Soapbox 2025: Dan Davies on Hard-Hitting Copy and Hyper Hyper Relevance
Our LBB community is buzzing with ideas, opinions and visions for a better advertising industry. So this year, we invited you to dig out your megaphone and climb onto our figurative soapbox to share your hopes for 2025: what change do you want to see? How can the inner workings of the industry improve? How should it adapt to the tech, social, cultural, economic, and politics shifts shaping the market?
Taking the mic this time is Dan Davies, strategy director at Tag, who ponders the power of words, the need to be creatively bold, and whether there’s such a thing as ‘hyper hyper relevance’.
Marketers don’t need crystal balls for 2025, but this year we might need to grow a set.
Why? The big trends will pretty much be the same as 2024. Which means in some way or other we’ll all be focused on data-driven personalisation, hyper relevance, AI and automation. So, how will we stand-out? Can you out-personalise or out-AI your competitors? Is there really such a thing as hyper hyper relevance?
To me the answer is to be creatively bold.
This courage will take many creative forms. One way is to be braver with words. Not the words generated by robots or algorithmically proven to be effective, therein lies the race to sameness. But the sort of words that stop thumbs and halt people in their tracks. Powerful words that drive even more powerful reactions.
At the end of last year we saw two very different, but equally impactful examples of what words can really do.
The world was given a chilling wake up to the power of words in the aftermath of a shocking tragedy. The three words reportedly inscribed on the bullet that killed United Healthcare’s CEO – "Deny, Defend, Depose" – seemed to encapsulate the mistrust and frustration many feel toward the insurance industry. These words resonated so strongly on social media that, for some, they transformed the perpetrator of a violent act into a symbol of defiance. While this mention in no way justifies or glorifies such a brutal and senseless act, it underscores the profound emotional impact that carefully chosen words can have, particularly when they tap into collective sentiment.
Returning to morally safer ground. John Lewis proved the value of the right words when it announced its return to ‘Never Knowingly Undersold’ two years after it had dropped it. Ditching these three words had cost the brand business, because many assumed their prices had risen. The irony is that John Lewis can even better deliver this brand promise now, precisely because AI is helping them price match quicker and easier.
So, here’s my thought for the year. The new marketing hot buttons of 2025 alone can’t make your marketing hot. Especially if everyone adopts them. All the data and algorithms in the world won’t make you powerfully personal. But with the right words you just might make hyper relevance relevant, trigger the emotional connections that make omnichannel better connected, and twin effectiveness with efficiency.
So, be brave by embracing the future of marketing this year but recognise that bravery can be the courage to take a backwards step too. Marry the insights advanced analytics bring with the human observation and understanding of writers. Harness the power of data and AI but make robots and writers best buds in 2025.
Create a marriage of convenience where algorithms do the heavy lifting and copywriters the heavy hitting.
But isn’t it just adding cost? No. Could gen AI write an earworm or words that become language currency? Take “Simples”. AI couldn’t have written it because it isn’t a word, yet it is now in the Collins English Dictionary. And we still relate it with meerkats 15 years later. One parting thought. Lo-fi might just keep you ahead of the martech curve. We’re already seeing the backlash against AI, (witness the growth of AI-shaming), and the continued enshitification (it is a word) of social platforms, maybe, just maybe old-school marketing has a place.
