Brands in Britain: Why So Serious?

“May you live in interesting times”, goes, supposedly, the curse. Well: I don’t know you about you, but my interest is definitely piqued this year, if my incessant, mesmerised doomscrolling is anything to go by.

2025 is going to be an “interesting” time to be responsible for a brand, because brands are caught between two impulses, increasingly at tension: seriousness, and spectacle.

Seriousness is a response to the sense that growth is hard, and times are sombre. Consumer confidence may be coming back, but business optimism is at a low. Growth is back but slow. Margins are eroding thanks to high, volatile input costs. Chief marketing officers are becoming chief growth officers. Data and tech are everywhere; ROI is king; (allegedly) showy, expensive, unmeasurable TV is dying and data-driven, rational retail media is in the ascendancy.

In this context, the idea of not knowing which half of your marketing is paying back isn’t funny any more: it’s rank negligence. We can, and should, take the business of marketing incredibly seriously. And technology has a seductive appeal, allowing us to engineer our brands to efficient growth.

This is all well and good; marketing and communications often needs to grow up and get real. But no-one’s told the only people who can actually grant us growth: consumers.

Because in their world, all this stuff is leaving them cold. Advertising – getting more and more serious since 2002 – is increasingly unpopular; the internet is being enshittified; trust in big companies is at a low. To most consumers, an ad isn’t a serious business investment as much as a blockable interruption, or (maybe) an opportunity to have fun at the brand’s expense. But that overstates the degree to which they care at all. Because the truth is: they just want life to be fun again. Everything about modern media tastes suggests what people really want is spectacle.

Wages are starting to go up, and inflation is slowing, meaning that we are slowly emerging from the acute phase of the cost-of-living crisis. Consumer confidence is trending up – as, interestingly, is SME confidence. As COVID becomes, for most, a surreal and unpleasant memory, people are trying to smile at life again. Searches for “depressed” still lead searches for “funniest” after taking over nine years ago. But 20 per cent of Brits would now choose comedy for a date; ten years ago it was 2 per cent. We’re all still in the gutter, but more and more of us are looking for a laugh.

There are still challenges – property is expensive; prices are still high; restaurants and pubs struggling. But more are more are emerging from survival mode and looking to enjoy life again.

To people looking to rediscover fun, seriousness – and the businesslike straightforwardness it encourages, is boring. And if there were a single cultural insight that explained the rise of Trump and Farage; the popularity of Elon Musk; the explosion of brands like Liquid Death and Prime; the support of TikTok; and the inexplicable failure of the electorate to support clever technocrats in Washington and Westminster, it’s boredom.

People are bored: bored of Marvel films; bored of career politicians; bored of COVID; bored of sanctimonious purpose; bored of boring brands; bored with almost every established structure you could care to mention. Bored people don’t want more seriousness. They want spectacle.

So how will brands respond?

Some brands will give into the Death Star gravitational pull of seriousness. They will overinvest in accountable performance marketing at the expense of brand (even though marketers keep discovering that doesn’t work); spend more on consultancies; buy safer work; and innovate more cautiously. Inertia will probably protect these brands for a while, but they’ll find it harder to charge premiums; harder to cut through; harder to justify their marketing budgets. It’s a serious spiral to nowhere.

Other brands – especially those led by creators, following their nose for notoriety and clicks – will become all-out spectacle machines. But what do you do if you want to escape the boring tax, but can’t get away with punting a million quid for lols?

The answer – as it always is – is to get back to those who grant us growth: consumers. Most of us will spend more time with marketing folk than real people, so our instinct is naturally to play for their approval. Successful brands will find a better balance. They’ll continue to get better at articulating value and leveraging modern technology. But they will also get closer to normal people. To the data that tells us how they really feel, what they really like to spend time doing. Not just how the ad machine is running.

Then they’ll remember that no one cares about their business, however serious. People are bored, trying to enjoy life in a world that makes that hard. And once you accept that, the only way forward is to lead with spectacle, not seriousness.

Nick Hirst is the executive strategy director at adam&eveDDB