Starbucks leans into “Pumpkin Spice Latte” nostalgia with Martha Stewart in a fresh social ad campaign

Starbucks is indicating the return of its seasonal Pumpkin Spice Latte (PSL) with a set of new social media advertisements that lean into pop-culture familiarity and mild mockery. The campaign centers on a deliberately self-aware question: whether the PSL is “basic,” a framing that turns a recurring fall ritual into something closer to a shared joke than a hard sell.

In the ads, Martha Stewart appears in a role that nods to her own public image as a tastemaker, offering an answer that treats the PSL debate as a matter of attitude rather than ingredients. The creative also features Belmont Cameli, an actor from the Netflix series “Off Campus,” extending the campaign’s strategy of mixing consumer brands with recognizable faces from entertainment.

The “basic” angle matters because it captures a recurring tension in seasonal retail marketing. The PSL is widely treated as a must-have autumn product, but Starbucks and its competitors have also faced the challenge of keeping a familiar item feeling current as customer attention fragments across platforms.

By using Stewart, Starbucks taps a demographic cross-over between food and lifestyle audiences and mainstream retail shoppers. Stewart’s brand is closely tied to home cooking, hosting, and seasonal presentation, which aligns with how many consumers think about PSL time as a mood, not only a beverage. Meanwhile, the inclusion of a younger entertainment figure reflects how Starbucks is distributing its marketing emphasis through short-form social content and creator-adjacent casting rather than traditional ads alone.

Social campaigns like this also fit Starbucks’ broader seasonal playbook, where the company typically treats autumn items as both a product launch and a kind of cultural marker. When a menu item has become expected, the company often needs to differentiate the “why now” beyond simple availability announcements. The Stewart framing suggests the differentiation is emotional positioning, not just product promotion.

Starbucks did not publicly outline in the cited report any technical changes to the PSL itself, such as formulation, sourcing, or pricing. The reporting focuses on the marketing concept and the participating personalities, rather than on product engineering or supply details.

What Starbucks does disclose through this kind of campaign is the tone it wants to associate with the PSL season: comfortable, lightly playful, and ready for debate. The “basic” prompt is a low-stakes engagement hook, designed to invite comments and shares rather than to persuade through product claims. That approach can be especially effective for beverages that people already know well.

With the campaign tied to the PSL return, the next question for investors and competitors is how far Starbucks’ social-first creative translates into measurable demand. The company did not provide, in the cited write-up, any campaign-level metrics or performance targets. Traders and analysts will likely look instead to broader seasonal sales commentary from Starbucks and to whether social engagement appears to translate into higher store traffic during the autumn period.