The Miri’s 2025: honouring the best (and calling out the rest)

It’s awards season. And while Hollywood just finished arguing over best picture, we’ve been settling a different debate: what in the creative and performance marketing world genuinely deserved a standing ovation, and what deserved to be shown the door.

2025 was the year that AI stopped being a conversation and started being a workflow. Creative teams were under pressure to produce more, faster,  and across more formats and platforms than ever before. The tools market exploded with solutions promising to fix everything. Some delivered. Many didn’t. And through all of it, the gap between teams measuring the right things and teams still optimising for vanity metrics just kept widening.

So we did what any self-respecting agency would do at the end of a big year, and handed out some awards.

The “Miris” go to the tools, trends and ideas that genuinely earned recognition in 2025. The Skippables go to everything else: the overhyped, the overused and the overdue for retirement. Both matter. Because knowing what to double down on and what to walk away from is, ultimately, the job.

The envelope, please.

The Skippables: awarded to the tools, trends and habits the industry needs to leave behind

The metric we need to move on from

And the Skippable goes to… “Impressions, CTR and install volume”

Three metrics walked into 2025. Impressions said ‘people saw me.’ CTR said ‘people clicked me.’ Install volume said ‘people downloaded me.’ None of them could tell you whether any of it actually mattered.

Let’s start with Impressions. The fact that an ad was technically visible to a human eye tells you almost nothing about whether it did anything useful. Impressions are easy to report and almost impossible to act on. Yet they still appear in decks and reports as evidence of impact.

CTR feels important because a click is a real action – Someone saw the ad and responded to it. But a click is only valuable if you know what happens next, as optimising for clicks without tracking what those clicks actually convert into is how teams end up celebrating the wrong thing. Bringing in the wrong audience efficiently is still bringing in the wrong audience.

Install volume is the biggest offender, and the one the industry has the least excuse for still celebrating. Raw installs as a metric is the clearest symbol of old-world thinking in performance marketing. Anyone can drive installs (insert Seinfeld reference here about how it’s the holding that counts). The question that actually matters is whether the people who installed your app came back the next day, the next week, and the next month. Volume without retention is not growth.

The buzzword we need to retire

And the Skippable goes to… “Authentic”

There is some irony in a word that was supposed to mean ‘genuine’ becoming the least genuine word in marketing. But that is exactly what happened to “authentic” in 2025, and frankly it’s been years in the making.

It started out right. A reaction against corporate-feeling creatives and the desire to see more genuine, real content. But then what happened was that brands began manufacturing authenticity at scale which completely negates the original sentiment and goal. Briefs went out asking for “authentic UGC-style content”, agencies were hired to produce “authentic creator partnerships”, entire creative strategies were built around looking like they had no creative strategy. The word became the exact opposite of what it was supposed to replace.

By the end of 2025, “authentic” had joined the long list of marketing words that say everything and mean nothing. If you find yourself writing it in a brief, a deck or a strategy document, stop and think about what it is that you’re after. Is it raw? unscripted? creator-led? Lo-Fi? Those words still mean something, use those.

Honourable mentions: “AI-powered,” and  “data-driven”. You know who you are.

And now – onto something more positive:

The Miri’s: awarded to the the tools, trends and ideas that genuinely earned it

The best social trend

And the Miri goes to… “UGC industrialisation”

UGC was intended to be scrappy – Real people, real reactions, little to no production budget, no art direction. The format worked well because it looked like nobody tried too hard.

By 2025, UGC had become one of the most briefed and optimised creative formats in the industry. Hooks were scripted, formats were templated, creators were cast for specific audience segments. What looked casual on screen was anything but that behind the scenes.

The evolution of UGC into a proper production discipline was one of the most important creative developments of the year, particularly for gaming and app advertisers who need to produce at the volume and velocity that platforms now demand. The format only works at scale if it can be systematised. 

But, and there is a but, the moment audiences clock the template, the whole thing collapses. This means the teams doing this well are the ones who understand both sides: the production discipline required to succeed, and the creative instinct required to make sure none of that discipline shows.

That is a harder skill than it sounds. Which is exactly why it deserves a Miri!

The Miri for best AI tool for creative production and collaboration

And the Miri goes to… “Assist”

Every year there are tools that promise to transform creative production. Assist is on this list because it did something different: it changed how work gets made from the very beginning of the process to the very end.

Assist, part of MSQ Intelligence, takes creative teams from concept to finished asset without the handoff friction that might kill momentum. Briefs, scripts, concepts and final production assets all live in one place, built on top of AI but guided by the strategic and creative thinking that makes the output actually useful. 

AI without creative direction produces volume. Assist produces work.

For clients, the impact showed up in three ways. First, speed: the time between brief and first creative iteration dropped significantly, which in a world where platform algorithms reward creative refresh rates, is a priceless competitive advantage. Second, consistency: when the full creative journey runs through one system, the brief and the asset stay connected in a way that separate tools and processes might not replicate. Third, cost efficiency: producing more creatives without dramatically increasing resources is the new winning model.

2025 was full of AI tools that automated the easy parts of creative production while leaving the hard parts exactly where they were. The ones worth recognising are the ones that understood that the goal was never to replace creative thinking. It was to give it more room to operate.

And that’s a wrap!

Four awards – Two things worth celebrating, two worth leaving behind. 

The through line connecting all of them is the same: 2025 rewarded teams who were honest about what actually works and ruthless about what doesn’t. The right tools, the right metrics, the right creative instincts. Not the loudest ones. Not the most hyped.

2026 will ask the same questions with higher stakes. The gap between teams building on solid foundations and teams still optimising for the wrong things is only going to widen.

Think your campaigns could benefit from that kind of thinking? We’d love to have the conversation.