What a Personable Brand Looks Like in 2025 with Paaula Baxi

Paaula Baxi is performance director at Spin Brands where she works on accounts including Magnet Kitchens, People’s Postcode Lottery, Camper, Wowcher and Mecca Bingo. She holds 10 years in performance marketing.

Her work ethos is to connect the humans behind the screen to a message that they actually care about, and never losing focus on that as the bottom line in amongst the noise that surrounds this industry.

LBB> What’s the most significant development or trend shaping the social space right now?

Paaula> Humour and silliness, without a doubt. Everything that’s gaining traction right now feels joyful, light, a bit wild. You’ve got Peppa Pig’s Mummy Pig doing a gender reveal, going viral across socials with a full-on activation at Battersea Power Station. Then there’s the “100 men vs 1 gorilla” content flying around.

The outside world is kind of bleak, and this is how we’re coping. People want content that makes them laugh. You can see it creeping into ads too with over 25% of campaigns spending over a million dollars last year leaning into humour. And it’s cutting through. It’s not just a moment; it’s a shift in how we’re connecting online.

LBB> Where are you finding the most exciting creative opportunities on social right now?

Paaula> Right now, I’m loving seeing brands jump into comment sections and showing up in ways that feel real and reactive. It’s not flashy tech, but that’s kind of the point. It’s low effort, low risk, and the creative possibilities are endless.

When done well, it bridges the relevance gap in seconds. You can tap into niche moments, show personality, and test new channels or audiences with agility. A recent fave was seeing Flo Tracker randomly pop up in a completely unrelated convo. I can’t even remember the original post, but I remember them. That’s impact.

LBB> Social media is a space for brands to be more human – but how do you walk the line between personable and twee?

Paaula> A brand being personable on social needs to ladder up to your values, your tone, and what your audience expects from you. If you're jumping into every conversation and shape-shifting your voice to match the flavour of the day, it can quickly come off as twee or worse, tone-deaf.

Be playful, be casual, sound like a human, but not one that’s completely detached from what your brand actually stands for. The most effective personality on social is the one that feels consistent, not performative.

LBB> What does ‘craft’ mean to you in a social context?

Paaula> As someone who engages with the ‘DIY / arts / crafts’ communities on social, I had to think about this for a minute!

When we talk about "craft" in a social context, whether you’re a designer, strategist, media buyer, or account manager, I think it’s about knowing how to bend, adapt, and rework classic marketing principles for a totally new landscape.

Marketing as a discipline isn’t that old to begin with, and social has already torn up most of the rulebook from the last 80 years or so. So to me, craft is the ability to take everything we do know and apply it with intuition and pragmatism. It’s about being smart, reactive, and a little fearless in how you show up and make impact in an ever-changing space. That’s craft.

LBB> Organic, paid, influencers, social search - how do you approach figuring out the best way to reach audiences?

Paaula> It always starts with strategy. Every brand has a different user journey, different values, different challenges, and different goals, so you can't apply a one-size-fits-all strategy to social. We start by figuring out what role social needs to play and identify the creative platform, then build a distribution plan for every facet of social that ladders up to their business goals, underpinned by a measurement framework that spans across them all.

We’ve got frameworks to start us off, sure, but once we're live, we let the data guide us to see what's working, what's not and where there’s headroom to experiment.

Every quarter, we reassess. Who are we reaching? Who's perceiving us as intended? What’s working harder than expected? What opportunity does that open up to evolve and push harder? Having a clear view on the data is crucial to figuring out your approach to reaching your audiences on social.

LBB> Social media can be brutal. How do you deal with that and help your team do the same?

Paaula> It is brutal haha. It’s fast, it’s intense, and it can feel like a lot to keep up with on your own. So one of the best things we can do is share the load. Knowledge, learnings, wins, losses. All of it.

We’ve set up lots of ways to do this, from casual channels where people can drop platform updates, trending topics, quick reads and TLDRs, to bigger in-person sessions where we get out of the day-to-day, show and tell our work and share what's exciting us. It takes the edge off and reminds us we’re not just staring into the void alone.

LBB> Social media has been accused of driving polarisation and spreading misinformation, while others call it the marketplace of ideas. Whether or not that’s the whole truth, it is certainly shaping discourse and is one of the key venues for culture war-ish behaviour. What’s your take on the role of social media in society and what responsibilities do brands and individuals working in social have?

