Every day brings a new contradiction.

Look at this incredible new tool!
Wait — the AI hallucinated again.
Agencies are dead.
Creative has never mattered more!

The truth, of course, lives somewhere in the middle.

There’s no question this is an exciting moment. Creative and marketing teams have access to more tools, more data, and more production capabilities than ever before. Timelines that once stretched for months can now happen in days, or even hours. Ideas move from spark to execution at remarkable speed.

At the same time, the pressure has intensified. Expectations are higher. Content volumes are exploding. “AI slop” is everywhere. And because so much mediocre work can now be generated instantly, the value of truly differentiated creative has actually increased.

It’s reminiscent of the early promises of email. Remember when email was supposed to make work dramatically more efficient and save everyone time? Now think about how many conversations you’ve had this week about overflowing inboxes and communication overload. Entire generations still reminisce about when coming back to the office with five voicemails felt stressful.

Technology rarely removes work entirely. More often, it changes how the work happens — and raises expectations in the process.

That’s especially true for marketers today.

AI-powered tools are now embedded across nearly every platform: Adobe, Canva, Sprout, Shopify, Google Workspace, social scheduling tools, presentation software, research platforms, and countless startups racing to automate creative execution. Tasks that once automatically required an agency partner can now often be handled internally.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

In many ways, this shift empowers internal teams. It allows marketers to move faster, test more ideas, and execute routine creative work without waiting on outside support. But it’s also happening in an environment where expectations continue to rise while budgets often do not. Marketing leaders are still being asked to do more — much more — with less.

So the question becomes less about whether to use AI and more about how to use it strategically.

Where does AI genuinely create efficiency?

Where does outside expertise still matter?

And perhaps most importantly: where does DIY actually create more risk than value?

We spoke with marketing leaders across hospitality, retail, food & beverage, and consumer brands to better understand how they’re navigating this new landscape. Here’s what we learned.

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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.

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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.

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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…

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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…

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Not Your Standard Fast Food Menu Photos

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…

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