The Day After Most Contagious 2025

Several speakers started from the same social diagnosis. Collective optimism is draining away. Housing is becoming unaffordable, food less healthy, healthcare more uncertain. ‘Social disconnection’ is no longer a marginal phenomenon. According to a recent EU survey, 57% of 18- to 35-year-olds feel moderately to severely lonely. For 17%, it’s severe loneliness.

In that context, the role of brands is shifting. A few years ago, purpose and sustainability were the holy grail. Today there is a growing need for social infrastructure: places, rituals, stories and communities where people can find one another again. That goes far beyond transactions. It’s cultural, relational, existential.

In a world that feels increasingly disrupted, people rarely respond with more rationality. The first reaction is usually to escape. Often in the form of nostalgia, even for times we never actually lived through. The psychology behind that can be explained via construal level theory. The further something is from us in time, space or imagination, the more abstract it becomes. And the more abstract, the less rational and the more emotional our response.

This mechanism was unpacked by Chloe Markowicz, Editor at Contagious. Her central thesis: in an era of wars, economic uncertainty and social polarisation, new opportunities arise for brands to connect with their audience through this kind of escapism. She distinguishes three dominant forms of escapism that matter here.

First, there is the escape to childhood, also known as ‘kidulting’. In this phenomenon, adults consciously reconnect with the carefree nature of their childhood through toys, games and cuddly characters, as a coping mechanism to briefly escape the mental pressure of adult life. This is not a fringe niche. Around 40% of European adults bought toys for themselves in 2025.

The hype around Labubu figures is a good example. But the fast-food plushies from Jellycat, offered as part of a dinner experience, also give adults a short-lived, make-believe moment from their childhood.

Second, there is the escape to other worlds. When reality feels heavy, people look for parallel worlds that are aesthetic, cultural or entirely fictional. Brands are increasingly tapping into that need by building universes that feel like alternative timelines or new realities.

Nike, for instance, collaborated with Air Afrique, the art collective that brings the lost African airline back to life in a retro-futuristic universe, complete with original aircrafts and archival iconography.

Vacation® Sunscreen, meanwhile, lets consumers time-travel to the 1980s with a sun cream that feels like an escape capsule from another era. This kind of worldbuilding turns a brand from sender into a place where people actually want to spend time.

Third, there is the escape to the dark side. Horror resurfaces strikingly often in times of social tension. It offers a controlled way of dealing with fear. Brands are increasingly using this aesthetic to amplify their message in a lighter, culturally plugged-in way.

The Ramadan campaign by Pocari Sweat in Indonesia deliberately plays with horror tropes: symptoms of dehydration are presented as mini horror scenes referencing Asian horror, such as The Ring. Oat Cult, likewise, nods to The Wicker Man with rituals, masks, agricultural symbolism and cult-like visuals. In both cases, these brands make their products more culturally charged, more off-beat and therefore more noticeable in a saturated category.

When the escape stops, one reflex remains: the desire for connection. That was the core of the talk by Katrina Stirton Dodd, Trends Editor at Contagious. We live in a time where togetherness is the new scarcity. One in two people regularly feels lonely; one in three has no one to fall back on. Social media are still called ‘social’ but haven’t felt that way for a long time. Individualism dominates the cultural mood, but under the radar, the need for love, closeness and belonging keeps pushing through.

People don’t expect brands to solve loneliness. They’re not looking for yet another app, yet another loyalty programme, yet another campaign. What they do expect is that brands help build the infrastructure for connection. Not solutions, but context. Not transactions, but spaces – physical and mental – that make encounters possible. The most interesting examples didn’t come from big tech, but from small, deliberately human frictions.

Milka deliberately sends a chocolate bar to the wrong address, so you have to knock on your neighbour’s door. Games Workshop doesn’t sell a hobby, it creates tables, tournaments and ‘reasons to meet up’, because a defined moment removes the awkwardness of spontaneous contact. Mattel’s UNO Social Club uses the card game as an excuse to get people offline around a table.

All of that may sound banal, but in this context it’s radical. In what was once called the ‘golden age of connection’, we can now clearly see the rust. Community is becoming the new brand logic. Community is no longer a transactional KPI, but a way of creating value. Brands that shift from ‘me’ to ‘we’, that organise real-life moments, enable rituals and cultivate togetherness, don’t just build target groups. They build communities.

