'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 [email protected].

'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.'

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.

Our Media Creativity report attempts to summarise the trends and themes on show among the shortlisted and winning campaigns within the Media category at this year’s International Festival of Creativity. And it's free to download...

A new study suggests that influencer communication has the single strongest effect on purchase behaviour, outperforming brand fit, follower count, and even perceived expertise.

Our Media Creativity report attempts to summarise the trends and themes on show among the shortlisted and winning campaigns within the Media category at this year’s International Festival of Creativity. And it's free to download...

60% of online news consumption now takes place through online intermediaries (social media platforms, aggregators, or search engines). But people still view traditional providers as more trustworthy... mediacat.uk/uk-adults-sp...

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.'

A new study suggests that influencer communication has the single strongest effect on purchase behaviour, outperforming brand fit, follower count and even perceived expertise.

Buried in the earnings report — then plainly acknowledged on the call — was an admission that principal-based media drove a meaningful share of Omnicom’s modest Q2 growth.

The ‘BS’ about Meta making agencies obsolete needs to stop, according to Publicis Groupe’s chair and CEO, Arthur Sadoun. In an earnings call with investors on 17 July, Sadoun said people have been telling him ever since he became CEO of Publicis Groupe in 2017 that Meta ‘will eat us for breakfast'.

The proportion of marketers who said they were planning to cut spend increased for seven of the 10 media channels included in Mediaocean's H2 Marketer Report survey. mediacat.uk/search-suffe...

Podcast advertising is enjoying a banner year, yet Spotify appears to be building a version of podcasting that doesn’t serve ads... mediacat.uk/podcasting-i...

‘If you think that our clients are ready to give up and basically, as Meta said, give their credit card to one platform, you’re wrong.’ mediacat.uk/arthur-sadou...

To compete in a media landscape that is ‘more and more global’, Stagwell last week centralised media investment across all of its 70+ agencies with a new AI-powered platform.

According to Mediaocean’s H2 Market report, the number of marketers who plan to increase spend on search advertising in the second half of 2025 fell 22% compared with H1 — the sharpest decline among the 10 media channels included in the survey.

Nielsen announced this week that it will add CTV coverage to its Ad Intel product in the UK from September. The integration will allow marketers to track CTV ad spending across streaming platforms, giving them a clearer understanding of the media landscape.

A study published in European Financial Management, claims the most conspicuous social media posts by the top influencers can sway the market value of companies by 0.5% in the next day's trading. mediacat.uk/influencers-...

'You can see that shift starting to happen in the programmatic industry, from what we would call real-time bidding to almost real-time predictions.' MediaCat had a chat with Zuzanna Gierlinska, UK Chief Commercial Officer at MiQ, about the launch of MiQ Sigma.

Strongly-worded posts by mega influencers can hit a company’s stock returns, according to a study published in European Financial Management. That said, the researchers warn companies to proceed with caution when developing their influencer marketing strategies.

'The value of planners isn't micro-optimisation, its imagination and strategic thinking. As AI transforms the industry, planners must play to these strengths. Not by doubling down on invasive data collection but by embracing geographic intelligence.' mediacat.uk/geographic-d...

'In the UK, Kantar reported that grocery volumes fell by 0.4% over the four weeks to 15 June and that the drop could be owed to GLP-1 drugs, as four in 100 households now include "at least one GLP-1 user".' mediacat.uk/glp-1s-consu...

Disney+ introduces second-screen shopping and virtual concessions, and Lyft offers experience-native formats, in our latest round up of what's new in the world of ad inventory. mediacat.uk/ad-formats-j...