Building brands beyond trends – what Sticky will be doing in 2025
You’ll also see us leading the charge against dated demographic audience segmentation.
Every January, the marketing world is flooded with insights, trends and forecasts about the upcoming twelve months. The exciting new tools, stories, colours, designs and fonts we’ll be using are splashed over more social posts, pdfs and webpages than one person can digest. How will we make the dreaded algorithms work for us?
It is an exciting time for everyone and seeing what’s coming together is fascinating. VR and AR have been on a tipping point for years, but things seem to have gone quiet in the favour of AI. Last year’s Pantone colour, a brown hue somewhere between chocolate, mocha and something less tasteful, didn’t seem to garner the love it usually does.
With that in mind, what will 2025 bring at Sticky HQ?
1. A new found Curiosity
Sticky’s Senior Strategist Nick Bain will shortly be announcing the results of our second annual nationwide survey into Curiosity. How have the events of 2024 impacted our ability to be curious? You’ll also see us leading the charge against dated demographic audience segmentation. Instead, we’ll bring you content that uses Curiosity as a starting point. We believe this approach results in authentic cross-generational content that means more to the audience than assumptions based on age and postcode.
Using AI as a tool to speed up processes, challenge idea and evaluate early-stage strategy is undeniably beneficial.
2. Make AI work for us
If AI isn’t integral to some of your business practices now, what were you doing in 2024? We believe 2025 will see AI drive even further forward. Using AI as a tool to speed up processes, challenge ideas and evaluate early-stage strategy is undeniably beneficial. It’s more than a note taker or something to churn out listicles (with varying accuracy and literacy). Our Senior Producer Giacomo Cannata plans to use AI to mine social media algorithms and support him as a virtual Assistant Director.
We’ll still be working with incredible talent across all our departments, but let’s be honest, there’s always grunt work no one loves to do. AI can step in here, freeing us up to do more creative and exciting work.
We’re also keeping an eye on the environmental impact of AI and how that can be lessened, as well as exciting/terrifying developments like DeepSeek.
3. Challenge our creativity
They may be the stuff of graphic designers’ nightmares, but apps like Canva and CapCut are making quality templates for visuals, videos and social posts that many brands are happy to publish – even if everything is starting to look a little samey. Our Senior Designer, Olgun Gokdemir, has taken this as a personal challenge for his team to be even more creative in 2025 and to always show clients something different and exciting. Something that isn’t templated; something no one else will have.
We’re also excited by trends that seem to smash juxtaposing ideas together but result in inspirational new graphics, like ‘minimalist maximalism’, for example. Think clean minimalist lines and sharp details, but with brash colours, massive type and unexpected eclectic elements. It shouldn’t work and that’s exactly why it does.
4. Bring you multi-form content
Short form content is dying they say. Long form is having a resurgence we’re told. But don’t forget, always keep it punchy. People are too easily distracted; we have popcorn brains bouncing off a million notifications and distractions. The algorithm favours articles of approximately 400 words long, but then Google itself says, “We don’t care about article length, we care about quality.”
At Sticky, we’re embracing multiform multi-post campaigns that mix up long and short form. We can craft the pithy one-liner, the essential pun, the detailed whitepaper and the most beautiful blog, and that’s what we plan on doing in 2025. Crafting, curating and creating the right content in the right place at the right length all under the one campaign.
That’s four things we’re championing in 2025 at Sticky. We’re excited to be even more curious, look at things differently and use new tools to speed up processes and find new ways to be creative. Along the way, we’ll be sure to dip into a hot trend or three when they work for our clients.
What will you be championing?