Those are precisely the brands – the ‘brands of love and belonging’ Stirton Dodd spoke about – that are worth their weight in gold today. They are reading the room correctly: behind the façade of individualism lies a deep, unchanging hunger for other people. Brands that take that hunger seriously don’t become noise in the feed, but places that feel like coming home for a moment.

The first highlight of the day was the session by Rohan Tambyrajah, Chief Experience & Strategy Officer at PHD. Rohan neatly connected a number of big shifts: the rise of AI, the explosion of content and the changing role of brands within that.

We’re moving into an age of abundance, where content multiplies faster than human attention. According to Gartner forecasts, by 2030 around 90% of all content will never be seen by human eyes. Not because the content is necessarily bad, but because our attention is finite. We still only have 24 hours in a day. That’s a flat line, while the supply of content keeps rising exponentially.

Our brains can no longer process that abundance, so we outsource more and more choices to algorithms and machines. It’s expected that by 2030 up to 25% of all transactions will be machine-to-machine, with no human involved. In such a world, decisions about what we see, do or buy are increasingly delegated to AI Agents. Not the consumer, but the machine decides which message gets through and which product surfaces.

That directly undermines the classic role of brands: price, functionality, availability, performance… Everything that is purely functional is less and less assessed by humans and more and more filtered by algorithms.

Rohan summed that up in one powerful concept: the line of indifference.

• Everything below that line (functional products, rational arguments, interchangeable propositions) disappears into algorithmic noise and is settled by machines.
• Everything above that line (pleasure, ritual, identity, emotion, narrative, culture and meaning) remains the domain of people.

Rohan’s central message? In an age where AI can automate almost anything, the real added value of brands shifts to what we do not automate: the human level of emotion, story and meaning. Brands that dare to position themselves above the line of indifference still have a future. The rest becomes noise.

A second highlight came from Nils Leonard, Founder and Creative Director of Uncommon Creative Studio. His keynote revolved around one sharp question that goes right to the heart of modern brand building: “The question isn’t: how do we create a famous brand? The question is: how do we create a brand people wish existed?”

Those, according to Leonard, are brands that leave behind more than they take. Brands whose truth we can feel. Brands that entertain, challenge, provoke. Brands that pierce through the bullshit of their category and shape culture. At their best, these brands grow into reference points.

The key, Leonard argues, lies in what he calls narrative objects: tangible, recognisable artefacts that embody a brand’s story and values. Not just another campaign, not more words, but objects that summon a whole world. That principle came to life in the case he brought on stage.

In the cosmetics industry, which runs on impossible promises, The Ordinary chose the radical opposite: honesty. Their platform ‘The Truth Should Be Ordinary’ is built on science, transparency and education. Uncommon helped the brand dismantle the sector’s biggest illusions by making them visible through ‘The Periodic Fable’, a reinvented periodic table that unpacks the most common false claims, buzzwords and pseudoscientific terms in beauty.

To expose the industry’s practices further, Uncommon brought another object to life. Not to unmask a claim, but to make the real secret of the beauty world tangible: the 10.5 million dollars cosmetic brands spend on celebrity endorsements. Instead of keeping quiet about it, The Ordinary stacked dollar bills in a shop window in downtown New York. The result? People queued for two hours just to look at money. Not because it was money, but because transparency itself became a spectacle.

Adweek called it one of the smartest provocations of the year: “A public display of truth in an industry built on illusion.” This is exactly what Leonard means: a narrative object that becomes mirror, indictment and cultural signal all at once.

If there is one lesson that lingers the day after Most Contagious 2025, it’s this: humanity will still be at the core of brand strategy in 2030. Not because consumers will suddenly be more emotional, but because machines are getting better at everything that doesn’t require emotion. What remains is what is irreducibly human: connection, ritual, imagination, culture, warmth and community.

Alex Jenkins closed the event with a nuance that is really a paradigm shift. Our industry must evolve from creating demand for products and services to defending human needs and facilitating ways to meet them. That’s where the new value proposition of brands lies.

Because the consumers of 2030 aren’t asking for more choice or more convenience. They’re asking for something to hold on to. For meaning. For places where they’re not alone. For brands that don’t optimise for algorithms, but for people. In a world where almost everything can be automated, the human becomes the one thing that cannot be copied.

‘Be More Human’ isn’t a slogan. It’s a system requirement. And perhaps also an opportunity to build an industry that adds more to people’s lives than it takes away.