Insight Out: On Brand

The Best Marketing Campaigns of 2025 (according to us)

Leith — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 18:50:38 GMT

The Tacolate collab between Salt & Straw and Taco Bell (image: Salt & Straw website)

Every year, a few marketing ideas burrow their way into our brains and simply refuse to leave. They’re the ones we reference in meetings, send to clients, and secretly wish we had come up with ourselves. For 2025, our team pulled together the campaigns that genuinely stuck with us—across industries, formats, and budgets.

What ties them together? Clear storytelling, cultural fluency, and an almost mischievous understanding of how people behave today. These are the ideas that blended strategy with delight, practicality with creativity, and—critically—earned disproportionate attention because they solved a real need or tapped a deep itch in the zeitgeist.

Below, we break down our favorite marketing ideas of the year, and what made each one so effective.

How AI Is Rewriting Discoverability for Restaurants and Hotels

Candace MacDonald — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 12:30:48 GMT

When someone asks ChatGPT for the best romantic restaurant in Chicago or a boutique hotel in Napa with a great spa, where do you think it gets the answer?

It’s not just searching Google, it’s summarizing what it finds across the internet—from your website metadata, to press coverage, to guest reviews. For many guests and travelers, this kind of AI-assisted discovery is quietly replacing how they decide where to eat, drink and stay.

It’s no longer people searching for brands—it’s algorithms deciding which brands people see.

Let’s breakdown what we know so far about how AI decides who gets discovered and who disappears.

Without Branding, You’re Aimless. Without Marketing, You’re Invisible.

Rachel Green — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 17:21:29 GMT

“Brand” is one of those words everybody uses, but not everybody really gets.

Here’s the simple version:

Your brand is how people see and feel about you. It’s the vibe, the reputation, the story people tell when you’re not in the room.

Branding is what you do to shape that perception. It’s your logo, your color palette, your style of imagery, and tone of vo…

Name Drop: Breaking the Old Rules in Restaurant Naming

Candace MacDonald — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 16:15:30 GMT

Naming a restaurant always sounds like a dream assignment—until the reality sets in. It carries the emotional weight of naming a child, paired with the frustrating constraint of finding something that no one else has already claimed. Add to that the buzzkill of trademark law, where promising ideas often die in legal review either because they can’t be p…

Restaurant Menu, or Editorial Spread?

Rachel Green — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 16:22:27 GMT

Not Your Standard Fast Food Menu Photos

Image Source: @thefishandchipsshop Instagram

Once dismissed as the domain of low-end chains, photo-driven menus are experiencing a high-design renaissance. From cutting-edge cocktail bars, to sleek cafes and “fine casual” restaurants, a new visual language is emerging—one that uses photography not as a crutch, but a…