The Brave(st) Marketing Trends 2025

2025 is off and running and it promises to be another rollercoaster ride of a year. Between global news, technology sprinting ahead and the ever-changing algorithms driving our audiences, it’s hard to know what is happening. But, as we sift through the data and reports there are definite trends that our strategy team is seeing rising to the top.

This year the trends dominating the conversation are all about one thing: You guessed it, AI. We agree that AI is an integral part of how we will all work moving forward– we are currently launching our own human-led, AI-powered creative accelerator called AI Bravestorm. But, for 2025, our take is that “brands will use AI” has passed the trend phase. We will see it more integrated into every aspect of marketing. We are still at the beginning of this wave of innovation and new applications are still going to be trendy, but AI has taken its place as a new constant. Things to look for this year are the more autonomous AI programs that will begin to act as virtual team members. Open AI’s Operator is just the beginning.

Knowing AI is a given, we decided to look for the other trends that stood out to us as the bravest trends. How did we determine which trends were brave, you ask? Well, we looked for these three criteria:

Bold Innovation: Disrupting established norms and embracing the unconventional.
Risky Business: Calculated moves that aim for meaningful impact over playing it safe.
Fresh Engagement: Redefining engagement or fostering deeper emotional connections.

Let’s jump into the bravest trends we predict will grow this year:

1. Shoppable Video Everywhere

Inspired by the explosive popularity of shoppable video in Asia, U.S. retailers are diving into this trend through social platforms, websites (Amazon ramped it up this past holiday season), and QR-code-enabled shoppable TV ads. Shoppable video is perhaps the clearest response to the fact that 63% of U.S. consumers discover new brands or products from TV and 39% searched online after seeing something on TV to consider purchasing.

Why it’s brave:

• Transforms the passive TV-watching experience into another interactive, commerce-driven platform.
• Demands significant investments in partnerships, hardware innovation, and content integration, with no guarantee of near-term adoption across diverse consumer demographics.
• Positions brands as enablers of instant gratification by eliminating the gap between entertainment and e-commerce.

Amazon partnered with video commerce platform TalkShopLive to produce a series of celebrity-hosted live shopping events on Black Friday. Personalities such as Martha Stewart, Jennifer Hudson, Eva Mendes, and Kimberly Schlapman hosted live shows featuring curated selections of Amazon’s Black Friday deals, ranging from books and music to housewares. These events were streamed simultaneously on multiple platforms, including TalkShopLive, Amazon Live, the hosts’ social media pages, and other websites embedding the TalkShopLive player, thereby broadening reach and accessibility. HomePage News

Image Source: Homepage News

2. Creator-Led Brand Content

This trend overlaps a bit with shoppable video: Placing creative control in the hands of influencers and content creators, allowing them to craft brand narratives in their authentic voice. Unlike traditional campaigns dictated by internal marketing teams, this approach builds trust by tapping into creators’ deep connections with their audiences. By letting creators shape messaging, brands can engage more authentically with niche communities while benefiting from the creators’ established influence and relatability.

Why it’s brave:

• Shifts total creative control away from corporate marketing teams.
• Relies on creators’ authenticity and risks misalignment with the brand’s identity and all the other risks that come along with influencer partnerships.
• Leverages creators’ trusted platforms to build authentic consumer engagement. Creator-led content exceeds brand distinction benchmarks by 4.85x, according to Kantar​.

Sources: 1. Extole  2. Marketing Brew  3. CNBC

3. Extreme Niche: Activating micro-markets & micro-communities

Half a step from creator-led brand content, this trend is about targeting small, tightly-knit communities and highly segmented micro-markets. Instead of creating broad, sweeping campaigns, brands can now craft bespoke messaging and offerings tailored to specific groups’ unique needs, values, or identities. With tools like social listening, geotargeting, and smart delivery, marketers can identify and engage these micro-communities with tech that negates the labor-intensive aspect that limited this sort of marketing in the past. This approach prioritizes deep relevance over broad reach which in turn can boost engagement x2 (Kantar Media) among audiences that feel uniquely seen and understood.

Why it’s brave:

• Rejects the traditional scale-based marketing approach in favor of niche targeting and bespoke execution.
• Requires granular insights, tech-savvyness, and in some cases, operational agility to execute, but hooking a bunch of unique micro-audiences is a long play that may pay.
• Creates deeper, community-level connection, fostering trust, relevance, and delight.

In June 2024, PODS storage solutions transform their moving containers into dynamic, AI-driven billboards. This campaign used generative AI to create real-time, hyper-localized advertisements tailored to each of New York City’s 6,000 neighborhoods. By integrating real-time data—including location, weather, traffic, and time—each billboard displayed contextually relevant messages as the PODS containers moved through the city. (Oh, and it won a Cannes Lion.)
Think with Google

Source: Kantar Report

4. Hyper-Transparency: Honesty for real this time

Hyper-transparency transforms how brands interact with consumers by openly sharing their internal workings—everything from supply chain practices and sustainability metrics to pricing breakdowns and the ethical considerations behind their AI use. In an age of consumer awareness and skepticism, this approach moves beyond buzzwords and promises full accountability. By providing detailed insights into their processes, brands invite consumers to become active participants in their journey, fostering deeper trust and loyalty.

Why it’s brave:

• Breaks from traditional corporate opacity and creates trust like no other approach can.
• Risks exposing potential inefficiencies or vulnerabilities but builds long-term consumer affinity.
• Positions brands as allies in consumers’ pursuit of ethical and informed choices–but for real.

Patagonia includes detailed carbon footprint data on its product pages, giving consumers complete transparency into the environmental cost of their purchases. This is an expectation for Patagonia’s key audience, as many turn to the brand not just for quality but also for its environmentalist behavior. Patagonia’s footprint

5. Balancing Human Creativity & AI Innovation

Alright, so, we know. We started this by saying AI is a given and not a trend, then continued into 5 trends that each have an AI component. This is the world we’re in. This year we’ll see a more mindful balancing of human creativity to AI’s rapid zeitgeist saturation. This trend will be re-emphasizing the value of human intuition, artistry, and emotional resonance in creative and communications with AI as a tool fueling human-led work and opening up new fronts in creativity.

We subscribe to this trend here at Truth Collective: We see the fantastic value AI can bring to speeding up ideation, empowering brainstorms and automating non-creative tasks, but that human element is still so incredibly crucial. Human creativity is the difference between churning out generic content faster versus being empowered to make better work at a pace that meets today’s needs. We’ll see more pushback on thoughtless applications of AI, and more thoughtful conversations around its larger impact on society and the environment.

Why it’s brave:

• Turns the widespread adoption of gen AI away into a creative accelerator, building support systems, and speeding operations to allow for new solutions at the pace our world demands.
• Turning down the AI talk might make some brands fall behind in consumer eyes, especially tech brands, but having AI in the back, behind the curtain could bring with it ire from consumers if they mis-interpret the human-led/AI-powered angle.
• Reinforces the emotional bond between consumers and brands by showcasing human effort.

That’s a look at some of the bravest trends we are seeing! The marketing landscape of 2025 is shaping up to be a playground for the bold, the inventive, and the unapologetically human. These brave trends challenge norms, redefine connections, and remind us that meaningful innovation requires equal parts risk and creativity. Whether it’s transforming how we shop, amplifying authentic voices, engaging micro-communities, embracing transparency, or doubling down on the irreplaceable value of human creativity, the bravest brands are those willing to evolve fearlessly.

So, as we head into 2025, let’s not just follow trends—let’s create them.

Sourcey bits: 1. Cnet  2. Forrester   3. Think with Google  4. Forbes  5. Forbes