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The Lowdown is Ad Age’s weekly look at news nuggets from across the world of marketing, including trends, campaign tidbits, executive comings and goings and more.

Olive Garden is giving its Never Ending Pasta Pass quite a boost in its third year. Darden Restaurants Italian chain will put 21,000 of the $100 all-the-pasta-you-can-eat-in-seven-weeks passes on sale Thursday, up from 2,000 a year ago. The bump, it says, is in honor of the 21st anniversary of its Never Ending Pasta Bowl promotion. Plus, it handed some early ones out to brand fans to help spread the word. The $100 passes let patrons visit the restaurant for seven weeks of unlimited pasta and Coca-Cola soft drinks plus, as any visitor to Olive Garden knows, unlimited soup or salad and breadsticks.

Fashion Week keeps getting more non-fashion sponsors, including the Energizer Bunny. And Unilever has hopped harder onto the bandwagon too, bringing one of its food brands Magnum into the fold alongside Tresemme, which is in its 17th year as a sponsor. The two brands joined in Rebecca Minkoff’s Sept. 10 fashion show on the streets of Manhattan near her store and Magnum’s new store on Prince St., the latter serving as a backstage. The pairing “just makes sense,” said Alfie Vivian, VP-North American Refreshments at Unilever. “Tresemme and Magnum are lifestyle brands that have fashion in their DNA.” Indeed, Karl Lagerfeld made a 2011 commercial for Magnum. And Tresemme stays involved to bolster its credentials as the leading hair styling brand in the U.S. and foster the idea that women can achieve the same styles at home as women on the runways have, said Rob Candelino, VP-marketing and general manager-hair care of Unilever U.S. “You can’t make it more democratic than actually taking a runway onto a street in Manhattan,” he said.

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