The Media Leader Podcast

In February, the Institute for Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) released its latest Agency Census. The findings showed an agency market in contraction: employment at creative agencies fell 14.3% last year – and that’s before Omnicom completed its acquisition of IPG and subsequently announced it would cut thousands more jobs globally. New hiring dropped over 40%, with young people especially find...

In January, an anonymous group of senior leaders at creative, media and adtech agencies released a memo warning that the industry is failing in its moral and civic duties to society. The memo argued that without an interruption to the status quo, advertising will “be a critical enabler to tech platforms that stoke hatred and division, facilitate hate groups to monetise their content at a time of i...

Late last month, a group of six magazine publishers – Bauer, Future, Hearst UK, Hello!, Immediate and Time Out – launched Atria, a single marketplace through which advertisers can engage with the combined reach of those publishers’ brands, equivalent to about 33m consumers. The effort is powered by publisher-owned first-party data. It is hosted by audience platform Permutive. Cath Waller is the ma...

At the end of January, The Media Leader held its first ever Audio In Focus Week. The audio landscape is evolving at a breakneck pace – with growing digital audio audiences, and audio businesses moving into video production. So, we decided to dedicate an entire week’s worth of our coverage to exploring the innovations, strategies and voices shaping the media channel. The week was launched in partne...

This month, advertising industry trade bodies the IPA, Isba and the Advertising Association are spending a great deal of combined energy highlighting the issue of trust. That includes at the annual LEAD conference, which takes place this Thursday, and in a report released last week by the IPA that found trust-building ad campaigns improve business outcomes. Trust is what drives consumers to purcha...

It's nearly the end of January, and from a macroeconomic perspective, it’s been an absolutely wild month. The US threatened to invade Greenland and institute tariffs on European countries mobilising to resist that effort. In Davos last week, Trump appeared to walk back some of those threats, but it’s safe to say uncertainty is and will continue to be at very high levels. Uncertainty raises questio...

A year ago, the Alliance of Independent Agencies and the Land of Independents collaborated to launch a new initiative aimed at sharing knowledge and support for independent media agencies. Enter the Alliance of Media Independents (AMI), which has served as a single route to the indie media agency market for suppliers and media owners. The AMI has spent the last year expanding, now with over 30 mem...

Last month at the Future of TV Advertising Global event in London, three key brand marketers spoke about how they view the strengths of TV, particularly as they compare to other audio-visual platforms. Richard Brooke is the global media trading and operations director at Unilever. Sorin Patilinet is the global marketing effectiveness lead at PepsiCo. Alison Keith was until recently the head of glo...

It’s the most wonderful time of the year. Yes, yes, it’s the holiday season and we’re just days away from Christmas. But it’s also the global adspend report season. Business leaders are getting a holistic look at how the total ad market performed in the UK and around the world, and also what to expect for next year. WPP Media’s This Year Next Year report released on 8 December, and it has become s...

This episode was produced in partnership with Roku. It's been a busy past few months for Roku: in the US, it launched a new low-cost subscription service, Howdy, which aims to be supplementary to the likes of Netflix and Disney+; in the UK, Roku launched 40 FAST channels on its platform. Last month, The Media Leader sat down with Roku’s content distribution director, Tom Price. If you haven’t list...

This episode was produced in partnership with The Guardian . Each year, The Guardian ’s advertising team delivers a research project cheekily called Shift Happens. Blending survey data with first-party data, the study aims to unpack longer-term cultural trends in Britain that may well be of interest to savvy marketers. Imogen Fox is The Guardian 's chief advertising officer. She returns to the pod...

Last December, Phil Smith, the director-general of Isba (the trade body for advertisers), announced he would be stepping down after eight years. Succeeding him is Simon Michaelides, who most recently worked as the interim chief customer officer of Great British Racing. Both Isba's outgoing and incoming leaders joined host Jack Benjamin on the podcast to discuss Smith's legacy and Michaelides initi...

