At Brandweek the co-founder set marketers a $20,000 guerrilla brief to pressure The Magnum Ice Cream Company into selling. The prize is ice cream for life.
Ben Cohen has set the advertising industry a brief, and the client is his own former company. Speaking at Adweek’s Brandweek conference in Atlanta on 16 September, the Ben & Jerry’s co-founder asked marketers to devise a guerrilla campaign to help free Ben & Jerry’s from its owner, The Magnum Ice Cream Company.
The ask is a “low-cost, quick, and easy-to-execute guerrilla marketing campaign” that increases the pressure on Magnum to sell. The format is open, from a live stunt to a social campaign, but it has to happen in the United States or in Amsterdam, where Magnum is based. The budget ceiling is $20,000, with a note that cheaper is better, and entries close on 7 October. The prize is free ice cream for life, payable only if the company wins its independence, Adweek reported.
Cohen and Jerry Greenfield started the business in a converted petrol station in Vermont in 1978 and sold it to Unilever in 2000. The deal was unusual: an independent board kept legal authority over the social mission, the product, the marketing and the trade mark, while Unilever ran the money. When Unilever spun off its ice cream division in late 2025, the brand passed to Magnum.
The relationship had already soured. Ben & Jerry’s sued Unilever, claiming it had been silenced over Gaza. After the spin-off Magnum replaced chief executive Dave Stever with one of its own executives, Greenfield resigned, and Cohen launched the Free Ben & Jerry’s campaign, which has gathered around 200,000 petition signatures. Magnum maintains the brand is not for sale.
Cohen’s line from the stage was that Magnum likes the golden eggs but is “in the process of destroying the goose”.
This is the purpose debate with the theory removed. Ben & Jerry’s is the most cited example of a brand whose activism is the product, and the question now in front of a court and a conference hall is who owns that: the people who built it or the company that bought it. Every marketer who has written “brand purpose” on a slide has a stake in the answer, and it sits awkwardly beside the consolidation described in our guide to who owns whom in advertising.
It is also a properly good brief. A tiny budget, a named villain, a clear objective and a deadline is more direction than most agencies get in a year, and the constraint is the point. The most effective protest advertising has rarely been expensive, as Comic Relief’s deadpan campaign showed this month. Expect the entries to be better than the average pitch.
He plans, buys and reviews advertising for a living, and helps score campaigns on the site against the same five Crown Score criteria alongside other authors and contributors.
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