What 2025’s Most Viral Campaigns Got Right

This year, marketing virality hasn’t been driven by controversy alone (though we’ve seen our share looking at you, Astronomer’s Coldplay concert chaos and American Eagle’s Sydney Sweeny’s Great Jeans campaign). The campaigns that stuck, the ones still echoing through comment sections and For You pages, have something else in common: they went beyond the objective of driving attention, they built momentum through layered storytelling and participatory culture.

In a time when audiences are more skeptical, more self-aware, and more creative than some branded content, successful campaigns are meeting them halfway. These campaigns are remixable, narratively rich, and platform-native. But most importantly, they’re designed for community engagement. They’ve moved on from passive participation to building into the campaign strategy fan reaction, reshaping, and resharing.

Whether it’s Gap fusing Y2K nostalgia with K-pop choreography, a teen romance that powers fandom wars or,  a fictional whodunit about a dead mascot, these campaigns tapped into audience behaviors and emotional currencies already in motion. Virality wasn’t the goal, it was the byproduct. These campaigns invited people to care, contribute and keep the story going.

Gap x KATSEYE: A Classic Gap Move Reimagined

Gap didn’t reinvent itself, it returned to what it’s always done best. The brand’s Fall campaign featuring K-pop girl group KATSEYE dancing to Kelis’ “Milkshake” was a callback to decades of iconic Gap choreography campaigns, updated for a new generation. The creative leaned hard into Gap’s brand DNA: music, movement, and denim uniformity, but made it feel undeniably of-the-moment. In a year flooded with AI-generated content, the human touch of the campaign’s crisp choreography, effortful production, and joyful physicality cut through the noise.

The Summer I Turned Pretty: Fandom as a Format

Amazon Prime’s The Summer I Turned Pretty became the viral monoculture of Summer 2025 and not just for its 25M+ viewers. Brands and fans alike activated around its weekly love triangle drama, turning “Team Conrad vs. Team Jeremiah” into a participatory social format. From POV TikToks and character memes to official brand boxes (Swedish Fish for Team Jeremiah, Sour Patch Kids for Team Conrad), the show sparked factional discourse that played out like a sports rivalry which the sports leagues MLB and WNBA even got in on the conversation. When brands leaned into fandom behavior with fluency and respect, they earned real emotional currency.

Duolingo’s “Death of Duo”: From Meme to Myth

Duolingo took its unhinged marketing to a new level by faking the death of its beloved green owl mascot, Duo. The true-crime-inspired campaign played out like a TikTok soap opera, complete with Cybertrucks, funerals, and a dramatic resurrection powered by user engagement. It wasn’t just chaos for chaos’ sake: the story unfolded in real time, giving audiences a shared arc to follow, speculate on, and co-create around. Even Dua Lipa got involved. The internet’s meme era is maturing. In 2025, viral success is less about one-off jokes and more about building stories with plot, payoffs, and characters people care about.