Our favourite challenger campaigns this year

Challengers have to outthink, outwit and out-manoeuvre the competition. They’re often cutting through cluttered categories where they might belong, or might have no business showing up at all. All the more reason for the established brands to get royally p*ssed off.

So who’s doing this noise-cutting like an art form? From scrappy challengers who’ve been around longer than a minute but still move like the underdog, to fresh-out-the-box start-ups, here are our favourite challenger campaigns of the year.

The shortlist:

Monzo ‘Gets busy living’
Sour Patch Kids beef with Oreo. Crumbs will fly before it’s over
Jaecoo 7 becomes the ‘Temu Range Rover’ Britain stopped minding
The clothing reseller that rebranded the back of the wardrobe
A squirrel that doesn’t quit – Pip & Nut spreads into telly
From counting steps to knowing Ronaldo’s biological age: What fitness tracker WHOOP makes possible

We also ask the awkward question: what even counts as a challenger? Monzo has 15 million customers, and Sour Patch Kids share a parent with the biscuit they’re picking a fight with…

‘When your money is behaving itself, you don’t have to’ says Monzo

Monzo’s ‘Get busy living’ launched on 27 July as the bank’s first global brand platform and its biggest integrated campaign to date. It’s ten single-shot films, directed by Daniel Wolfe and narrated by Olivia Colman, each following a small, ordinary moment. A couple slink home after a date, a group of boys head off on a school trip and a dad dances in the living room with his daughter after bathtime. Monzo sits quietly in the corner of the screen, while features like Salary Sorter, Joint Accounts and Monzo for Under 16s take care of the money in the background. Colman delivers the line that pulls it together: “When your money’s in the right place, you can be too.”

Image: Monzo/Get Busy Living

A brand platform is a single idea a brand can hang everything on, in every market, for years. This is the first time Monzo has had one.

What we like most is how specific it is. Each film picks one person in one moment you wouldn’t usually link to ‘big banking’ and pairs them with a product: a teenager under 16 trusted with money for a school trip, a young couple on a night out whose joint kindly account picks up the bill, a dad who gets paid so he can look after his daughter. The platform is broad but each scene is narrow, and the soundtrack is songs everyone knows (Teenage Dirtbag, Baba O’Riley, Days Like This). It also landed big, with takeovers of Piccadilly Lights and Waterloo Motion.

The StrategiQ takeaway: Is Monzo starting to behave less like a performance-led brand and more like an emotional one? The signs say yes. It has its first global platform, a celebrity voice, landmark outdoor and its first sonic identity, and with 15 million customers it’s no longer playing the gritted-teeth upstart. But it was never short on personality (see its 1p Coventry City kit stunt earlier this year). What’s new is that the product stops being the hero. Staying in the corner of the frame is a confident move for a bank: it says we’ll handle the admin, you get on with the good bit. That kind of emotional territory is what keeps a challenger chosen once it’s no longer the new thing.

Sour Patch Kids pick a fight with Oreo (their Mondelēz family rivals)

For their first integrated UK campaign, Sour Patch Kids did something bold for a newcomer: they went after one of the best-known biscuits on the shelf. ‘Not As Sweet As They Look’ includes four special-build sites in London and Bristol where the sweets appear to rip down a neighbouring Oreo poster, taking a TikTok and Instagram rivalry onto the street.

Image: Mondelēz/Sour Patch Kids vs. Oreo

Elsewhere, a tug of war tears one character in half and a game of tennis turns aggressive. It runs through September and October, aimed at Gen Z and millennials.

The twist is that both brands are part of the Mondelēz family, so the feud is friendly (to a degree). The sweets’ brand manager says there’s always “a sour little surprise” with Sour Patch Kids, and this one has Oreo’s name on it.

The StrategiQ takeaway: Sour Patch Kids are the new name in UK advertising, so they are taking aim at one of the UK’s better-known biscuits (Oreo launched in 1912). It works because the rivalry was built in comment sections for years, so the billboards didn’t spring up out of nowhere. It’s not about having a serious enemy, it’s a personality play, and Sour Patch Kids have shown what they are made of.

Jaecoo 7: the ‘Temu Range Rover’ Britain stopped minding

Jaecoo launched in the UK in January 2025. In September 2026, the Jaecoo 7 was Britain’s best-selling new car for the second time this year, with 10,813 registrations, ahead of the Tesla Model 3 and the Ford Puma. The Puma still leads year to date, but the gap is closing.

Image: Jaecoo 7/Yahoo Images

The secret is hiding in plain sight. The Chery-built SUV has the boxy styling and grille that invite constant Range Rover comparisons (the Evoque and Velar are the usual ones), a long list of standard kit and a price from about £30,000. Social media supplied the name: the ‘Temu Range Rover’ and Jaecoo doesn’t seem to be fighting it. One senior Jaecoo Australia executive said he was “flattered” by the comparison.

It isn’t a Range Rover, of course, and the reviews are clear-eyed about that. One test found the petrol engine adequate rather than quick, and the real rivals are the Kia Sportage, Toyota RAV4 and Honda CR-V. So the marketing challenge was never to prove it was one. It was to get people not to care that it isn’t. Buyers talk about the looks, the kit and the cost, and lease deals are widely cited as a big reason for its popularity.

The StrategiQ takeaway: Jaecoo let the natural comparison do the talking, then made the maths easy: a similar look, a loaded spec and a far lower monthly cost. A nickname that could have been an insult became free advertising, and Jaecoo seems happy to ride the wave. The bigger question is whether this challenger is here to stay or a look people want for now. It topped the two biggest registration months, March and September, and much of its appeal is value: a lot of car for the money. Finance deals may tighten and prices may creep up, but it’s very unlikely to ever cost anything like a new Range Rover, so that value gap will hold. With Chinese brands at around 23% of UK new car sales in September, the test is what happens once the novelty fades.

