TL;DR: Marketing trends will continue to shift A LOT this year...
Writing about 2024 marketing trends, I focused on the Big Five of trends, including Gen Z social media, UGC-style content, AI hype going down (I was wrong) and sustainability going up.
An important shift form the early 2020s is that marketing strategies, tactics, and channels have become increasingly differentiated among B2B v.s. B2C, virtual v.s. physical products.
Also, there’s a whole new space of AI marketing tools, the Everything Bagel Magic Powder to sprinkle on tasks that must become more efficient. Will we want to go on eating, daily, fast-delivery but low-quality dishes that all taste the same?
In 2025, I decided to do the annual fortune telling slightly differently...
As I failed to finalise my personal INs and OUTs list in time for the NYE (I got as far as hypocrisy: OUT and coconut: IN), I’m going to make up for this oversight in my business-realm predictions.
Opinionated as ever, here come my predictions for 2025 marketing trends in six categories.
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My experience being primarily in brand, marketing, and growth strategies for Seed and A-round tech companies, the forecasts are probably most relevant to the techy-unicorny world.
However, there will be food for thought (bagels!) for marketers/founders in all industries.
IN:
- More AI tools to automate more tasks & be more efficient. What’s done with the time saved with “efficiency” remains a mystery.
- More lame, inhuman, uncreative content flooding all social media feeds until, around 2027, the last human logs off their Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn accounts.
- A few actually useful AI tools that automate intern- and specialist-level tasks. Like AI-compiled media monitoring reports, AI-scraped + enriched lead lists.
OUT:
- Creativity + personality in advertising, social posts, sales pitches >> leading to worse results for marketing teams using AI tools.
- Manual reporting + spreadsheet’ing that leads to better understanding of what’s working and what isn’t.
- Engagement on social media and elsewhere. There is simply too much CONTENT.
Also IN:
- Ad creatives done with AI tools (the top Q4 2024 trend was UGC-style video ads) that perform worse than ads done by experienced graphic desigers.
- Democracy: more small brands able to launch digital ad campaigns without hiring an agency.
- AI-written marketing & sales emails that sound like your grandfather's been let loose behind keyboard: awkward.
- C-level people’s inboxes flooded by 10x more spammy sales & marketing emails >> leading to new AI-powered inbox curation tools get lots of VC interest.
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By the 2nd half of 2025, everyone is so tired of AI that we finally begin thinking with our own heads again.
Bad marketers will be unable to restore their creative brain cells. Good marketers get lots of job offers and/or a raise.
IN:
- All social channels: posts and videos that either a) entertain or b) teach something new and original get most engagement.
- Instagram & TikTok: More (big-)brand collaborations with celebrities + other big-name brands.
- Instagram & TikTok: Reels videos bring 90% or more of total reach. UGC-style videos continue to get highest engagement.
- Instagram & TikTok: Meme-style videos and images with brand insertions.
- LinkedIn: “Comment to get X” style posts get highest engagement. B2B creators give away even more valuable stuff. More people begin to give away free stuff until the entry level gets too high for most.
- LinkedIn: Even more C-level people building a personal brand. Errr, their marketing team building their personal brand >> more hiring for social media positions.
Big IN:
- Reddit! More of us resort to Reddit as the last humans-only social platform with trustworthy information.
OUT:
- All social channels: Easy growth for brands with unoriginal ideas/product that can’t hire a good social media marketer and/or agency.
- TikTok: Fatigue on both consumer + marketing team level >> fewer collaborations with TikTok content creators.
- Instagram: Brand accounts with mediocre content stop getting any engagement on their feed posts. It’s a MUST to do creative & fun Stories + Reels.
- LinkedIn: Video posts are out. We’re finally ready to admit the algos don’t love them.
- LinkedIn: Carousel posts that were bread-and-butter in 2024 get low engagement.
- LinkedIn: Personal-story style posts with overflowing fake emotionality. "I had tears in my eyes when reading your comments." Please, get a grip on yourself and/or book a therapist consultation.
IN:
- Anti-AI brand storytelling. "There is no AI" inside our product becoming a relevant value proposition to large customer segments.
- Brands with original—borderline insane—storytelling. Think Liquid Death and IKEA. Big props Bolt's brand team who boarded the train already in late 2023.
- AI-powered (visual) brand generation. Unsure yet if this is a good or a bad thing. Certainly, we’ll end up with more of the same and boring. But more brands can launch faster.
- Big-name brand collaborations with movies, celebrities, other big-name brands. Developed as multi-million advertising campaigns, both online and offline.
- B2B influencer marketing. LinkedIn Content Creator is now a valid (and lucrative) job title.
OUT:
- AI-led brand storytelling. Guess what... Not everyone wants AI algorithms to choose what they eat, listen, watch.
- B2C influencer marketing. The ROI just doesn't justify it, and people don't engage with obviously sponsored content.
- Great product being enough to win new users' attention & love. In the overcrowded, all products need an engaging brand narrative and strategy to get it before people's eyes.
- Especially in B2B software: Best products no longer take over competitors' clients. The first movers will lock in most users as it's too time- and energy-consuming to change tools/things for just another 10% improvement.
