'From an advertising and media perspective, data and technology are actually moving us away from people, seeing them almost as robots and machines.'
Havas Media’s Emily Fairhead Keen and Dan Holt tell us how brands can reconnect with real people through empathy, usefulness and trust.
In this month’s ad formats roundup, scroll depth replaces IDs, inbox tabs become product surfaces and even UX design becomes a variable in ad pricing.
Airbnb announced that it is shifting its advertising from TV to social media in its earnings call.
Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, attributed the shift to changing consumer habits, saying that search is ‘switching from desktop to mobile and from Google search to social media’.
In this month’s ad formats roundup, scroll depth replaces IDs, inbox tabs become product surfaces and even UX design becomes a variable in ad pricing.
In February, WPP’s outgoing CEO, Mark Read, described 2025 as the ‘year of execution’. Halfway through, his words sound dangerously prophetic.
The holding company released its H1 results this morning. No crystal ball was needed here, a bleak July trading update had already lowered expectations.
Do you have a question about media, marketing or your career that you’d like answered? Ask Faris Yakob.
He has a world of experience within agencies and as a consultant, and he wrote the book on Paid Attention.
Just email your question to askfaris@mediacat.uk.
'As AI agents increasingly consume content on our behalf, will we start designing more and more content not just with AI but for AI? To what extent will we need to prioritise machines as a primary audience, designing content for algorithms whose ‘opinions’ could shape human decisions?'
Selena Gomez’s cosmetics brand, Rare Beauty, unveiled three scratch-and-sniff billboards in New York City last week to promote its first fragrance.
The billboards weren’t just fragranced — they also featured QR codes passersby could scan to order a sample from Shopify’s Shop app.
'YouTube’s entire model depends on avoiding television’s core responsibility: accountability for what it distributes.'
As we chase TV equivalence, are we failing to question what YouTube actually is?
'As AI agents increasingly consume content on our behalf, will we start designing more and more content not just with AI but for AI? To what extent will we need to prioritise machines as a primary audience, designing content for algorithms whose ‘opinions’ could shape human decisions?'
Ad trade bodies are warning advertisers not to fall foul of the incoming restrictions on advertising less-healthy foods (LHF) during their seasonal marketing.
'Yes, search still works. But it’s capturing intent as opposed to creating it. If you’re only showing up when someone knows what they want, you’re competing for the narrowest slice of demand — often at the highest cost.'
Brave Bison's Mark Byrne explains how search is changing
Heading into Meta’s second-quarter earnings call, many expected a stumble. Instead, Meta came out running.
‘The strong performance this quarter is largely thanks to AI unlocking greater efficiency across our ad system,’ Zuckerberg told analysts.
Campaigns run through Meta's automated ad-delivery system, Advantage+, typically outperformed manually orchestrated ones by 9% at the midway point of the campaign --- but they then lost steam.
mediacat.uk/marketers-be...
'Yes, search still works. But it’s capturing intent as opposed to creating it. If you’re only showing up when someone knows what they want, you’re competing for the narrowest slice of demand — often at the highest cost.'
Traffic to VPN providers has exploded since the UK’s Online Safety Act took effect less than a week ago.
Just as publishers were beginning to find ways to stand on their own outside the walled gardens, the VPN boom is now herding advertisers straight back into the arms of Big Tech.
Ad trade bodies are warning advertisers not to fall foul of the incoming restrictions on advertising less-healthy foods (LHF) during their seasonal marketing.
The Advertising Association, ISBA, IPA, and IAB UK have published a one-page document explaining clearly what brands can and can’t do.
A new meta-analysis from Haus shows that manual campaigns still outperform Advantage+ for a slim majority of brands.
Still, there's plenty in the findings that Meta's salesfolk will lap up, including the stat that, on average, ‘Meta drove on average 19% lift to the brand’s primary KPI’.
It's not just grumble websites that are going to have to adjust to the new Online Safety Act...
mediacat.uk/online-safet...
New data from Digital i reveals that the most stable traffic on UK streaming platforms doesn’t come from prime-time hits or algorithmic discovery.
It arrives in two daily spikes (6-9am and 5-7pm) and it’s driven almost entirely by children’s programming.
The ads business of Spotify is the ‘one area that hasn’t yet met expectations,’ according to the company’s founder and CEO, Daniel Ek.
The streaming platform delivered healthy results in Q2 but saw its ad-supported revenue fall by 1% year on year.
Traffic to VPN providers has exploded since the UK’s Online Safety Act took effect less than a week ago.
Just as publishers were beginning to find ways to stand on their own outside the walled gardens, the VPN boom is now herding advertisers straight back into the arms of Big Tech.
The ads business of Spotify is the ‘one area that hasn’t yet met expectations,’ according to the company’s founder and CEO, Daniel Ek.
Ek said Spotify has been ‘moving too slowly’ with its ads business, and it’s taking ‘longer than expected’ to see the results they anticipated.
The in-car environment is 'one of the largest untapped frontiers in digital media', according to the driver interaction platform 4screen. And last week, Brand Metrics and LeadStory also found that in-car ads can have a significant impact on brand uplift.
New data from Digital i reveals that the most stable traffic on UK streaming platforms doesn’t come from prime-time hits or algorithmic discovery.
It arrives in two daily spikes — 6-9am and 5-7pm — and it’s driven almost entirely by children’s programming.
'The Magnificent Seven (possibly excepting Apple) are all in on AI. By the end of 2025 they will have spent more than $560 billion on AI in two years, for a return of just $35 billion. Investors are eager for the fruits of the promised revolution.'
mediacat.uk/publishers-p...
According to Ofcom’s latest News Consumption Survey, the average UK adult now spends 61 minutes taking in current events each day — they just do more of it online and through social media.
News Corp’s David Rowley believes that 'we need to turn the open web into some sort of hedged garden' and make it easier to 'buy a set of premium publishers in a very smooth, scaled, transactable way, for planning purposes, buying purposes and probably most importantly, for reporting.'
