Non-Toxic Masculinity.

Can brands harness a masculine vibe in a non-toxic way?

I’ve read a lot of 2025 predictions about the end of ‘woke’ and DEI. Long term the trend is going in the right direction but this year ‘Men Behaving Badly’ will be a theme. Noel and Liam will replace Taylor (Swift) and Charlie (XCX), Trump beat Harris and Zuck wants more money not more inclusion. I’m interested in how brands might harness this vibe in a non toxic way.

Before we dive in, although it is related, I wanted to talk about Jaguar very (very) quickly.. One interesting take I saw was from Mark Boyd who thought the whole thing was an attempt to reset the AI search overlords. In the same way a politician announces something silly or frivolous to shift more unsavoury content down the rankings.

“Jaguar’s problem is that legacy of content means it’s nigh-on impossible to change the brand.”

I think there is something to that. Much has been said about the existing Jaguar audience. When I worked with Rory Sutherland at Ogilvy he always used to use Jaguar as an example where not to talk to your existing audience. Rory, who drove a jag back then, said ‘I don’t want to see a car with the headline that simply reads, “Fat?”’

Spare a thought for existing Jag drivers. They are driving around in what they thought was a man’s car and now….what? A little like the French plantation family on the border of Vietnam and Cambodia in the Final Cut of Apocalypse Now they feel like they should be fighting for something. But what?

Everything is cyclical. Fashion tells us that. Skinny jeans, baggy trousers, flares, cycle in and out. Potentially the cycles are getting shorter but also within cultural advertising there are only so many vibes to go around. So we naturally come back to the same themes time and again.

2025 will be about men and money. Most years in history have been about men and money! So, despite research from the major consultancies showing that a more diverse workforce helps the bottom line, we are getting Trump over Harris, Oasis over Swifties, profits over DEI. I just read a piece about how White Bread is taking over from Sourdough. Even bread is cyclical.

It will be interesting to see how brands portray this vibe shift. I fully expect a lot of Loaded style lad content around Oasis. The cheeky rowdy unapologetically ‘avin it attitude will drown out everything else. Boys being boys. ‘It’s refreshing isn’t it?’ some will say. After all these years of having to be boring some will let loose. This will coincide with Trump’s second term, featuring men behaving badly and women who prioritise personal power (and profit) over everything else.

The BBC just released a 90 minute documentary about Loaded magazine. The 90’s lad bible. Sex, drugs and rock and roll. There were of course Ladettes as well. Girls were allowed a drink too you know and some did well out of the movement but the documentary shows that most women went along with the leering and jeering despite feeling uncomfortable and soon tiring of it. Loaded relaunched last year as an ‘antidote to wokeness’. The target market is men in their 40’s and 50’s who remember the wild nights out. Unsurprisingly it lasted about 6 months and is now a really sad website.

So, no Loaded comeback, thankfully, but you won’t be able to move this year for Noel and Liam. There will be obvious clothing campaigns. How many different brands will Liam Gallager model cagoules for? But there will be tons of other brands that try to harness their vibe. Cars, drinks, probably a mobile network, a bank? Who knows? What I’m hoping for is something a bit more interesting. A little more unexpected. Something that has lad vibes in a non toxic manner.

Perhaps something similar to the way the sunscreen brand Vacation approaches everything. There is a knowing tongue in cheeky, sexy, old school vibe. If you were being parsimonious you could argue that it’s sexist and promoting a time when women were mistreated but it’s done in such a way that you would have to be really looking for a fight to come to that conclusion. I know Lach, one of the co-founders quite well from when we worked together at betaworks. He is the most chill Aussie dude.

It may be that brands will simply ape whatever vibe that Liam and Noel are displaying. Liam is equally happy going for a nice chill run on Hampstead Heath or throwing TVs out of hotels. So we may have to wait and see. Marketers will need be nimble not to misjudge the laddish quotient. By the way, when I speak of Oasis I really mean Liam. I’m not sure anyone really cares what Noel does if it doesn’t relate to Liam.

