7 Top-Performing Advertising Creative Trends for 2025
Published Jan 9
Stand out in 2025’s digital marketplace by capitalizing on game-changing advertising trends, as told by Superside's Executive Creative Director Anneke King. Cut through the noise and impact of tomorrow’s digital landscape by launching everything from standout AI-generated video to hyper-targeted social campaigns.
Welcome to the attention economy, where the average American spends around eight hours daily immersed in digital media. As social media platforms and artificial intelligence (AI) evolve, audiences’ appetite for engaging content keeps growing—and they expect more from the brands trying to reach them.
Standout creative advertising has become essential for business success. Brands need advertising that captures attention and drives real results, powered by AI and creative performance capabilities that enable personalization at scale.
Leading companies are already seeing impressive results by following this approach:
- Superside helped PointCard achieve 3.5X higher click-through rates through careful testing of social ads.
- Our creatives leveraged AI to produce 4,000+ native social ads for Shopify.
- For Marqeta, we demonstrated the speed of modern advertising by scaling 3D out-of-home ad campaigns in just five days.
We turn to Anneke King, Superside's Executive Creative Director, for expert insights on the advertising trends to watch and how to navigate this rapidly evolving landscape.
The Future of Advertising Creative in 2025
Digital advertising is exploding, with the market expected to grow by $651.2 billion between 2023 and 2028. Thanks to the increasing use of mobile devices, mobile advertising dominates this landscape, claiming 73% of total ad spend in the United States.
In 2024, companies invested over $76 billion in social media advertising, showing how important social platforms have become for reaching customers.
And in an era where disruption is the status quo, brands find it increasingly hard to keep up and grab attention.
It’s a tough ask: Today’s ad creative needs to engage audiences personally across various platforms and guide customers smoothly through their buying journey.
However, multiple brands across industries are now using AI to scale and personalize their ad creative. With the market value of artificial intelligence expected to hit $190 billion in 2025, more enterprises and agencies will learn how to put the rapidly advancing technology to good use.
AI-savvy marketers are already reaping the benefits: 85% of marketers report improved content quality with AI, while 84% note increased efficiency in content creation (even if the final edits are human!). AI enhances brands’ marketing efforts by:
- Personalizing campaigns;
- Predicting customer behavior;
- Automating campaign management;
- Helping teams create standout ad creative faster;
- Analyzing ad spend;
- And much more.
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From crafting engaging social media posts, optimizing email campaigns and tracking creative performance in real-time, the latest AI tools are revolutionizing the advertising industry and how brands connect with their audiences and differentiate themselves. These standout creative performance examples demonstrate what’s possible in 2025.
But AI is just one part of the story. Several other important advertising trends are emerging, including:
- Brands adopting unhinged ‘brain rot’ digital culture
- Accelerated AI adoption & impact for multiple ad creative variations
- Incorporating influencers into multichannel campaigns
- Design quality dominance
- Top-tier ad storytelling
- Optimized content for AI chatbots
- Video content supremacy
Let's dive into these trends.
7 Advertising Trends for 2025
Today’s top creative agencies help customers navigate the exciting new world of advertising in the age of artificial intelligence. Whether searching for a partner to produce your digital ads or social media content campaigns, the right team of experts and tools can help you tap into the latest advertising trends to reach your goals.
Don’t risk falling behind your competitors or wasting your advertising dollars. Brush up on 2025’s top ad trends:
1. Brands adopt unhinged ‘brain rot’ digital culture
Source: KFC's TikTok
This year, niche and absurd obsessions have stolen the spotlight. Chronically online humor isn’t just a passing trend—it’s the way Gen Z and Gen Alpha communicate, create and expect brands to engage with them.
Spend time on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, and you’ll notice that humor dominates the content. Many brands now embrace “unhinged marketing” a style that uses absurd humor to grab customers’ attention.
“It’s a trend that’s bleeding beyond the walls of TikTok. Given the speed viral trends take off—and the ease of using Generative AI to create absurd content—’brain rot’ or ‘unhinged’ humor is present in our digital spaces and branded work.” — Jessica Luch for ADAge
This approach started on TikTok and has spread across other social platforms. It strongly appeals to younger audiences, particularly those in the Gen Z and Gen Alpha categories.
