Exploring the Narratives of Escapism with McCann at CES 2025

Escapism: it’s having a moment. 

Increasing societal pressures, economic uncertainties, and global political turmoil mean audiences are actively seeking moments of relief, relaxation, or simply distraction. Amidst distrust and stress, the escapism shift marks an opportunity for brands and marketers to connect meaningfully with their audiences.

Just how and why public opinion is gravitating towards this shift in society is a topic we explored with our partner McCann in a presentation at CES earlier this year.  

Truth Central is the global intelligence unit embedded at the heart of McCann WorldGroup, with the brief of surfacing truths about human behavior for the use strategy across the group. And heading into 2025, that unit was looking for insights to support and refine their hypothesis that escapism trends were coalescing into a massive opportunity for brands.

The McCann team started from the standpoint that audiences perceive themselves as living through challenging times, and that this has pushed a growing number of people towards seeking escape. As this escape assumes both expected and novel forms across communities and platforms, the question becomes how to capture this conversation and explore it in all its (continuously evolving) nuance.

At which point, the unit turned to Narratives AI. The first search engine for public opinion, it helps chart an instant, comprehensive map of where a narrative formed, how it evolved, and where it’s headed next. Through the use advanced clustering algorithms and LLMs, Narratives AI enables the user to view beliefs as they evolve, not what they look like at one fixed moment in time. 

So, equipped with Narratives AI’s insights (and Pulsar co-founder Francesco D’Orazio), McCann’s Laura Simpson (Chief Intelligence Officer) and Jess Francis (Research Director) travelled to CES, ‘the most powerful tech event in the world’, to share their findings.

Notably, the number of public narratives appears to have exploded mid-2023 onwards while the latter plateaued, suggesting a media environment that doesn't yet reflect the shifting cultural and societal currents we see play out in the wider world.

Clearly, escapism can manifest in familiar forms such as vacations and retail therapy. But audiences are also seeing exciting, novel escapes. Think sleep tourism, where travellers specifically seek out hotels tailored to optimal rest, or psychedelic reinvention, where controlled, chaperoned psychedelic experiences offer transformative breaks from reality. And between these two poles of established and novel behaviors, we see too how activities such as crafting, or reading, or social media are each redefined according to confer either 'transcendent' moments, or simply the opportunity to decisively 'switch off'. 

Drilling further down into these narratives revealed that each could be labelled as belonging to one of two macro-categories – either a Trigger for escape (‘Escaping the Mundane’, ‘Parenting Troubles’) or else an Escape Strategy (‘Retail Therapy’, ‘Vacations & Festivities’). 

These individual narratives can then be investigated in more depth, utilizing social listening or media monitoring, or else integrated alongside more traditional approaches, such as a quantitative survey and academic citation. This was precisely the approach taken by the Truth Central team, who employed the Narratives AI as a means of gathering evidence to test hypotheses, and as a springboard onto new, unexpected areas of research.

So, what does this tell us all about escapism, and about the nature of an escapism economy? 

The team’s framework proposes that escape has shifted from ‘destination’ to ‘mode’, in which regularly utilizing cultural or technological touchstones to leverage oneself from societal pressures has replaced the idea of escapism as a simple transplanting from one state or location to another. 

These insights presented at CES 2025 have practical implications for brands across all sectors. Companies can leverage these narratives to inform their product innovation, craft targeted marketing strategies, or enhance customer experiences that genuinely resonate with their audience's desires. Essentially, understanding escapism allows brands to become architects of memorable moments, both big and small.

And, while we are seeing a rise in such novel formulations of escape as sleep tourism and psychedelic reinvention, its also true that practically every brand is at least tangentially (and often directly) in the escape business, whether they’re providing minor or major moments to customers. Almost every brand stands to gain access to an escapism economy worth a potential $13.9 trillion. 

The analysis presented by McCann and Pulsar underscores a fundamental shift: escapism has transformed from an occasional behavior into a regular mode of living. Recognizing and analyzing this shift in-depth using Narratives AI can distinguish brands that simply respond to trends from those actively shaping them. Equipped with Narratives AI, organizations can confidently navigate these cultural currents, turning powerful insights into tangible actions.

If you’re interested in learning more about Narratives AI, and how it can help you and your organization effortlessly identify key narratives from social media and news coverage, you can fill out the form below: