Marketers’ marketing moments of 2025

Duolingo kills its mascot

February feels like a lifetime ago in 2025 time. But cast your mind back to when Duolingo announced its owl mascot Duo was dead. Hit by a Cybertruck. Murdered. RIP.

What followed was gloriously unhinged. Funeral videos. Conspiracy theories. Dua Lipa tweeting “Til’ death duo part”. None of it paid for. Then a resurrection website where users could “bring Duo back” by completing lessons leading to 50 billion XP earned in two weeks, 1.7 billion impressions and twice the social conversation of any Super Bowl ad.

We all talk about social-first campaigns. But Duolingo didn’t bolt social onto their marketing – they built their entire brand there. Years of distinctive personality gave them permission to fake-kill their mascot and have the internet genuinely mourn.

You can’t just decide to be “unhinged” one Tuesday. It only works when you’ve earned it.

Helen James, Marketing Week columnist and CEO of The Gate London

Marketing putting talent first

The success of our industry is dependent on us building a pipeline of great marketing talent. Dr Grace Kite shared earlier this year that fewer than one in four marketers have any formal marketing training, holding up a mirror to our industry’s lack of focus on our most valuable commodity. Surely investing in the development of our talent should be at the forefront of all our agendas?

At Specsavers, we’ve invested heavily in building our own marketing academy, with a curriculum that ranges from foundational brand building to omnichannel personalisation. A personal highlight for me was attending the pitch days that all 500 marketing colleagues took part in, sharing smart business ideas born out of the new skills they had acquired through the academy.

The curiosity, adaptability and creativity on show gave me great optimism, not just for our team here at Specsavers, but for what the marketing industry as a whole can achieve if it chooses a talent-first approach to investment.

Peter Wright, CMO, Specsavers

Creativity alongside efficiency

Rory Sutherland’s advice to ‘be wary of the pursuit of efficiency’ is something he’s often repeated over the years, but is never more timely for 2025.

Marketing is drowning in optimisation, nostalgia, and AI, which are all built on what worked yesterday. The problem with this is that efficiency kills surprise, and the things we may not know yet. Algorithms reward predictability, not originality.

This is something the charity sector often kicks itself for – not being data-led enough – usually due to a lack of resource to fund the tech which enables better insights to inform its marketing. However, it doesn’t focus on its strengths enough in regard to being super creative in its marketing to create effectiveness beyond its budgets and resources.

If we keep chasing the past, we’ll lose the creativity that makes people care, so it’s vital we have the right balance. Leaving room for creativity and discovering the unexpected.

Warren Fiveash, head of marketing, Teenage Cancer Trust

Ikea launches on Oxford Street

On 1 May, the new Ikea store opened on London’s Oxford Street. ‘Big store opens on premier shopping street’ might not normally be considered a startling marketing headline, but this was, for two reasons.

First, it reversed the direction of retail travel in times where traders are beleaguered by high rents, high employment costs and online competition. Ikea had the courage to move in when others were moving out.

But more significantly, it slammed into reverse the logic of Ikea’s own successful business model. Those low prices always came with a drive out to a big shack on the ring road. Now people could view, try, choose and buy well-designed furniture closer to where they live and work, bang in the centre of town. An upgraded delivery service would get any bigger items home.

Reversing your own business model is a courageous step. Ikea has again shown the kind of fluidity and resourcefulness that make it one of our great brands.

Helen Edwards, Marketing Week columnist and branding consultant

ChatGPT and its debut brand campaign

A marketing standout for me this year was ChatGPT’s debut brand campaign. Its cinematic short films were a powerful reminder of what’s possible when technology lifts human creativity up instead of overshadowing it. It put imagination, craft and genuine emotion back at the heart of the narrative and showed that tech can actually bring us closer.

It’s a philosophy we truly embrace at Snapchat, where we fuel relationships and friendship through our technology. We empower people to express themselves, get creative with conversation through Chat, and make the little life moments more fun.

The truth for marketers is simple: people are craving real moments more than ever. It’s on us to tell those stories and to champion how tech-enabled experiences can build communities and spark deeper human connection.

Kate Bird, senior director, EMEA marketing, Snapchat

A bright future for marketing

2025 marked a new low in the perception of marketing as an important business discipline. Agentic AI reinforced the ‘tactification’ of marketing begun by digital, accelerated by programmatic, and reinforced by performance marketing. In this gloomy context, my leftfield choice as candidate for best marketing development of 2025 is the publication of ‘What Strategy is’ by Clayton Williams.

The reason? The book provides a clear framework for describing the essential and strategic contribution of marketing to business success. By describing business in a quantum terms (lots of uncertainty, entropy and non-linearity), the book positions leadership as a creative discipline of finding the best fit between the capabilities of a business and the “dancing landscapes” in which it competes.

This is not a task for algorithms. It requires system thinking, pattern recognition, synthesis, meaning making, imagination and adaptation. There is a bright future for marketing.

Jonathan Knowles, Marketing Week columnist and founder of Type 2 Consulting

Brands inviting conversations

A defining marketing trend of 2025 has been the shift from ‘brand presence’ to ‘brand participation’. Consumers no longer reward brands for simply showing up – they expect them to engage meaningfully, contribute to cultural conversations, and act with clarity and purpose. The most successful campaigns of the year weren’t polished, slow moving productions; they were agile, socially attuned and built from real time insight.

Another major shift was the rise of cross-disciplinary collaboration. The brands gaining market share weren’t the ones with biggest teams, but the ones where marketing, digital, creative, retail and data functions operated as one cohesive team. This ability to integrate thinking and execution has quickly become a competitive advantage.

As we look ahead, the real opportunity lies in brands that can stay culturally fluent, move at pace, and empower teams to work fluidly across channels, markets and disciplines.

Ancella Thomas-Evans, former international marketing director, Elf Beauty

Cadbury’s emotional storytelling

One of the standout campaigns for me this year was Cadbury’s Memory advert from its ‘Generosity’ series – part of the ‘There’s a Glass and a Half in Everyone’ campaign.

It is a beautiful reminder of how a big brand idea, grounded in a clear and powerful brand truth, can evolve while retaining its emotional core. The ad’s quiet storytelling is centred on the power of small, thoughtful gestures that tap into universal family bonds, reflecting the kind of human insight that makes marketing so exciting to me.

Getting under the skin of real behaviours and cultural truths, and translating them into work that genuinely resonates, is where the magic happens. At a time when marketers often push for scale and volume, this ad reminds us that the smallest acts often create the most lasting memories.

Munnawar Chishty, CMO, Carlsberg Britvic

The Omnicom-IPG merger

The tectonic plates are shifting in adland. The AI space race is the major driver. The holdcos are creaking into action in the only way they know how, promising efficiency through scale. But this won’t give clients what they really need – tight teams of smart people using creativity and the right technology to build their brands.

And it will be adland’s people who suffer. I’ve worked for Publicis agencies twice and Omnicom agencies twice. What made them great was their people, not the global networks they were connected to, or the bureaucracy that scale always brings.

The silver lining will be the many brilliant, small, new things people build once they’re freed from the restrictions of the holdco model. With DDB now gone, perhaps we should read Bernbach’s famous VW ad as advice to the thousands of people now figuring out their next move: Think Small.

Tom Roach, Marketing Week columnist and vice-president of brand strategy, Jellyfish