4 trends to watch in creative content for 2025
Developments in generative AI once again left the content world well and truly shaken in 2024. Both its benefits and drawbacks shaped how we produced and consumed online content. Looking ahead, 2025 will be no different. All major trends that I foresee will be touched by astonishing AI advancements at some level, whether content creators lean into its uses or lash out against its existence. Here’s what to watch in the year ahead…
Generative AI: the support act or the star of the show?
Starting with the crux of the issue, 2025 could be the year that answers this question. Predictions on how generative AI will change digital marketing vary. Some AI experts are certain that by 2026, 90% of online content will be generated by AI without human intervention. People from the marketing world however, including us at The Content Engine, are excited at how it could lend a hand. Using generative AI tools as an editorial or production assistant could combat blank page syndrome, spark new ideas, streamline creative workflows and analyze data to super-power content strategies. This ultimately means more time to develop storytelling and creativity.
The recent release of Open AI’s Sora suggests that the technology might not take such a back seat, however. Sign-ups for the text-to-video tool froze after high demand in December. Will the video clips generated be fit for customers' eyes? Match brand guidelines? Give us the licensing terms we need to replace our current image providers? And, most importantly, have enough soul and accuracy to create reliable and engaging work? Answers to these questions depend on accessibility and service improvements. It is certainly a space to keep a close eye on.
Vertical video will soon be everywhere
Digital marketing is a constant fight for eyeballs and screen space. What better way to win attention than by making immersive content that fills a whole phone screen? A few months ago, if you opened the LinkedIn mobile app and scrolled down four times you would have seen a ‘Videos for you’ section. Now, after a presumably successful test, there is a dedicated video feed. The professional network’s vertical video-centric strategy feels like an attempt to keep up with Meta, who have hosted this format for a couple of years.
It’s not the only one.
Even platforms that classically hosted long-form, horizontal content are doubling down on vertical formats. Since the end of 2020, YouTube Shorts have seen a 135% increase in popularity year on year with the channel earning 70 billion views a day in 2024.
With the staggering growth of Linked in this year and YouTube’s answer to mobile-friendly short-form video content, vertical video has great potential to dominate the digital ecosystem in 2025. So if you’re still making content in landscape, you’ll be missing a trick and increasing the chance of people missing your content on their feed too.
Being a real human has never been more important
I tested this statement with a little experiment. When I opened my LinkedIn app and scrolled 20 times, 75% of content was from an individual account. Furthermore, when I clicked into the new video feed and scrolled 20 times, 90% of the video content featured there had a narrator. I had exactly the same results on Instagram Reels. This human-centric trend feels like it’s been gaining momentum for some time and I really believe AI-generated content is one of the reasons behind this growing need to interact with real people.
As Victoria Turk wrote in The Guardian “in a world where anything can be fake, everything might be.” In 2025, as AI-generated video and images become more prolific, we will need to know who we can trust and so will rely even more on experts to give us the facts. Surely human connection should trump clever fakery.
Supporting this view, social channels have made investments which champion more thought leadership and less ‘enshittification’ of digital content. LinkedIn's ‘Top Voices’ verification and Thought leadership Ads are an attempt to amplify those who have something interesting and notable to say. Meta’s latest tool, Meta Video Seal is the platform’s latest attempt at tackling deepfakes, which made up over 7% of fraud cases this year, according to ID verification platform Sumsub.
Turk asks, “Are we ready for a world in which it is impossible to discern which of the moving images we see are real?” The increase in content that features real humans, alongside measures to stamp out fake-content perpetrators, suggests we don’t want to completely give up our creativity, opinions and group cohesiveness to an intelligent machine just yet.
Lo-Fi content is enough, even for LinkedIn
I’ve talked about LinkedIn a lot in this post because it’s the channel our customer base - large corporates and NGOs committed to the SDGs - are most excited about. This is likely due to how it’s changing.
There were a few moments in the second half of 2024 when I did a double take and checked I was on the right app. Sharing your true self on LinkedIn was once unthinkable: it was a platform for innocuous on-message updates or smug successes. This year I spotted the first ‘day in a life’ videos in my LinkedIn feed as well as content on workplace relationship advice shared by people with their hair in curlers.
Playing into this authenticity is our final trend to watch: Lo-Fi content.
Lo-Fi content in practice means 'lower quality' but that doesn’t mean consuming it is a bad experience: quite the contrary. This stripped back content takes minimal effort to produce and lets the idea or the person do all the work. In short, channels don’t need content with fancy sound effects, 4K cameras and graphics for them to deem them worthy of putting them on social feeds.
More and more, authenticity seems to ensure content success. The notion that perfection is a facade hit social networks such as Instagram and Facebook around the pandemic in 2020, with User-Generated Content enjoying a surge in popularity.
UGC was pretty basic; a raw image, a blurry video clip, even a sloppy screenshot. Now four years on, as AI tools are making content creation much more accessible, we’re entering a more sophisticated yet still simple Lo-Fi era. Think blocky headlines and subtitles with a few photos slapped over the top. All channels seem to be promoting this kind of material - even those once thought too uptight and professional. It may look easy, but it’s hard to get it right. The less you rely on fancy effects, the more you need strong story-telling.
In summary, yes social feeds will continue to be pumped with generic, mid-range content in 2025, thanks to generative AI. We might also get some decently produced stuff from it. But we believe with our need to connect and learn, the era of the expert narrator, and those who can demonstrate their knowledge and creativity, is upon us.