Naughty, Nice, and Everything in Between: What 2025 Taught Us About Brand
From Cannes to Coldplay, AI Christmas ads to public health brilliance, this Christmas special episode of Canned cuts through the tinsel to answer one question: what actually builds brand?
By the time December rolls around, marketers are tired. Budgets are blown, campaigns are wrapped, and everyone is pretending the year went exactly to plan.
That’s why year-end conversations matter.
In this Christmas special episode of Canned: The Marketing Podcast, Ben van Rooy from Human Digital and Steph Quantrill from Cue Marketing look back at the brands that defined 2025. Not through awards decks or LinkedIn hype, but through outcomes, impact, and cultural reality.
Joined by brand strategist Eugene Healey, this episode becomes less about who won and lost, and more about what brand actually means right now.
Marketing didn’t get simpler in 2025. It got noisier.
More platforms. More content. More cultural tension. More pressure to perform instantly and explain everything to a CFO who wants certainty in an uncertain world.
Against that backdrop, this episode tackles the uncomfortable gap between:
Talkability and sales
Creativity and effectiveness
Cultural relevance and brand permission
And it asks a harder question many brands avoid:
Just because you can participate in a cultural moment, does that mean you should?
The Big Themes That Kept Coming Up
Brand Is Bigger Than Campaigns
One of the clearest threads through the episode is that brand is not what you launch. It’s what you live with.
Optus didn’t land on the naughty list because of a bad ad. They landed there because brand is built through systems, service failures, and how you communicate when things go wrong. In highly regulated industries, marketing teams often inherit messes they didn’t create, but still carry the reputational cost.
The takeaway: Brand lives everywhere, especially where marketing has no control.
Talkability Is Not the Same as Growth
American Eagle’s Sydney Sweeney campaign became unavoidable in 2025. Hot takes everywhere. Headlines everywhere. Cultural debate everywhere.
Sales growth? Not so much.
As Eugene Healey points out, brand consideration and preference actually declined. The people celebrating the campaign online were not the people buying the product.
This is the danger zone modern marketing keeps walking into:
Confusing cultural visibility with commercial effectiveness
Assuming controversy equals success
Reporting impressions when the business needed preference
Attention without alignment is just noise.
When Purpose Actually Works
Not all bold work fails. Herpes New Zealand proves that.
Their multi-year campaign reframed sexual health through humour, humanity, and honesty. It didn’t talk down to audiences or hide behind service-announcement tropes. It treated people like adults.
What made it work was not just creativity, but commitment:
Multi-channel execution
Real healthcare integration
Clear behavioural outcomes
This wasn’t purpose as positioning. It was purpose as practice.
And it’s why the campaign deserved its Cannes Lions and its place firmly on the nice list.
The Realities Brands Are Struggling With
Oligopolies Kill Bravery
Supermarkets and telcos dominate their categories. And paradoxically, that dominance makes them boring.
When the incentive is “don’t mess it up”, creativity dies. As Eugene puts it, many Australian and New Zealand industries operate in a Mexican standoff where everyone is profitable enough to stay safe and terrified enough to stay dull.
Yet challenger behaviour still exists. Up Bank proves regulation is not an excuse. IKEA proves scale doesn’t kill imagination.
The issue isn’t constraints. It’s courage.
AI Isn’t the Problem. Cynicism Is.
Coca-Cola’s AI Christmas campaign isn’t offensive because it uses AI. It’s offensive because it assumes viewers don’t care.
Same assets. Same tropes. Same emotional shorthand. Just cheaper and faster.
The reaction wasn’t outrage. It was indifference.
And indifference is lethal.
As the episode makes clear, the problem isn’t technology replacing creativity. It’s brands choosing efficiency over respect for craft.
Where Brands Got It Right
IKEA’s New Zealand Launch
Few brands understand cultural entry like IKEA.
Instead of shouting “we’re here”, they studied how New Zealanders actually live. Then they showed up in ways that felt local, inclusive, and human.
Pop-ups outside Auckland. Regional media investment. Physical brand assets that felt playful, not imported.
The lesson is simple:
Global brands win locally when they listen first.
Cadbury Made to Share
This campaign worked because it integrated product, packaging, and behaviour.
By mapping real consumption moments and reflecting shared effort and appreciation, Cadbury didn’t just tell a story. They created more reasons to open the chocolate.
It’s a reminder that the best brand ideas:
Increase consumption occasions
Reinforce purpose
Live beyond one channel
John Lewis and the Power of Emotion
Every year, people say emotional advertising is dead. Every year, John Lewis proves otherwise.
This year’s campaign resonated because it didn’t chase trends. It respected audience intelligence and emotional complexity. It trusted storytelling.
Craft still works when it’s honest.
Crisis, Culture, and the Art of Recovery
The Astronomer and Coldplay saga wasn’t planned. But the response was.
By leaning into discourse instead of hiding from it, the brand reframed a viral disaster into cultural commentary. The choice of Gwyneth Paltrow was absurd in exactly the right way.
The lesson:
When culture explodes around you, denial makes it worse. Reframing can save you.
Practical Takeaways for 2026
If there’s one piece of advice that runs through the episode, it’s this:
Build from the bottom up, not the top down.
That means:
Start with real moments, not big slogans
Design ideas that can fragment and travel
Create frameworks people can participate in, remix, and own
Respect audiences enough to do the work properly
Brands that win now are not louder. They’re clearer.
Naughty or Nice Is a Moving Target
Every brand is one decision away from the naughty list.
Every crisis is one response away from redemption.
What separates the winners from the cautionary tales isn’t budget, scale, or even talent. It’s judgement.
This episode doesn’t hand out easy answers. But it does offer something better: perspective.
And as we head into 2026, that might be the most valuable thing marketers can have.
🎧 Watch or Listen to the Full Episode
If you want the full conversation, including Cannes side quests, fashion tangents, and unfiltered industry honesty, watch the episode or listen on your podcast platform of choice.
Subscribe to Canned: The Marketing Podcast for more conversations that cut through the noise and get real about what works.
Check out the YouTube version here: https://youtu.be/xpjabFBsYdw