It shouldn’t be beyond our wit as marketers to create masculine brand messages that are not toxic. Working on another project with a famous Creative Leader from the 80s and 90’s, he described himself as a hard person to work for. He said he was ‘mean’. I thought that was quite an interesting term. He was not toxic, he was not a sex pest. He probably was a bit of an asshole but mainly he was mean. His defence was that he wasn’t mean if you were brilliant at your job. Basically the Whiplash methodology. Random thought: could a woman have played the J.K.Simmons role in Whiplash, or would that cause too many blown minds?

Brands follow vibes, they don’t create them.

It will be interesting to see how brands parlay Trump’s particular brand of masculinity. In 2016 he was thought of as an anomaly. Many big brands either stayed quiet or rallied against Trump thinking order would restore itself. Nike’s 2018 BLM campaign with Colin Kapernick taking the knee was about as anti Trump as you could be without being explicit. The headline is as much about Nike as Kapernick. MAGAs burnt their crap dad nikes in protest. But this time round Trump won the popular vote. Brands follow vibes, they don’t create them. I think we’ll see some analogues of the Colin Kapernick campaign that make a nod towards the right and masculinity without being explicit. I’ve written before about how brands like Fred Perry deal with nutjobs co-opting their brand, but this will be different.

Meta’s recent announcement that they are getting rid of fact checkers and installing Dana White, to the board, is most certainly a vibe shift. UFC fighter in, Sheryl Sandberg out. Zuck is reading the tea leaves and acting accordingly. I saw someone quip that Zuck was taking the knee to Trump. US publishers in the Midwest and South tell stories of facing waves of cancellations after covering ‘woke’ topics. And it seems applications to Southern US colleges with big frat vibes are up massively. Walmart is rolling back it’s DEI programs too.

Back in 2018 a prominent group of French Women, including actress Catherine Deveneve, signed an open letter in Le Monde stating that the me too movement had gone too far. Reactions to the letter claimed that it went too far the other way, there were comments about rape that seem particularly problematic, but the idea that they wanted men to be men is there in black and white.

But what kind of men? Apparently, these days promoting obscure bloggers is equivalent to knowing about cool bands before anyone else. In that spirit I point you towards Middle Aged Running Man. A bloke blogging about running in a very blokish way. He is kind of a dick but he knows he’s being a dick and when you see him interact with real people he couldn’t be nicer. What we are really seeing is his inner voice making snide remarks about running and the world for entertainment, because he knows there is an audience for this even in something as niche as the running world. So maybe it’s about personas and putting on a show for the cameras?

There are nuances in all of the above examples of course, but really what this all screams is “LIFE HAS BEEN SHIT. CAN I JUST HAVE SOME FUN PLEASE?”

Just like in the last post where I talked about how brands should take a nuanced view on recreational drugs I think there may be some success for brands championing men wanting have fun in a non-toxic way. I read a good piece by McKinney that talked of the ‘Perma Swirl’.

Our latest research reveals that what began as 2020’s momentary crisis has evolved into something far more insidious – a chronic condition we’re calling the “Perma-Swirl,” and it presents both a tough environment and an opportunity for brands to gain attention.

As America navigates this new normal, brands have an unprecedented opportunity to be stabilizing forces in an unstable world. The winners won’t be those that shout the loudest or pick sides, but those that acknowledge our shared experience and offer genuine help in finding our footing.

I agree with this in theory. Some brands may be able to tread a successful tightrope that ‘acknowledges our shared experience’ but I do think we’ll see more and more brands pick sides. Pick a vibe. It’s just easier. (And god knows it’s hard work marketing these days). If we can do that in a non-toxic way that could be good for sales and humanity. Of course if some brands do veer too far on the toxicity scale there will be opportunities for smart and nimble brands to find success by counteracting that with wit and humour.

It’s gonna be an interesting year.