Brands - Why This Is The Year To Get Weird and Stand Out

Ah, 2025. The midpoint of a messy decade. The giddy apex of its first act, a bit like stopping halfway up a rollercoaster and realising your stomach is still somewhere in 2022. Inflation is back, rummaging through our wallets like a nosy neighbour at a jumble sale. Isolationist politics are frothing again, with flags waving furiously and borders being drawn as tightly as Aunt Muriel’s apron strings at Christmas.

It’s a strange time. A liminal space, if you want to sound clever (which we always do in this industry). But perhaps there’s something beautiful about the uncertainty. After all, when everything feels like it’s teetering on the edge, what better moment to give it a bloody great shove and see what happens?

A Flat White World With Niche Sprinkles

Have you noticed? The world’s coffee shops all look the same. Reclaimed wood, ferns dangling like botanical spiders, pastel menus whispering about a “seasonal guest roast”—the sameness is stifling. It’s all so flat you could level a table with it.

And it’s not just coffee shops. Markets are stuffed with identical tat from Temu. Instagram is an endless parade of identical sunsets and perfectly imperfect croissants. Culture is flattening, ironing itself out into one big, bland pancake.

But—here’s the twist—while culture flattens, people are niching themselves into oblivion. They’re joining niche WhatsApp groups, posting TikToks about 18th-century shoe repair, and diving into Discord servers dedicated to oddly specific joys.

Brands that want to stand out have a choice: be the same as everything else, or dive headfirst into the niches. Not in a "cool, we’re fellow hedgehog enthusiasts" kind of way. No one likes a try-hard. But in a way that respects the small, weird, glorious worlds people are building for themselves. The magic isn’t in interrupting these communities—it’s in helping them rise, amplifying their voices, and creating space for them to shine in ways they never thought possible.

The Reckoning: No More Hiding Behind Purpose

Ah, brand purpose. Remember when we all thought it was the saviour of capitalism? Like if we just tied enough causes to enough products, we could make the world a better place and sell more toilet cleaner?

Turns out, people weren’t born yesterday. They’re looking at your “sustainably sourced, ethically washed, morally superior organic whatever” and going, “Yeah, but is it any good?”

There’s something oddly freeing about this moment. About getting back to the art and soulfulness of selling. Because selling—when done with honesty—has a purity to it. It’s a dance, a persuasion, a connection between what you’ve got and what someone else needs. And it’s not something to be ashamed of.

And here’s the thing: you’ve got agency in this game. If the product you’re asked to sell doesn’t align with your values, the solution isn’t to smuggle in your own moral agenda like a well-meaning Trojan horse. It’s to work somewhere else. Go sell something you believe in. Because the best ads don’t come from crowbars and compromise—they come from conviction.

And frankly, that’s why so many toxic industries are destined to wither away. No one decent will want to work on their shit products. The best minds—the kind that shape culture and make ideas fly—won’t spend their talents trying to polish something no one should buy in the first place. And that’s how the world, slowly but surely, gets better. Not through lofty manifestos, but because bad businesses get starved of the good people they need to survive.

AI: The Glittery Goblin in the Room

AI has gone from being the wide-eyed wunderkind of tech to the slightly unsettling overachiever in the corner—quietly brilliant, eerily efficient, and always one step away from taking your lunch money.

The real opportunity is to use it to bring us closer—to each other, and to the humanity we’re trying to reach with our ideas. AI can crunch numbers and surface insights, sure, but the magic lies in how we use that knowledge to find humanity—not just in ourselves but in the people our ideas are meant to move.

Because great advertising isn’t built on data alone. It’s built on the moments between the data—the quirks, the contradictions, the unquantifiable sparks of being human. And if we let it, AI can help us find those sparks faster, sharper, and maybe even brighter than before.

Dadaism: Advertising’s Absurdist Moment

Dadaism was born out of chaos. In the wake of World War I, it emerged as a rebellious, absurdist response to a world that had been torn apart by materialism, nationalism, and the blind faith in structures that had failed catastrophically. Artists like Duchamp and Ball turned to nonsense, mockery, and provocation to challenge the hollow seriousness of the establishment and to point out the absurdity of the systems people unquestioningly upheld.

Fast forward to today, and the parallels are hard to miss. The forces at play—rising nationalism, economic instability, cultural homogenisation, and a creeping sense that much of what we’ve built is wobbling on shaky foundations—mirror the conditions that gave rise to Dadaism. Layer in the relentless commodification of everything—from human connection to creativity itself—and we’re left in a similar moment of disillusionment.

But there’s also opportunity. Just as Dadaism mocked the absurdity of its time, today’s advertising has the chance to respond not with earnestness or empty moral posturing, but with wit, irreverence, and, crucially, effectiveness. Advertising can channel that same Dadaist spirit: irreverent, creative, and unafraid to poke holes in the puffed-up pomposity of the status quo. All while creating wildly effective work for the businesses the world genuinely needs to succeed—and ditching those it doesn’t.

Look no further than Nutter Butter, a Dentsu client whose campaigns lean into playful absurdity, embracing a sense of self-aware silliness and lore that cuts through like a hot knife through peanut butter. By turning their cookie into an irreverent icon, they’ve shown how brands can surprise, delight, and remind us that not everything needs to be so crushingly serious.

The Decade Halftime Show: A Chance to Get Weird

We’re halfway through the 2020s, folks. The first half has been a bit of a mess, hasn’t it? A global pandemic, relentless doomscrolling, and brands playing whack-a-mole with crises. It’s been reactive, earnest, and a bit exhausting.

But now we’re in the halftime show. A chance to reset. A moment to stretch, crack our knuckles, and ask: what kind of decade do we want this to be? The first half was serious and a bit shouty. What if the second half was bold, joyful, and gloriously unhinged?

The next five years belong to brands that embrace the off-piste, leaning into the unexpected and the audacious. Not weird for weird’s sake, but weird that’s born from truth, wit, and the desire to make people feel something again. Nostalgia’s had its day. Purpose is shedding its skin. AI is here to challenge us. And the flattening of culture is begging for brands to throw a curveball and disrupt the status quo.

2025: A Year for Joyful Stumbles

So here’s to 2025. A year to embrace chaos, lean into the mess, and rediscover what it means to delight, surprise, and matter. The world doesn’t need advertising to save it. It just needs it to get back to what it’s brilliant at—being gloriously unhinged, creating wildly effective work for the businesses the world actually needs to thrive, and having the guts to walk away from those it doesn’t.

Tim Whirledge is Dentsu Creative's strategy partner