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2025 was a wild year to be running ads.
Algorithms shifted. Feeds got noisier. Privacy changes kept rolling out. New formats appeared just as fast as old ones stopped performing. And in the middle of all that, AI moved from “experimental side project” to a core part of the creative stack.
Marketers had to adapt in real time: rethinking what “good creative” looks like, how fast they can produce it, and how to keep campaigns on-brand across more channels than ever.
That’s the backdrop for this lookback.
Across all that change, teams using The Brief as their AI marketing agency still managed to ship an enormous amount of work:
Those numbers are powered by people: the designers, marketers, performance marketing teams, and agencies who shipped campaigns day after day in one of the toughest attention markets ever.
This is a look at how they actually worked in 2025.
The headline number: in 2025, teams exported 2.5 million ads from The Brief.
If you printed every one of those ads as a 1080×1080 poster and laid them out side by side, you’d cover roughly 50 football fields of ads. That’s brand stories, launch campaigns, evergreen performance assets and one-off experiments, all stitched together into a single, massive creative surface.
Behind that volume is something even more meaningful: time saved.
Based on production benchmarks, those workflows added up to around 1.2 million hours saved.
Which equals:
That’s time teams reclaimed to:
The Brief is here to automate the repetitive parts of ad creation—but the imagination, the taste, and the judgment behind those 2.5M ads? That’s all you.
One of our favorite views into 2025 is the split between animated and static designs.
Across exported creatives:
Animation clearly took the lead, but static didn’t go anywhere. Instead, teams used both in smart, complementary ways:
Even the calendar tells a story:
The takeaway from 2025: the best-performing ad systems aren’t “video-first” or “static-first”—they’re format-flexible and designed to move easily between both.
New channels come and go, but some workhorse formats just don’t quit. In 2025, the most-exported ad sizes in The Brief were:
Horizontal formats still drove the largest share of exports, but full-screen vertical made one of the biggest jumps year over year, as teams leaned into social, UGC-style, and mobile-first campaigns.
What this tells us about 2025:
Media plans are increasingly fragmented, yet core display inventory still carries a big share of performance budgets. At the same time, teams are rapidly scaling vertical, social-native creative alongside those “boring but essential” units.
Creative systems now have to do both: reliably cover the staple formats buyers expect and spin up high-volume, highly-branded vertical assets for the feeds where customers actually spend time.
In 2025, users sent about 470,000 AI prompts into The Brief.
If you stitched those prompts together as continuous text, you’d get roughly 175 novels worth of creative direction—all the ways marketers described their products, audiences, and visual goals to an AI assistant.
Consistently, we saw prompts packed with words like:
The result is a fascinating snapshot of what “good creative” meant in 2025: cinematic but clean, premium but accessible, and heavily focused on product clarity.
AI’s real job: video & product shots
When we look closer at labeled prompts from The Brief’s AI features, one pattern dominates:
About 86% of prompts were focused on either:
In other words, AI wasn’t just used for wild concepts or abstract art. In 2025, AI’s “day job” inside The Brief was:
It’s no exaggeration to say that AI became a core part of the production stack for product-focused and video-heavy campaigns.
A global creative community: 133 countries and counting
The Brief’s 2025 footprint was truly global. Creatives from 133 countries used our tools to build and ship campaigns.
The largest AI prompt volumes came from:
But some of our favorite stories come from the long tail: teams in smaller markets using The Brief to punch above their weight in visual quality and speed.
That distribution shows up in the work, too:
When you look at the full map, 2025 reads like a global creative patchwork—different visual styles, different markets, one shared toolset.
All of this output and experimentation required serious infrastructure.
In 2025, we shipped 15 new tools inside The Brief to help teams go from idea to live campaigns faster, including some heavy hitters like:
These weren’t built in isolation. They were built in response to how you actually work:
Every new tool in 2025 had the same goal: take more of the busywork out of making ads, so humans can spend more time on the parts only humans can do.
2025 in Ads: a year powered by our users
2025 was a big year for The Brief—but it was an even bigger year for the teams using it.
From first-time users testing AI prompts to power users running entire global campaigns in The Brief, you turned a platform into a living, breathing creative ecosystem.
So to everyone who designed, tweaked, shipped, and iterated ads with us in 2025:
Thank you for making 2025 this big. Here’s to even more imaginative, efficient, and joyful creative work ahead. 💛
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