The rules? Be weird, be unhinged or be ignored.
Take Duolingo’s iconic brand owl, for instance. What began as a viral X meme, mocking the app’s aggressive push notifications has transformed into a social media star. The mischievous owl attends raves, gets arrested and threatens users to keep taking their Spanish lessons.
What’s genius is how Duolingo leaned into this fan-created absurdity. They turned the owl into a character for their campaigns, connecting with multiple generations and driving downloads. Evil Duolingo didn’t just demand you “Spanish or Vanish”, it became a pop culture moment.
Carefully crafted, polished marketing messages no longer work as well as they used to. Brands must speak the same language as their audiences—even if this means being ridiculous.
Nutter Butter's TikTok takes this further, offering downright nutty content. Their late-night chaos feels tailormade for viewers stuck in a 3 a.m. content loop. Sometimes, to meet your audience where they are, you’ve got to crawl down the rabbit hole with them.
The Paralympics have been doing this long before unhinged marketing was coined.
Historically overshadowed, the International Paralympics Committee (IPC) partnered with TikTok to create viral videos blending incredible athletic performances with trending sounds and edits, a combination of poking-fun-at-themselves combined with awe-inspiring moments.
So, what’s the secret to unhinged marketing success? Know your audience inside and out. Your humor should feel authentic and hit on experiences your audiences relate to. Keep a close watch on trends, collaborate with influencers who understand your brand’s vibe and don’t be afraid to get a little strange.
If you’re ready to explore this creative approach, choosing the right design partner is critical. Could Superside be the ideal match?
At Superside, we dive deep into your brand to truly understand your audience, competitors and content goals. Our teams specialize in turning that knowledge into high-quality, relatable content that resonates. It's all about creating content that feels personal, relevant and impossible to ignore.
Our team has delivered over 20,000 successful social media marketing projects. Their expertise can also help you develop the right blend of humor and authenticity to tap into this key trend and maximize your ad spend.
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2. Accelerated AI adoption and impact: The AI-first brand approach
Watch Superside's AI-driven designs for OPA! Watch the complete project here
“The buzz around generative AI isn't just hype—it's the harbinger of a fundamental shift in content creation. But here's the interesting part: While many marketers are still stuck in the basic ChatGPT-generated blog post phase (a strategy that's increasingly showing its limitations and SEO risks), the real innovators are pushing boundaries we didn't even know existed." — Brian Solis for Forbes
It’s clear that AI isn’t just transforming business; it’s completely reshaping the game. In the marketing and advertising industries, we're seeing unprecedented changes in everything from creative ideation to design execution and data analytics.
Right now, both marketing teams and agencies without AI in their toolkits aren't just falling behind; they’re at risk of not delivering enough in an increasingly AI-powered landscape that doesn't wait.
Research shows that while 81% of companies plan to invest more in AI, some forward-thinking businesses have already implemented AI strategies and are seeing significant returns on their investment.
New tools like Runway, Adobe Firefly, Sora, Midjourney and Synthesia AI are also changing how teams create ads and produce videos.
Just like we did in our first full AI-designed music video:
These tools help design teams work faster and handle more projects. AI can also take care of repetitive tasks like sending marketing emails, placing ads and organizing customer groups, freeing up marketing professionals’ time for more strategic, creative tasks.
At Superside, AI is now an essential part of how we approach all creative tasks. We started using AI early, specifically to speed up our creative and strategic work, and we’ve seen its benefits firsthand. Since bringing AI into our workflows, we’ve completed 500+ projects twice as fast as before, which has helped our customers save 60% on costs.
If you want to start using AI effectively to produce standout ad creative and personalized advertising, adapting an AI-first approach, our experienced team can help.
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3. Incorporating influencers into multichannel campaigns
Our ad work with Imperfect Foods included a UGC Video with motion graphics that did so well on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook that it was adapted for television in multiple states.
Brand partnerships have evolved from traditional celebrity endorsements to full-on influencer marketing. Companies now team up with social media personalities who have built dedicated audiences in specific niches within multiple industries, like fashion, education, travel or food.
