Welcome to the Battenhall Weekly, Edition #52, with our special guest editor this week – Battenhall founder and CEO, Drew Benvie
Battenhall
The communications agency for the social media age. Named 30x Agency of the Year ??
Once a month we are going to be welcoming senior figureheads from the team to provide their own timely insights as guest editors of this newsletter. Kicking things off is Drew Benvie , who has been to New York and back over the past week, to spread the word on what’s happening in social in 2025 ??
I spent last week in New York and London talking to clients and industry peers about what I’m expecting for social media in the year ahead. I was delighted to be joined by my colleagues Anton Perreau , John David Iglesias and Logan English as we hosted our first US-based social media talk and networking event at Soho House New York.
The themes of the week included: creator culture and how it's feeding product development, cats, crosswords, #Croctober, and dark social. Fun fact: the NY Times crossword comes out at 10pm ET, and I now know someone on a 152-day no-hint completion streak! ?? Thanks to all our special guests who made it such an engaging discussion. We’re planning on repeating it and hosting at new cities, so if you are interested in coming along, email [email protected].
Returning to London this week, and on Safer Internet Day we presented our Year Ahead in Social keynote to the #PRogress group in Shoreditch, organised by Stephen Waddington . I followed that by shooting off to deliver another presentation to a FTSE 100 client. Every day our forecast for 2025 builds, but the core principles are being reinforced with every news story we see.
That being the case, here are my picks for the top stories this week.
A new non-profit organisation called ROOST (Robust Open Online Safety Tools) was launched on Safer Internet Day (Feb 11). Incubated at the Institute of Global Politics at Columbia University, the initiative is backed by OpenAI, Google, Discord and Roblox among others, with the goal of creating a framework for developers to build safer online experiences in the AI era.
Meta has partnered with ChildHelp to launch a new digital literacy program for middle schoolers, called Staying Safe from Online Harm: Sextortion and Exploitation. Meta says that it has fully funded the curriculum, making it free and available to everyone, and that it has been informed by world-leading child safety experts.
The Commission into Countering Online Conspiracies in Schools has launched a major new report this week into conspiracy belief, misinformation and disinformation in schools. The report finds that trust in established figures and institutions among school pupils is declining over time as they continue to be exposed to high levels of misinformation online.
AdWeek has analysed the biggest ads of this year’s Super Bowl. My personal pick, based purely on its presence this year, was the OpenAI ad. A clever take on the UX dot, the ad took us on a journey of innovation. But many online critics pointed out the ad looked so basic it could have been made by DeepSeek!
Despite the social app’s turbulent month, especially in the US, TikTok overtook Instagram to become the most downloaded app in January 2025 according to the latest rankings from app analytics provider AppFigures. Interestingly, ChatGPT was the most downloaded in the iOS App Store, and was fifth overall.
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Want to suggest a story? Contact the team by emailing [email protected].