Vinted turns clearing out your wardrobe into a TV series

How many of us have tags-still-on garments taking up space at home? Or things we’ve worn once. Vinted took note.

The reselling platform was founded in Vilnius in 2008 and launched in the UK in 2014. It now has around 17 million UK users, and in January 2026 it launched in the US, its first market outside Europe.

Image: Vinted/Netmums

It’s also not leaving us to decide when it’s time for a clear out. Vinted calls the first Sunday of January ‘Sell-It Sunday’, an unofficial national holiday for decluttering after Christmas. Its own research backs up the habit: 51% of Brits estimate they have more than £400 worth of unused items at home, and 16% think it’s over £1,000.

Now Vinted has turned the same idea into telly. Live Better for Less launched in September as a branded entertainment series across seven countries, each with its own host. Motsi Mabuse fronts the UK version, on Prime Video. Each 24-minute episode follows households with too much clutter, tight budgets and goals that feel out of reach, as the host helps them find things to sell or reuse.

Image: Vinted/Live Better For Less

The StrategiQ takeaway: 24 minutes of your time… dedicated to someone else’s clutter. Really? Then again, it’s not as daft as it sounds. The UK has a history with How Clean Is Your House? and anything else involving a poke around someone else’s pad, so the core concept is already well-trodden ground. What will be interesting is whether this embeds Vinted further into today’s ‘normal’ behaviour, taking it from household name to household habit. Sell-It Sunday gives people a date to act on, and Live Better for Less gives them a reason to want to. Further, Vinted’s opponent isn’t just another app, it’s new clothes, and that’s quite an ethical stance for a brand to take no matter how big it gets.

Cyril doesn’t stop – and neither do Pip & Nut

The nut butter vendor goes from market stall to TV screens this year.

Pip & Nut started small. Pip Murray began making palm-oil-free nut butter at home in 2013 and sold jars at Maltby Street Market in London before launching in retail in January 2015. More flavours followed (its Coconut Almond Butter won a Grocer new product award), along with squeezy packs, nut butter cups and, more recently, snack bars. By 2025 it was reported as the UK’s number one nut butter brand, on track for over £35 million in retail sales.

Now it’s spreading onto screens. This September, ‘Obsession Spreads’ runs on Sky, Channel 4 and ITV, alongside a London Underground takeover from 7 September. The idea is deliberately simple: a squirrel with one thing on his mind, getting to a Pip & Nut jar.

Image: Pip & Nut

The ad scored a 5.9 ‘Exceptional’ System1 star rating, putting it in the top 1% of TV ads. It’s part of a £3.5m marketing spend for 2026, the brand’s biggest ever annual investment in above-the-line media, expected to reach an estimated 63% of UK adults.

The squirrel also finally has a name! After years of fans asking, Pip & Nut let its community pick from three names in a public vote, with thousands of votes and comments. The winner, Cyril, was unveiled at a naming ceremony among the trees near its London office. As the marketing director put it, if the community cares enough to name him, the brand should “give them the final say”.

Image: Pip & Nut

The StrategiQ takeaway: Pip & Nut has one idea (obsession), one distinctive character and a product people rave about, and it has taken all three from market stall to shelf to Underground to telly without changing the plot. Letting fans name the mascot is cheap, joyful and makes them feel like part of the family. We have to question: is a number one brand still a challenger? Maybe not on market share, but the relentless mindset and how Pip & Nut came up still very much is.

WHOOP: from the runner’s wrist to your whole health story

It wasn’t long ago that fitness trackers were mostly for runners, and before that they were pedometers. The first consumer one, Japan’s Manpo-kei in 1965, gave us the 10,000 steps a day target, even if that was essentially a made-up number. WHOOP started out serving elite athletes. As its CMO has said, it began as a B2B business selling to professional sports teams, then added cyclists, triathletes and CrossFitters. 2026 showed its reach widening further.

In July, ‘In the Blood’ launched during the World Cup. The campaign followed Cristiano Ronaldo from the streets of Madeira to football’s biggest stage, and revealed his WHOOP Age as 29 (he’s 41). The message: there’s “no limit to how far you can take your body”. The focus has shifted from pure performance to longevity.

Image: WHOOP/Ronaldo

Earlier in the year, Carlos Alcaraz, Jannik Sinner and Aryna Sabalenka were told to remove their WHOOP bands at the Australian Open. WHOOP’s CEO replied, “Data is not steroids!”, and the company fired back by shipping sensor-embedded WHOOP Body apparel, including boxers and bras, to the players, so they could wear it in matches. A rules row became a global debate about an athlete’s right to their own health data.

The technology has also edged its way into period-app territory. WHOOP now tracks menstrual cycles, launched a women’s health blood panel in March and, in August, connected with Natural Cycles for fertility and birth control tracking. WHOOP says women are a growing share of its new members, with 150% year-on-year growth.

The StrategiQ takeaway: The same wearable now works for the marathon runner and for someone who has never owned a pair of trainers, and that accessibility is the point. In 60 years we’ve gone from counting steps to knowing Ronaldo’s biological age. But nobody wears a pedometer now. The device that defines a category rarely outlives it. Sensing is already moving into rings, watches and clothing, and WHOOP’s own Body apparel at the Australian Open hints that the band alone isn’t the point. For a brand spreading across sport, longevity and women’s health, the challenge is to keep up with where the tech goes next.

Sources

What Counts as a Challenger? Six Brands Cutting Through the Noise