“An inspiring example from this year [2024] was GiffGaff’s ‘Are you on GiffGaff or something?’ campaign, where influencers translated the playful brand tagline into diverse, engaging content. This kind of campaign offers a flexible framework that allows creativity while maintaining brand coherence.” — Luke McCarthy for Vamp
Influencer marketing—across all social media platforms—is on the up and up: The industry was valued at $24 billion by the end of 2024 and 60% of marketers plan to spend more on influencers in 2025. Influencers’ skill in creating authentic content that fits naturally on social platforms, and taps into niche audiences, is highly prized.
Influencers bring the trust factor. They turn your message into something real, relatable, and worth listening to. They have a captivated audience and know how to sell to them.
Influencer marketing gives brands the opportunity to tap into influencers’ established loyal audiences, which makes sense with their ideal customer profiles (ICPs) to better convert.
The scale of influencer partnerships varies widely. While many brands (37%) work with up to 10 influencers, some larger companies partner with over 1,000. In the United States, Instagram leads in influencer marketing ad spending at $2.2 million in 2024, followed by TikTok at $1.2 million and YouTube at $1.07 million.
Dunkin's partnership with TikTok star Charli D’Amelio demonstrates just how powerful these collaborations can be. By creating “The Charli” drink and running TikTok challenges, Dunkin’ saw its app downloads jump by 60% and cold brew sales increase by 45%. This success came from leveraging Charli's genuine connection with her over 150M+ fanbase on her TikTok account.
It’s all about alignment. Partner with influencers who match your brand’s vibe, co-create authentic content, don’t smother them, let them do their thing and watch them turn their followers into your customers.
For brands new to influencer marketing strategies, we recommend working with experienced social media strategists and specialized agencies.
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4. Design quality matters
“Consumers are going to continue to be inundated by more content and more offerings from more brands, but the truth is their reality leaves them with less attention, less time and fewer resources to give.” — Lance Concannon for Meltwater
Creating valuable, quality content is as important as ever for brands. With social media platforms and search engines flooded with everything everywhere all at once, companies that produce highly valuable material will stand out and stand a better chance of building lasting connections with target customers.
Quality content—as part of a robust content marketing strategy and not just poorly edited AI-generated content and images—serves multiple purposes:
- It helps to establish a brand as an industry authority
- Builds actual trust with consumers
- Improves brand visibility and site authority in search engine results, which is key for lead generation in both paid and organic campaigns
When a campaign surprises and provides tangible value, it is more likely to be shared. Ultimately, it creates a ripple effect that organically expands the brand’s reach in all channels, even if you bet on OOH advertising.
For example, this is the creative quality we served to Marqueta for their high-reach campaigns.
To amplify its brand presence, Marqeta collaborated with Superside to execute an ambitious out-of-home advertising campaign in New York City's Times Square.
Superside delivered eight compelling 2D designs in just two days and completed the entire 3D animations in five days, showcasing Marqeta's brand on a 120-foot LED display in one of the world's most visited locations and saving thousands of dollars from hiring an in-house designer.
This can happen for your brand, too.
Remember: In a world of endless distractions, content that offers genuine value will always find its audience. Superside’s team of creatives can help you tap into this key trend to create engaging content and supercharge your advertising efforts.
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5. Superb storytelling
“To be a good media storyteller, one must actively consume media and stay informed about local, national and global events. Understanding current trends and issues is crucial." — Jon Sindreu for The Wall Street Journal
Echo chambers—where people are exposed only to information that reinforces their existing beliefs—can limit a brand’s reach and create division. In 2025, smart brands can break free from these “digital bubbles”, see beyond and create content and ads that welcome different perspectives and encourage open dialogue.
While data-driven marketing provides valuable insights into customer behavior, it's storytelling that creates lasting connections.
People want to feel inspired and understood—they want to be part of something meaningful. A compelling brand story adds humanity to your business and helps build emotional connections that data alone can’t achieve.
Entelo shows how this works in practice. Superside supported the SaaS hiring company to refresh and reflect its bold and daring identity that helped the Entelo brand stand out and be used across various collateral. The identity is designed to reflect diversity, inclusion and the lively spirit of talents. The bright color palette ensures the brand stands out on a dark background.
By combining authentic storytelling with inclusive dialogue on social media platforms, brands can create meaningful connections that resonate beyond their immediate audience.