Paaula> I think the answer ties closely to what I said earlier – a brand’s values should guide the cultural conversations it chooses to show up in, or stay out of. It’s totally fine for a brand not to take a stance if something doesn’t align with who they are. And on the flip side, it’s also fine to be bold or even controversial, as long as that’s baked into the brand’s identity and resonates with the audience they’re speaking to.

What’s not okay is when it feels like a personal opinion or a knee-jerk reaction. Brands have a responsibility to ground their messaging in facts, data, and real understanding. If there’s any uncertainty or grey area, maybe it’s not the moment to jump in. Not everything needs a take – and that’s often where the trouble starts.

LBB> What are the biggest missteps brands make regularly on social?

Paaula> Trying to use social only for performance or only for brand. It’s one or the other, and they miss the fact that social works best when it’s end-to-end.

People don’t move through platforms in a straight line. They don’t see a brand ad, click the link, and convert in 30 seconds. They float in and out. They follow, they ignore, they see something funny, then maybe they click. Social has to be set up for that full experience, otherwise you’re just wasting time and money on the wrong moments.

LBB> Inevitable AI question! How are you applying AI in your day-to-day role and what have been your key insights/observations about the best way to approach it in the campaigns you’ve worked on?

Paaula> As a performance marketer, this question always makes me laugh because everything from ad algorithms to attribution models contains some AI driven-input now. From that perspective, it's become really hard for advertisers to escape it.

We're tinkerers, we enjoy pulling all the little and large levers and seeing it spit out better outcomes. But now the platforms make those decisions for us, faster than we ever could, so the best approach is to focus on how we can best manage and engineer it to work for us.

Ultimately, creative is key. Feeding it creative inputs that it can work with, understanding that the machine crawls content metadata to be able to distribute it to the right user at the right time in the right place.

We tested three different messaging angles for our client People's Postcode Lottery, and it was crazy to see how mentioning the word "island" distributed ads to a younger demo, mentioning "shopping trip" skewed ads drastically to a female demo and calling out a monetary value-focused spend on a male audience.

When performance marketers approach the "inescapable" AI elements that have entered our world this way, it can help us unlock a new way to provide even more value to the brands we work with.

LBB> Thinking longer term, where do you see the biggest risks and opportunities when it comes to AI in social?

Paaula> From my vantage point the biggest risk to AI is the overuse of it to replace creative functions. From insight and idea generation to executional capabilities. If we become overreliant on these systems to produce faster, more cost-effective content, it will only harm the end-user experience.

We saw it in the UGC boom a couple years ago. Early adopters found great success and brands started to double down on the production format for their social content, and after a year or so, our audiences’ feeds were so overpopulated with noise desensitised and turned them off. And lo and behold, brands like Burberry who sparked a resurgence of old school "celeb ambassadors" strategically and smartly, were the ones that created memorable cut-through on the feeds once again.

Biggest opportunity wise, it has to be operational efficiency. AI can eliminate bottlenecks in project management, reporting and account admin. Allowing marketing humans to do what we do best, think about the best ways to connect to other humans. It’s also unlocking tools like real-time sentiment analysis or AI-powered focus groups that were once only accessible to brands with big budgets. That democratisation is exciting and, if used wisely, can improve both the quality and accessibility of marketing.

LBB> When you’re not working, what social platforms and content do you personally enjoy engaging with and why? What creators, influencers and social communities do you really love?

Paaula> I’m a YouTube and TikTok girlie, for sure. These days, I’m craving longer-form content to help slow my brain down. I love watching YouTube on my TV (I know! niche).

Content about home interiors, DIYs and crafts from creators like ‘TheSorryGirls’, or the educational, relaxing content from ‘The Outdoor Boys’. For fun, I’m deep into social and relationship commentary channels like ‘Nectar’ and ‘ShxtsnGigs’.

LBB> What advice would you give to people who are looking to get into social, whether as creatives, strategists or producers?

Paaula> Be curious! You can't care about social from nine to five. It's a vast universe, and you need to be an astronaut.

And look, that doesn't mean being on the platforms all day, every day, not at all. But it means asking questions about how it works:

Why did I stop scrolling for that post?

What made me trust this brand?

How did I go from viewer to buyer?

Be an astronaut. Explore it, and you'll go far.