Futurewatch: 7 inspiring tech trends for 2025

Classic advertising works on the principle of overwhelm. You present the audience with content that is so surprising, great or touching that it compels you to watch and remember. This allows maximum recall performance to be achieved in the shortest possible time. But given the ever-increasing number of messages and a fragmented media landscape, it is becoming increasingly difficult to assert yourself against the flood of competing messages. No matter how great your own 30 seconds are, just a few minutes later the target group has seen a flood of other messages that dilute attention with their own content.

The alternative is immersion: an experience that invites users to linger and interact with the brand content by immersing themselves in an independent emotional and sensory production. The core target group that can be reached becomes smaller, but the anchoring of the brand messages becomes significantly better due to the higher level of engagement.

Immersion is possible through many staging approaches. Venues like The Globe in Las Vegas or spatial VR installations at exhibitions are already taking visitors out of their everyday reality. But stationary retailers can also invite passers-by to linger with particularly opulent window displays. And with his community-driven TikTok campaign for a “Paw Patrol” sneaker, Deichmann showed that immersion is possible even in serial campaigns on social media.

Customer experience is already a buzzword in digitalization. However, most decision-makers tend to understand this as the digitalization of interactions with customers in order to increase efficiency. Customers should prefer to research their questions digitally and only express their wishes digitally. In this logic, direct contact with a person is always the last option when all other means have failed. Generative AI will make these systems even faster in the future.

The result is greater efficiency and faster turnaround times at lower costs for the majority of requests. But this comes at the cost of the frustration of customers, who have to sit through endless tape announcements and first have to research for themselves where the information relevant to them can be found.

The more digital the customer experience becomes, the more valuable real interpersonal interaction and thus general human content become as a brand experience. Marketers will have to look for strategies to present their company’s employees as brand ambassadors to as large an audience as possible. Obi is already providing a best case for this strategy by offering video consultations with experts from its own workforce. Booksellers activate the “human factor” by simply presenting handwritten book tips from their own employees on the shelves.

While technological pioneering achievements like the Apple Vision Pro will remain an unaffordable luxury gimmick for the foreseeable future, AR glasses for just $300 to $500 are becoming an IT piece that is surprisingly suitable for everyday use. Companies like Meta, Snap, Xiaomi and Oppo deliver products that have overcome the teething problems of its predecessor Google Glass and do not turn their wearers into exotic aliens.

Development is still in its early stages, but Meta showed with its Orion prototype that these glasses will turn our environment into a walkable Wikipedia. The world then becomes researchable in real time and intuitively. This will dramatically change the way brands interact with their customers. Real-time navigation all the way to the shelf alone will redefine performance marketing. But the option of digital try-ons and personalization through augmented reality or the use of avatars as virtual brand ambassadors in everyday life will also permanently change product marketing.

For a long time, the formula for success in the fight for attention in social media seemed inevitable: those who relied on polarizing content could not only inspire their own fans, but also activate their counterparts for earned media through the negative reactions of critics and thus achieve greater visibility on digital platforms . This media dynamic even creates search-like behavior for some users in topic bubbles – so-called doomscrolling.

But entertainment formats like “British Bakeoff,” “Forged in Fire” and “Fixer Upper” have long signaled that there is a great longing among audiences for an alternative to the negative stress of news. Now Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign in the USA shows that positive identification figures and relieving humor can also be viral success formats on digital platforms.

Humorous memes are reaching record levels and normal, everyday studies are suddenly being celebrated online as role models. At its core, this is nothing more than attitude marketing. But while traditional stance campaigns often only trigger resignation and tend to promote stockpiling, the Democratic campaigns are winning new supporters with their appearance. Marketers can learn from this that attitude and positive values ​​continue to be a campaign theme. You just have to show that being on the right side can be fun.

Targeting and performance marketing reach their financial limits, even for the most wealthy advertisers, but also the limits of what is technically feasible. It is not for nothing that more marketers believe that “compelling” must come before “selling”. And in order for “compelling” to be possible at all, brands have to rediscover “telling”.

This is also necessary in order to be prepared for the upcoming technology transformation through generative AI. Because in the era of the search engine, digital marketing had to concentrate on optimal brand findability. In the coming era of response machines, brands must be able to be told in the best possible way.

The brand story has two levels. There is the aspirational level of the brand, which is about its values ​​and historical achievements. But at least as important is the pragmatic level at which the concrete benefit aspects are told. The aim must be for generative AI to not only tell you when a brand was created, but also which of its products are particularly popular and where you can buy them. A prompt such as “Which products are particularly popular as gifts among 25-year-old men?” Ideally, a reference to possible purchasing options should lead to your own branded products if they are relevant in this context.

The classic campaign logic ends with the digital brand story. Because in digital dialogue a story is continually told and the brand personality expands and becomes more complex. Marketing is then no longer about thinking in independent campaigns whose stories exist separately from each other. The model is then more of a storytelling like in the Star Wars or Marvel franchise, where all stories form an interconnected universe.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the digitalization of media cannot adequately transfer all the achievements of its analogue models. This gave rise to a music movement that led to the renaissance of vinyl records. The small, unpredictable scratches that carry traces of real life into the actual musical work are exciting on vinyl. Similarly, despite its greater reach and networking, social media manages to convey the quality of experience of real events together with other people.

This leads to live experiences becoming their own social medium that marketers should systematically activate. From classic festival marketing like the Wartsteiner Wedding at the Parookaville Festival, to events at the company headquarters like Underberg and Rotkäppchen celebrate, to training courses like Weber’s barbecue courses, there are many ways to bring your own fans together as a community. These events can then also provide the content to then reach a significantly larger audience on the digital channels.

It is not without reason that popular wisdom has the saying “A picture says more than 1000 words”. Images, which are easy to understand even from a great distance, do not depend on a common language and do not have to be laboriously decoded in the head. The power of the logo as a branding tool rests on this principle. With its Swoosh, Nike is not only consistently recognizable as a brand, but also gives energy to its own brand solely through the image design of the logo. Edeka not only gives its own private label an emotional context through its “heart products”, but also makes it an easily recognizable advertising platform for the Edeka brand via the yellow heart.

The value of images has increased due to digitalization. Today, if you want to remember something, you no longer take a note, but simply take a photo with your cell phone. Thanks to image searches like “Circle to Search”, digital image recognition will also become more important for orientation on the Internet. And our classic communication is also changing. For many users, emojis already complement the classic alphabet when chatting. As the caricatures of the digital era, memes even condense complex messages into just one image.

Given this media shift, marketers must learn to think of messages in hieroglyphs. Today, images are no longer an illustration of the claim, they can themselves be the brand claim. But this also means paying more attention than ever to the visual consistency of brand management. The chosen motifs must not only fit the brand’s visual language, but also the target group’s visual language. At the same time, a brand’s products should reliably lead to the brand in the image search solely through their visual design. Traditional packaging can become an aid to the digital customer journey.