When companies align their message with audience values and offer real support, they build stronger communities over time. The result is deeper engagement, loyal followers and a brand that stands for something more than just its products or services.
This is what Salesloft did with Superside in San Francisco for their storytelling-focused awareness campaign.
Using motion ads, Superside partnered with Salesloft to infuse its revamped brand identity into engaging visuals, adaptable across various screen formats, from single screens to expansive 11-screen displays. This approach transformed the subway stations into a dynamic canvas, effectively conveying Salesloft's narrative and resonating with its tech-savvy audience.
Creating meaningful, branded content isn’t easy, but it’s worth the effort.
6. Optimizing content for AI chatbots
AI chatbots have become essential tools for modern marketing, transforming how businesses connect with customers online.
AI chatbots can do more than guide visitors to your content: They can “personally” support customers throughout their buying journey, handle support requests instantly, and gather valuable data to improve marketing efforts.
The key is using AI and machine learning to understand and respond to individual customer needs while maintaining an authentic human connection.
As AI search engines increasingly replace traditional search, marketers must adapt their SEO strategies from just ranking on traditional search results to AI optimization (AIO). The idea is to content that works well with AI systems while still engaging human readers.
For example, BMW boosted conversions by 30% for years now by using personalized messaging. This demonstrates how AI-driven personalization can help brands resonate with customers.
These AI tools can, for example, analyze customer behavior—from page views to location data—to create targeted marketing campaigns that reach target customers at exactly the right moment with relevant messages.
As AI continues to shape how people find and interact with content on digital platforms, businesses that effectively blend AI capabilities with personalized customer experiences as part of their digital marketing strategies will stand out.
7. The continued dominance of video content
“What's changing is the sophistication of video creation and distribution. AI-driven video production tools are making it possible to create personalized, targeted video content at scale, while new formats like shoppable video and live streaming are opening up exciting new possibilities for brand engagement.” — Bernard Marr for Forbes
Video still dominates the digital marketing landscape and remains one of the key advertising trends. Making up over 80% of all internet traffic, video has become the go-to medium for reaching social media users. Nearly 9 out of 10 US internet users watched online videos in 2022, making it clear why marketers consider video their top content strategy.
The appetite for quick, engaging, short-form video ads and content continues to grow, particularly among Gen Z consumers. This growth isn’t just driven by consumption patterns: it’s fuelled by the revolutionary changes in how videos are created and distributed.
As video continues to evolve, shaping the digital advertising landscape, new formats like shoppable videos and live streaming create fresh opportunities for brands to connect with audiences.
LG Chile's job interview prank video campaign perfectly illustrates the power of engaging video content. The company pranked job seekers during interviews to showcase its HD TVs’ quality, generating 33 million views. The video succeeded because it tapped into universal experiences and emotions, prompting viewers to imagine themselves in similar situations and share their stories.
Creating impactful video ads can be challenging, especially as there’s already so much digital marketing content available online. Consider tapping into Superside’s expert video services, enhanced with cutting-edge AI capabilities, to help you produce engaging videos faster and more cost-effectively than ever before.
Powerful video ads, run by powerful analytics
By 2025, artificial intelligence is expected to generate 30% of outbound marketing messages from large organizations, a figure that’s up dramatically from just 2% in 2022. Case studies of companies using AI to produce video ads and content are already showing time and cost savings of up to 80% compared to traditional production methods.
Another powerful advantage of AI is its ability to process large amounts of consumer data to understand what target audiences want and need, helping companies make better marketing decisions based on real information.
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This innovative platform helps our marketing teams quickly identify what works and what doesn’t, turning your data into actionable insights that deliver high-impact ad campaigns.
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How Superside Leverages Creative Performance for Skyrocketed Success
Superside delivers high-performance ad campaigns and other creative assets at scale. Combining the top 1% of global creative talent with powerhouse AI tools, our AI services can supercharge your creative campaigns in 2025 and beyond.
Just look again at Salesloft, which saw its vision come to life with four dynamic motion ads in two weeks, or Imperfect Foods, whose design capacity grew tenfold while saving $250,000 in production costs.
With flexible subscriptions starting at $6,000 per month, we can handle both big and small creative projects without compromising quality.
Book a call to capitalize on this year’s advertising trends with Superside.
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