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KIMP’s Picks 3rd January: Weekly Highlights In Design, Marketing, AI, & More

Happy New Year and welcome to the very first edition of the KIMP’s Picks in 2025! As we all ease back into work mode after the holidays, it’s the perfect time to catch up on the social media conversations about AI, marketing, and more. Whether you’re mapping out your Q1 strategy or just need a quick burst of inspiration, we’ve got you covered.

We’ve rounded up insights and ideas that are not just newsworthy but actionable because staying ahead means staying informed. So, get ready to quit the endless scrolling and catch up on all the buzzworthy updates in the next few minutes. Let’s go! 

In the Marketing Realm 

Enhancing your influencer marketing efforts 

Later, a leading social media marketing platform shared a post discussing influencer marketing. With the influencer marketing industry valued at over $21 billion, brands are eager to tap into its potential to reach engaged audiences and boost sales. 

To guide businesses in selecting the right influencers, Later outlines ten critical questions, ranging from understanding the influencer’s target audience and engagement rate to assessing content quality and alignment with brand values. 

For instance, it’s essential to ask about the influencer’s familiarity with your brand and whether their audience matches your target demographic. By addressing key points like these, brands can ensure they select influencers who not only resonate with their audience but also align with their values, making for a more effective and authentic campaign. 

Campaign spotlight 

One way to find inspiration for your next ad is to explore creative ads from other businesses. So, here’s a quick ad to inspire you. 

Ads of The World, a platform that showcases creative advertising campaigns globally, recently shared British Airways’ new campaign, “Take Your Holiday Seriously.” 

The ad featured here highlights how adults struggle to disconnect completely during the holidays. Taking a singular message the short and memorable ad communicates the idea precisely. 

Automating your marketing funnel 

A recent post from MarTech, a platform that provides insights on the latest marketing technology trends, explores the power of marketing funnel automation.

The article explains how automating the marketing funnel processes can replace manual tasks, allowing marketers to leverage big data for real-time insights and personalized messaging. 

The article also highlights the importance of tools such as customer data platforms (CDPs), marketing automation platforms (MAPs), and AI-powered technologies, which enable businesses to streamline workflows and refine lead scoring.  

In the Content Marketing Realm 

Making the most of bad content ideas

Great content ideas lead to great content. But can you do anything with those bad content ideas that you are possibly considering tossing away? Content Marketing Insititute, a leading authority in content marketing-related insights shared an article discussing this. This article provides readers with some valuable insights on how sometimes even the seemingly bad content ideas can be put to good use. 

The article emphasizes how to gather the right information, understand the intent behind requests, and align ideas with business goals before refining or revising them for the target audience. 

Through collaboration and brainstorming, marketers can pivot seemingly flawed ideas into content that better fits their strategy and achieves desired results. 

Building an SEO strategy for your brand 

Search Engine Journal shared a resourceful post on building SEO. The post highlights that creating a winning SEO strategy goes beyond just focusing on trendy tactics. It highlights how this involves a comprehensive approach that addresses challenges, defines the right direction, and ensures the implementation of effective actions. 

So, if you are looking for ways to refine your SEO approach in 2025, then this is a post you cannot miss. 

Understanding the differences between on-page, off-page, and technical SEO

So the previous post was about SEO strategies in general. Even before building a strategy comes the process of understanding the different dimensions of SEO. There is on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. Semrush, a leading online marketing channel shared a discussion about these different aspects of SEO. 

The article highlights the importance of off-page SEO in particular and presents some interesting tips and strategies for brands and marketers to enhance their off-page SEO approach. 

In the Design Realm 

Vibrant packaging design 

Packaging of the World is a great source of inspiration for anyone working on packaging design. Their recent post discusses the unique and vibrant packaging for a brand called Johnny Pep Microfarm. 

The brand celebrates the joy of bringing loved ones together over bold, spicy meals, drawing from Cyprus’ deep-rooted tradition of hospitality. 

The packaging design reflects this spirit, using quirky, vintage-inspired elements and a playful mascot to convey the fun and energy behind each product. The use of custom hand-drawn illustrations adds a unique, personalized touch, while the dynamic, bold colors evoke excitement and attention. 

Given that nostalgic elements in design and the use of hand-drawn illustrations are projected to trend in 2025, packaging designs like these can be good to draw inspiration from. 

Ideas for variable fonts 

Variable fonts are touted to be among the anticipated typography trends of 2025. So, if are looking for ideas for choosing variable fonts, then this post from I Love Typography is for you. 

Variable fonts allow brands to seamlessly add variety and character to their brand designs. In addition to allowing seamless transitions and fine-tuned aesthetics, variable fonts also allow for unique visual effects. So, now is a good time to experiment with variable fonts in your brand designs. 

Logo redesign disaster 

Redesigning a logo can be a tricky project to tackle. There are several hurdles brands run into and some miscalculations lead to the redesigned version drawing negative criticism. One such instance is the recent Westchester County logo redesign. 

This logo redesign was received with negative criticism because of how some parts of the new design closely resemble the logo of the popular online dating app Hinge. 

Notably, the wavy crossbar in the letter “H” is the standout element in the new Westchester County logo. This is very similar to the curvy crossbar in the Hinge logo. 

