TL;DR
Stand out in 2025’s digital marketplace by capitalizing on game-changing creative 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, that’s done faster and drives real results. By leveraging creative performance capabilities and AI to personalize at scale, you can do all of this.
Leading companies are already seeing impressive results by following this approach:
- PointCard achieved 3.5X higher click-through rates through careful testing of social ads and by using Superside to create multiple ad variations per campaign.
- Our creatives leveraged the power of generative AI to co-produce over 4,000+ native social ads for Shopify in just 24 hours.
- For Marqeta, we demonstrated the speed of modern advertising by scaling 3D out-of-home ad campaigns in five single days.
We turn to Anneke King, Superside’s Executive Creative Director, for expert insights on the advertising creative trends to watch, how to navigate this rapidly evolving ad creative landscape, and how you can jump on it for the rest of the year.
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 ad creative 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 creative advertising trends are emerging, including:
- Brands adopting unhinged ‘brain rot’ digital culture
- Accelerated AI adoption and its impact for multiple creative variations
- Incorporating influencers into multichannel campaigns
- Ad design quality dominance
- Top-tier ad storytelling
- Optimized content for AI chatbots
- Video content dominance continues
Let’s dive into these trends.
7 Ad creative 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
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 tailor-made 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 AI-powered 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.
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-powered image custom models into over +40 creative workflows that we use daily, we’ve completed 3000+ projects twice as fast as before, which has helped our customers save over 50% on costs per asset.
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.
45% more efficient creative
Our expert AI designers help you create, test
and launch multiple, impactful concepts at scale.
We’ll get you to market sooner.
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. We’re talking about bringing influencer to high-scaled, multichannel campaigns. Companies now team up with social media personalities (and even AI influencers!) 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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