What Brands in the MENA Need to Know to Stay Ahead of the Curve?

We played a game at Cannes this year; report back from the talks you attended with a count of the number of 'AI' mentions. The highest recorded was 22 mentions in an hour!  A couple of weeks ago a one-hour call took place between the leaders of Omnicom and Interpublic to discuss merging their two 'creative' agencies ($30 billions worth).  Data and technology came up at least a dozen times each. AI, eight times. 'Creativity' was mentioned once.  

So, I’m going to stay away from the clichéd AI and Tech trend tropes! Plus, I also think if you get drawn into the tech too much, you can over complicate, and creativity gets lost. Just like it did in their call and probably their agency too.

Don’t get me wrong, work with AI, Data and Tech, just don’t fall in love with it and get all clingy. Instead, build a unique, AI-powered business that creates massive efficiencies for you and your clients. Trust me – your clients can love you back, more than AI will! OK that’s my last mention of AI, I promise.

I’m going to talk about just one of the things to help you win next year. One strategy, in two parts, to help you build your Cultural Power in 2025!  

Media shifts, audiences splinter, budgets tighten, but creativity always wins. (You know award winning work is 12x more effective than those that didn’t pick up some metal, right?) But it’s being creative at speed that will help you win in 2025. Being creatively, culturally relevant, flexible and connected, to be precise. We call it Cultural Creative Agility (CCA). Part of our Cultural Power Index.

Brands that win in 2025 will need to respond to culture creatively and do it instantly. You will need agility, and you will need teams and systems that know how to move and work at the pace of culture. 

Take the general response, and in particular Heinz’s response, to the Taylor Swift ‘chicken and seemingly ranch’ social post as a good example. Heinz’s product drop of 'Ketchup & Seemingly Ranch' is pure Cultural Creative Agility! But there is more to this cultural moment than meets the eye, and that brings me on to our second part. The power of cultural trends and how to play within them.  

There’s a little trend that’s appearing right now and our strategists are calling it 'Cultural Re-Mixing'. Taking something loved and mixing it with something surprising and innovative. The Dubai Chocolate, mixing coke with pickle juice, or mixing olive oil with ice-cream – this is an interesting cultural trend that we think will get bigger. But whether this trend does spawn more collaborations, marketing moments or even new product launches is yet to be seen. The nugget here is that consumers, and in particular gen z’s, are playing with traditional, stable norms and rejecting the restrictions that have been placed on them by generation after generation. They are demanding more and they are demanding different. Whether it’s owning a home, but with a shared living room and kitchen, or even a shared Dyson vacuum, or owning a car and renting it out, Cultural Re-Mixing has the potential to be bigger than just two products coming together. In lots of ways consumers are asking, why can’t I have my cake and eat it too, and brands and businesses need to be ready.  

Brands in 2025 must be set up to identify cultural trends that have traction, spotting ones that are relevant and authentic to them, and for them to join in. As social post trending is only the beginning – look deeper and you will find a nugget like Cultural Re-Mixing and it’s connotations. Identify, clarify, create and implement, all at speed, and while trying not to be the embarrassing 'Dad at the Disco' on social!”

So, start building a team with Cultural Creative Agility muscles and pay close attention to the trends that are happening and will happen in 2025. Without getting better at CCA, your brands Cultural Power will falter.

Of course, AI can help with this. Oh bugger!