they actually speak.
The Always With You campaign successfully repositioned JanSport as a cultural staple for Gen Z, leveraging humor, music, and TikTok’s unfiltered storytelling to drive engagement and brand relevance.
Within the first month, the campaign generated a 71% increase in purchase intent and a 385% year-over-year boost in engagement. TikTok became a core driver of success, with a 65% YoY spike in traffic and a 24% increase in engagement rates, making it JanSport’s top-performing social channel. By embracing humor and music as storytelling tools, JanSport resonated with Gen Z’s preference for unserious, relatable content, leading to a 28% lift in brand searches and a notable surge in organic user-generated content.
Beyond digital, the campaign translated to real-world impact. Two months after launch, JanSport recorded its highest-grossing day in 57 years, marking the brand’s first significant revenue growth in a decade. By rejecting traditional advertising tropes and meeting Gen Z on their terms—through humor, music, and native TikTok content—the campaign transformed JanSport from a nostalgic legacy brand into a must-have for a new generation.