A very sad OUT:
- Sustainability and CSR. We tried, people didn’t care, we were the people.
- Greenwashing is finally out. Everyone's tired of being treated like an idiot by brands saying their product is sustainable because it's packaged in recyclable cardboard box.
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In 2025, we're finally admitting our hypocrisy as consumers: "green" equals not buying. But instead of not buying, we'll simply stop talking about fake sustainability nonsense.
On the bright side, second-hand and vintage apps + platforms will continue to thrive. It's cheaper, more original, and delivered to your doorstep. And (!) things produced before Y2K (2000) have 10x superior quality v.s. current Big Retail output (same goes for luxury brands).
IN:
- PR and publicity continues to be a high-ROI marketing investment. In case you have something interesting—or crazy—to say.
- Medium-size brands (in addition to household name brands) shifting to soft storytelling and brand campaigns v.s. performance marketing.
- Advertisements (online + offline) with huge IN YOUR FACE TEXT blocks on single-colour backgrounds as our collective attention span deteriorates further to invertebrate level.
- Google Ads continue to outperform other digital ad channels.
- More marketers launching Reddit ads, now that there’s a bigger audience on the platform >> buy Reddit stock NOW?
OUT:
- Digital advertising on Meta + TikTok keeps getting more expensive and less efficient. >> But is there a better option, especially for small brands? Organic social + top-quality content + cold sales seem like top contenders.
- Static ad creatives with clear messaging still outperform most video ads.
- As in any other year, advertisements with ultra-creative copywriting and design that perform worse than ads saying “get 20% your first order”—or better yet, ads saying “SALE.” Will creative teams and ad agencies ever learn?
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​High-level OUT:
- Money. At times of shaky economy, companies will cut spending in all areas, and marketing is one of the first to take the hit. We'll probably see more layoffs (specialist-level people replaced with AI) and advertising budget cuts.
- Growth. The cost-cutting festival will also mean slower growth for most companies. Especially as market is reluctant to spend.
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Not to lose faith! Many successful companies were launched during recession. And it's because of low competition, lower advertising costs, access to talent that they could expand so fast. Think Uber, Airbnb, Slack, Pinterest, Instagram in 2008.
IN:
- Small brands using AI tools like Canva for marketing creatives and wondering why their marketing isn’t working.
- AI-generated photos and CGI animations that are, in fact, an improvement from stock photos & videos.
- Many cool aesthetic trends, from 3D to Y2K retro style to frosted-glass effects >> innovation won't stop but is affordable to well-funded brands mostly.
- Template-based websites for small and just-launched brands that look better than what average branding agencies produce. Premium-level $100 templates on Squarespace, WordPress, WebFlow have gotten good.
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OUT:
- AI design tools will eventually lose users as they fail to deliver high-quality creatives.
- Social media experts & paid social marketers who can’t use Figma. Hate to break this to you but Canva templates are just not good enough. They never were.
- Collaborating with large we-do-it-all agencies >> shift towards boutique agencies & freelance experts to work with high-level experts v.s. have juniors on your campaigns.
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As I observed in a LinkedIn post, it was sad to see Adobe's annual design trends report shift from cool stuff to AI stuff this year. For aesthetic inspiration in 2025, I recommend these two reports on Behance. One. Two.
IN:
- Newsletters! Brands launching their own Substacks or other-platform newsletters that are so good they compete with media publications.
- B2B brands publishing less but higher-quality content. Think extensive guides, free courses, trend reports v.s. 800-word blog articles.
- B2C brands launch their own media publications, either news-style or video platforms that compete with big media companies vis Ă vis quality and audience numbers. See
- Marketers using AI tools for content writing. Hate, no, happy to break this to you: no AI tool can write text 100% as good as one written by an experienced writer.
- BUT good writers can use ChatGPT (you really need no other tools) to accelerate their research + writing process.
All my predictions here are AI-free. I wasn’t even tempted to ask ChatGPT “what are the marketing trends in 2025?” It would simply scrape other blog articles, mostly by junior marketers. Would you really want to read those?
OUT:
- For most brands, publishing a blog for SEO purposes is passé. AI-powered search results kill lots of organic traffic, content marketing becomes more technical and complicated.
- People coming to your blog directly. Nope, you’ll have to work hard on marketing any piece of content to attract people to it: social media, newsletter, paid ads.
- Podcasts as marketing strategy is finally out. There are too many good established ones competing for the time we all save thanks to AI tools—and that we spend watching Netflix or YouTube…
Personal IN:
- Whenever googling stuff like “best toaster” or “best recipe for x” adding the word “Reddit” to the end of my query and trusting people in Reddit forums to get honest, human, useful information.
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Merci!
Thanks to all friends who thought along to this trends report. Curious to see which predictions will manifest in 2025.
And, as always, happy to discuss further as your reply to this email or DM me on LinkedIn.
Quick marketing-life update: I'm in a post-holiday bliss era of inspiration, loaded with ideas for next newsletters, as well as working on two big personal projects. You'll hear about in the coming weeks. I am currently only accepting marketing audit request.
Have a good one, and stay clear of AI!
Thanks for reading!
Karola