PMG, an independent challenger ad agency, has gone on an investment spree. Over the past few months the agency has hired top talent, and in recent years it has acquired a number of businesses to build out a full-service offering for brands as it looks to challenge holding groups and other indies for business. One major addition it made last month was Josh Krichefski, the former GroupM EMEA and UK...

One of the key topics of industry research we at The Media Leader have been following is how media companies – be they agencies, owners or brands – can and should restructure themselves to become more fit-for-purpose in a changing media ecosystem. Independent marketing advisory MediaSense has been examining these issues for several years, and last month it released its latest report, in partnershi...

Last week, The Media Leader hosted its flagship annual event in London, The Future of Media, and for this week’s episode of the podcast, the team wanted to bottle one of the headline interviews from the conference. On Tuesday, host Jack Benjamin sat down with Niel Bornman, CEO of Publicis Media Connected UK. Publicis is having a big year – it is, by some margin, the strongest-growing of the major...

This episode was produced in partnership with Roku. It's been a busy past few months for Roku: in the US, it launched a new low-cost subscription service, Howdy, which aims to be supplementary to the likes of Netflix and Disney+; in the UK, Roku launched 40 FAST channels on its platform. The company has emerged as a key partner for other entertainment partners to increase the reach and viewability...

At the heart of every media plan is the need to understand what a consumer wants; wants from your brand, your product, how they want to be spoken to and through what touchpoints. Michael Brown is the UK and EMEA head of research and insight, and a senior managing partner, at IPG Mediabrands. He joined host Jack Benjamin to discuss how his craft of both qualitative and quantitive consumer research...

This year, the Molly Rose Foundation, the charity founded in the memory of Molly Russell, in partnership with online safety researchers, has released a number of studies around the efficacy of social media platforms’ online safety efforts. In August, it found that, despite platforms’ promises to get better on tackling the issue of child safety, the likes of TikTok and Instagram are still bombardin...

It's one thing to get your CFO's attention and a marketing budget approved. It's another to deploy that investment in a way that builds your brand and delivers on boardroom promises. In a break from our typical interview format,  The Media Leader  team wanted to bring you one further discussion held at last month's Future of Media Manchester event. To close the day, The Media Leader 's c...

At The Media Leader 's Future of Media Manchester event last week, effectiveness expert Peter Field and Newsworks insights director Heather Dansie presented new research that shows investing in high-attention media channels — TV, cinema, radio, news brands and magazine brands — is more profitable than investing in low-attention ones. And yet, over the past decade, adspend has flowed to social medi...

It has been a tough year for many working in media. Jobs appear to be shrinking amid AI transformations and cost-cutting drives necessitated by struggling or transitioning business models. WPP has cut its head count by 7,000 in the past year. Omnicom’s acquisition of IPG will lead to “cost synergies”, which also translates to potential redundancies, and similar consolidations are expected to come...

One of the core themes of this year has been the adaptation of consumer behaviours. Everyone wants to understand how Gen Z consumes media, how AI is changing search habits and how different platforms address different emotional needs. With change comes a whole lot of uncertainty and, by trying to address new consumer behaviour, you risk losing what works and what makes your brand special. So it’s...

Denise Turner has worked in media research for more than three decades for a number of agencies and trade bodies. This summer, she succeeded Belinda Beeftink as research director at the IPA. Turner sits down with Jack Benjamin to discuss her new remit and how she views the state of media effectiveness as media owners move towards providing outcomes-based measurement for clients. She is also servin...

This episode was produced in partnership with Sky Media After another big summer of sport and the kick-off of the 2025/26 Premier League season, Jack Benjamin is joined by Sky Media's new director of digital advertising, Pippa Scaife, and director of transformation, Dan Cohen, to discuss how brands can make the most of live sport. In the UK, if you’re a football fan — or, indeed, a fan of practica...

Next month, The Media Leader will head up north for The Future of Media Manchester – part one of our two-part flagship event series, with the other held in London in November. While there, we’ll be looking to unpack an industry in flux. How is AI changing the media market? What’s next for social platforms? And for brand discovery? How can we supercharge investment outside London? Ahead of the conf...