Designers and critics have been criticizing the new design for lacking originality. 

Projects like this one come as a reminder of rebranding mistakes brands should avoid. 

Freepik discusses style predictions for 2025

There are various graphic design styles that brands can explore when creating marketing and branding graphics. 

In a recent post, Freepik discussed their predictions for the style trends likely to trend in 2025. From Fantasy Anime style to Renaissance and illustrated pop, the post explores diverse styles along with some examples for each of them. Freepik also provides viewers with recommendations for applications of respective styles in the insightful thread here. 

In the AI Realm 

Restructuring at OpenAI 

OpenAI is undergoing a significant restructuring, transitioning its for-profit entity into a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation (PBC). This move aims to secure substantial funding for continued AI research while upholding the company’s core mission of ensuring artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits humanity.

This shift aims to secure long-term sustainability for the nonprofit arm, which would oversee broader charitable initiatives in sectors like healthcare and education. 

OpenAI’s journey from a nonprofit research lab to a revenue-generating company underscores its adaptability in pursuing AGI development, safety, and equitable impact.

Replit enhances Agent with xAI integration 

Replit revolutionized software development with the introduction of AI-powered Agent which can be used to build apps and sites. In other words, this is an AI-powered marvel meant to simplify and streamline the work of software developers.

In a recent post, they announced the integration of xAI within Agent. This means that you can tap into the power of xAI and their applications like Grok. 

Adding “add AI features with xAI” to your prompts lets you deploy the capabilities of Grok when building your code. 

Hugging Face’s ‘smolagents’ 

Hugging Face has launched ‘smolagents’, a lightweight library designed to help developers build powerful agentic systems with ease. 

The library’s streamlined approach features a core logic condensed into just ~1000 lines of code, emphasizing simplicity and efficiency. Its primary class, CodeAgent, enables agents to write actions as code snippets rather than JSON blobs. This is designed to improve performance and align more naturally with LLM capabilities. 

Supporting any language model through LiteLLM integration, ‘smolagents’ also incorporates secure code execution via e2b sandboxes, ensuring safety during deployment.

Alibaba Qwen unveils experimental ‘Visual Reasoning’ model “QVQ”

Alibaba’s Qwen team has introduced QVQ, an experimental open-weight model for visual reasoning, as their final release of 2024.  

Designed to process images and instructions, QVQ employs deep reasoning, reflection, and step-by-step logic to generate confident predictions, distinguishing itself from direct-answer models. 

Stanford AI introduces ZeroHSI

Stanford AI has unveiled ZeroHSI, a cutting-edge method for generating 4D human-scene interactions without requiring paired motion-scene training data. 

By leveraging state-of-the-art video generation models and neural rendering, ZeroHSI synthesizes natural human motions in diverse environments, including interactions with dynamic objects. 

Unlike traditional approaches that depend on expensive and labor-intensive datasets, ZeroHSI capitalizes on vast motion priors learned from video data to reconstruct human-scene interactions through differentiable rendering.

AIOpsLab from Microsoft 

Microsoft researchers have developed AIOpsLab, an open-source framework designed to evaluate and improve AIOps agents in cloud operations. 

This new upgrade aims to address challenges faced by enterprises in managing complex IT environments by standardizing how agents handle fault diagnosis and mitigation. 

AIOpsLab supports scalable, reproducible benchmarks and enables flexible integration with cloud services, making it easier to simulate real-world operational tasks. 

Run:ai x NVIDIA join forces 

Run:ai has officially joined NVIDIA, marking a significant milestone in the company’s journey to revolutionize AI infrastructure. 

The merger will allow Run:ai to expand its product offerings, enhance GPU utilization, and empower AI teams with greater flexibility. With a commitment to open-source its software, Run:ai aims to extend its ecosystem reach beyond NVIDIA GPUs, supporting a wider range of platforms. 

Moreover, with Run:ai acquisition NVIDIA will now be able to allow enterprises to manage their AI infrastructures and optimize them in multiple ways either on the cloud or as an on-premise integration or as a hybrid model. 

Social Media Feature Updates and Algorithm Changes  

Updates coming to X in 2025

X’s CEO Linda Yaccarino shared a post slightly hinting at what’s coming to X in 2025. No doubt 2024 has been a big year for X with a big chunk of updates added to the platform – major feature launches and some minor interface tweaks as well. 

Based on ​​Linda Yaccarino’s post here it looks like X is inching closer to their vision of becoming the ‘everything app’ with the introduction of new branches like the X Money to complement the existing ones like Hiring. Besides, it also looks like there are more updates coming to X TV and Grok as well. 

Meta’s 2024 roundup 

As a way to bid adieu to the year, Meta shared a post summing up all things new on the platform. This was a quick recap post that looks back at all the new feature updates that were introduced across Meta products like Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp, and Facebook. 

So., if you are looking to catch up on anything that you might have missed on these platforms, this round-up post is definitely something you cannot miss. 

Wrapping Up…

That brings us to the end of this week’s KIMP’s Picks. We hope that our handpicked assortment of posts gave you a snapshot of the week that was. Stay tuned and check out this space for the next weekly social media update that’s coming next week. Or better yet, subscribe to The KIMP Scoop newsletter for instant updates delivered to your inbox. 

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Posted On

03 Jan, 2025

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