Ad Age has published its list of the top five rebrands of 2025, selecting what the publication calls the bold moves that worked.

The ranking caps a year in which brand identity decisions moved up the agenda for marketing leaders facing compressed attention spans and crowded categories. Ad Age's editorial team evaluated the year's rebrands and settled on five it judged successful — the ones where the risk of change was matched by results.

What does the list cover?

The selection spans the rebrands Ad Age considers the most consequential identity changes of 2025. The publication's framing is explicit: these are not the safest redesigns of the year, but the boldest ones — overhauls that carried real execution risk and still delivered.

Ad Age did not position the list as a forecast or a trend survey. It is a retrospective verdict on completed work: companies that committed to change, rolled it out, and made it stick.

Why does this matter to CMOs?

Rebranding remains one of the most expensive and least forgiving decisions a marketing leader can sign off. A full identity overhaul touches media spend, packaging, retail environments, digital properties, and internal culture simultaneously.

A trade-press endorsement from Ad Age functions as a peer benchmark. When the industry's most established marketing publication puts a rebrand on a year-end list of moves "that worked," it gives CMOs a reference point for their own board-level conversations about when wholesale change is justified — and when it is not.

The five winners share a common thread in Ad Age's telling: boldness that produced measurable acceptance rather than backlash. That distinction separates a successful rebrand from an expensive apology tour, and it is the judgment call every chief marketing officer must make before committing budget.

What happens next?

Year-end rankings like this one typically set the reference cases brand teams cite in 2026 planning cycles. Expect these five rebrands to appear in agency pitches and internal strategy decks through the first half of next year.

CMO Observer will track which of the 2025 winners sustain their new identities — and whether any of them land on the inevitable list of rebrands that did not work.

Note: This summary is based on Ad Age's headline announcement of its top-five ranking; the publication's full list of the named companies appears in its original coverage.