The Mid-Year 2025 Trend Report
Cinema, phone theft, Waitrose, exits, typos, and am I missing something?
Happy Tuesday
As we tip into the second half of 2025, we reflect on what we’ve seen so far. This is from the lens of brands, marketing, advertising, technology, and culture.
It’s an interesting time. As my colleague Anna posted last week on her LI, the world at the moment seems to zig-zag from fears of impending war to incredulous purchasing recommendations.
Here are the Ballpoint agency trends we’re spying in the first half of the year.
Josh
1. Cinematic filming in ads
Highly-referenced Ffern just got Bill Nighy into an ad, which is all round pretty epic.
This went micro-viral in internal Ballpoint chats.
Whether in this particular actual filmic narrative style, or just by using colour grading that’s giving Wes Anderson as with the back catalogue of Lohause ads. I’m almost counting down the days until I need to upgrade from my Ace+Tates.
2. ChatGPT is increasingly a traffic source
Google still dominates, for today, but the fast rise of ChatGPT as a traffic source is just one of the visible signs of our future world.
I reckon there’s a reasonable charge that Google’s market cap has already peaked, and in a shorter time than we imagine, they’ll become another Yahoo.
3. Phone theft in London is now globally mockable
It happened slow and then fast. Phone theft crept up on all of us and now its so commonplace that it’s at the centre of comedy. One of the things I was most take aback by in my recent trip to New York is how freeing it felt to hold my phone out without fear of it being snatched.
For Brand London this has to a pretty bad thing. London has as good opportunity at the moment to gain from a lot of international instability, but when something like this is becoming synonymous with the city, that’s a pretty bleak sign.
4. Waitrose is starting to do for British challenger brands what Whole Foods did in the US?
WilderBee, Freja, Gipsy Hill Brewery, Living Things (always in our work fridge), Hip Pop, Punchy, Mother Root (client), Gymkhana Fine Foods (client), Baz & Co, Ottolenghi, The Pickle House, and literally dozens more.
I don’t know the inner workings of Waitrose’s strategy, but 2025 feels like the biggest commitment to challenger brands from any supermarket.
I read somewhere that you can do $50m of revenue just from Wholefoods in the US. I wonder who the first equivalent will be from the class of 2025 in Waitrose?
5. Founders talking to their teams about exits more
Is this more mercenary? I don’t know.
When I was young, founders didn’t publicly admit they were thinking about exit. If they did it was always under the banner of ‘we’d go for an IPO but we’re not thinking about that yet, we’re just building.’ Don’t get me wrong, I often felt that was insincere.
But the opposite? So many founders I meet now are openly talking about their exit horizons.
Are people just building to sell?
6. Hustle is back
“Work-life balance is not the startup game. When we started with LinkedIn, we said “go home, have dinner with your family, and after you’ve had dinner with your family, open up your laptop, get back into the shared work experience and keep working.”
Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn
And then…
“When you’re younger, when you don’t know what you’re doing. When you have to go down a lot of false ends because you’re not as productive, you better work your ass off, you better sprint, you better work three times harder than everybody in the company. It’s essential.”
Marc Randolph, Netflix
This will upset some people but the hustle is back (or maybe it just didn’t go away).
For a few years, those who worked long and hard and smart, had to whisper it in the hallways. The tech status quo had morphed suddenly into a work-life balance mantra.
For many, I imagine they will see this as directly correlated with the rise of the ‘anti-woke’ and the current downfall of D&I in corporate America.
But for me, this actually seems more reflective of the era of technology we’re in. We’ll see more unicorns founded in this current era than we have for a long time. AI has meant we are in a new arms race. And as Marc says, when that happens, you have got to sprint to gain advantage.
7. Longevity
People like Bryan Johnson were never the example of what everyone would be like. Just like Wim Hof before him or members of the organic movement before that, the goal was never that everyone live like him. Instead that trend will seep into everything we do a little bit.
The impact isn’t that 0.0001% of people will want to live forever.
It’s that 10% of people will want to live 20% longer.
And longevity is certainly that trend. Depending on how you carve up the Jobs to be Done you might find that two of our clients Thriva (health insights via blood testing) and Mother Root (non-alcoholic ginger aperitif) are actually competitors.
Alcohol is decreasing. Functional habits are increasing. Sleep is being prioritised. Balance is in full swing.
8. People adding typos to their content to show its not written with AI
As I write this, I know four separate people who read my newsletter who will think this is about them. It’s about all of you – and so it’s probably about everyone else more broadly too.
9. The AI-skeptics have gone quiet
End of 2024 and there were still legitimate voices downplaying the impact that AI would have. Now it’s mid-2025, if you do still hold that view, you’re keeping it to yourself.
Something happened in Q1 of this year that made the transition from ‘it’s nothing’ to ‘oh fuck’ to ‘okay, this is inevitable now let’s see how we can spin this thing?’
I think there’s a series of bits playing out here:
New models feel an order of magnitude more useful
MCPs and automation integrations mean its now viable to build your own tooling easily
The shift in hiring behaviour, see Shopify et al
Obviously we have no idea how far this goes, but one things for sure, it’s no longer being downplayed.
And if you want to see how this is heating up, yesterday’s note from Zuck should provide some answers….
10. Luxury Strategy Handbook is diversifying
Vogue Business noted a return to gatekeeping back in February referencing the fact that Hermès, Bottege Veneta, and Corteiz were joining the ranks of the Birkin in deliberately trying to engineer exclusivity and lack of access.
Readers of the Luxury Strategy Handbook will be familiar with this strategy.
The goal of luxury marketing is to do no marketing. Remove access. Increase barriers to entry. Stop your customers coming in. Raise prices. Say No.
But for every brand that follows this ilk, there are other luxury houses succeeding in other ways. It’s not quiet luxury if you’ve got Liam Gallagher jeering from the front of a Burberry campaign. Nor is it exclusive if you have a café for the masses to grab something with Hindmarch or ALD tagged across it.
I think it’s still important for premium brands to be ultra careful in what and how they appropriate from the luxury playbook. To beat your enemy, you have to know them first.
What do you think? What’s missing or on your hit list? And maybe more importantly as we enter the business end of the year, what do we think we’re going to see gracing our lives in the second half of 2025?
A big thanks to the wider Ballpoint team for helping put this list together.
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