Sebastian Revell.
The AdNews end-of-year Perspectives, looking back at 2025 and forward to next year.
And see the AdNews 50 plus page state of the market report, Forecast 2026
Sebastian Revell, Executive Strategy Partner, Emotive.
Looking back on 2025 and forward to 2026, I wanted to chew on both an innovation, and an enduring dogma. Together they deliver us impact and longevity, and three key issues to tackle.
The innovation: GenAI. What else?
I tried very hard to avoid it. Less out of a lack of interest, more about trying to be a little less obvious. But there’s just no way to leave it out. So let’s get it out of the way first.
AI moves from a cool toy to both a creative arms race, and an operational risk
What 2025 has been to AI, is like what 1969 was to space exploration. Back then, years of scientific advancement came to a head as we landed on our nearest and dearest celestial body. Fast forward many ‘giant leaps’ in science and technology, and this has been the defining year in starting to remove the ‘fiction’ from science fiction.
By the end of 2025 we have seen GenAI become a requisite, not just a plaything for the tech-curious. This has led to many agencies and brands being keen to demonstrate their refreshed creative potential, as well as the perceived efficiencies it creates. ‘Perceived’ because what isn't spoken about nearly enough is just how hard it is to get it right. For many, using GenAI means getting to the final product quicker and cheaper, but it’s just not the case.
Iteration is never linear, and there’s no defined rule on how LLMs will react to the creative vision it’s prompted with. This often results in a more expensive and time-consuming process than we’re being led to believe. Especially given the rise of specialists in wardrobe, skin, hair etc. We recently went through over 1,000 iterations to get a bunch of deep sea creatures right! You could say we were drowning in it.
Our first issue to tackle: it might be time as a creative industry to shift the dialogue around GenAI from not just being an efficiency play (a time and cost saver), to being more of an effectiveness play (a facilitator of greater creative freedom and impact). But with that, must come an allowance for fair time and budget to get it right.
The potential importance of ‘HumaCore AI’
Where GenAI adoption is rising fast, governance and consistency are lagging. This brings meaty issues into the open around authenticity, IP/rights, brand safety, and most interestingly for me, the ‘uncanny valley’ problem.
This is the feeling of discomfort we get from interacting with, and experiencing something which is artificial and appears almost, but not quite human. In the not so distant future, it’s not inconceivable that as we fully migrate from a GenAI experimentation era to one of normalisation, there will come a point when the conversation shifts from “look how cool and realistic AI is” to “because AI is so realistic, it’s the brands that help us connect to reality and authentic human connection, that will ultimately be more successful."
It’s not that I don’t think GenAI will continue to have a profound impact on human existence, I just don’t think it will have as profound an effect on human life. Novelty will always decay, trust will always be tested and (the majority of us) will always seek connection with a pack. Too much artificiality from brands will conceivably just not fly with the masses.
This might result in a need for something we could call ‘HumaCore AI’ (I’m definitely not widely read enough to prove this is an entirely original thought, but just go with me). ‘HumaCore AI’ is the conceptual hypothesis that we need to balance advancements in AI with core human values and the need for authentic human connection. This will impact how brands implement and show up with GenAi integration.
Our second issue to tackle: unless implemented with transparency and/or ‘HumaCore’ intent, advanced usage of GenAI may well become more of a barrier, than a facilitator to engaging brand experiences.
A dogma: evoke emotion, create entertainment, drive attention. Simples.
It’s so easy to be distracted by shiny and new things that we simply forget to get the basics right. Whatever side of the fence you teeter on, this is exactly what both Byron Sharp and Mark Ritson are consistently trying to beat into us.
The battle for emotionally distracted goblins with thumbs.
In an ideal world, our audiences would be rational sophisticates carefully comparing attributes, then rightfully choosing our product. But we know that the marketing reality is that they’re just emotionally distracted goblins with thumbs.
Advertising literally comes from the Latin word advertere, meaning ‘to turn toward’. And in 2025, we finally doubled down on the basic ingredients for doing this effectively and how to get our goblins on side - emotion and entertainment. These aren’t the ‘nice-to-haves’ of advertising, they’re the price of entry; and it’s something you earn, not something you buy.
Ritson and System1 laid it out clearly in their Creative Dividend paper released in June, showing that effectiveness is driven by emotion, distinctive brand assets, and time. Noting that we keep yanking campaigns before they’ve had a chance to ‘wear in’.
TRA’s ‘favourite ads’ research further backed this, showing how Aussies disproportionately love emotional storytelling and ads built on character, sentiment and humour, not RTBs. And Tourism Australia’s ‘Come and Say G’Day’ (fronted by our favourite pants-man Robert Irwin) didn’t just rack up views, it scored in the top 1% of global ads tested by System1, signalling the compounding power of emotional storytelling done consistently.
Rocket science, marketing really is not.
Our third (and ongoing) issue to tackle: Short-terminism! As we head into 2026, my hope is that all this proof adds to the eulogy for ‘the short and nothing but the short’ modern marketing focus. And with it we can help our marketing partners continually prove to their C-suite that emotion and entertainment = business success, not just heavy-handed CTAs.
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