One of the great laws of advertising is that everyone wants to reach and understand young consumers. Earlier this month on the podcast, host Jack Benjamin spoke with Hasbro ’s global heads of media to get the perspective of one brand with a vested interest in speaking to younger cohorts. And last week, he also prodded Channel 4 about its own research into Gen Z. But there's more to unpack, particularly around issues of child safety online and how gaming is becoming increasingly impossible for me...
Jun 30, 2025•36 min•Season 5Ep. 49
This episode was produced in partnership with Channel 4 Channel 4's chief commercial officer Rak Patel and head of sales strategy Sam Hicks join Jack Benjamin for a conversation in the south of France during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. UK broadcasters stole the show this week, with Channel 4, ITV and Sky announcing a pioneering collaboration with Comcast Advertising to provide a self-serve TV ad marketplace aimed at making TV more accessible for small and medium-sized ...
Jun 19, 2025•24 min•Season 5Ep. 48
Brands are navigating choppy waters this year amid macoreconomic uncertainty, meaning media strategies are having to remain nimble and adaptable. One brand that has an especially interesting challenge is Hasbro. The toy company owns a huge swathe of major brands and intellectual property – much of it primarily consumed by children – and managing the portfolio and the different media tactics needed across those brands presents unique obstacles and considerations. Jennifer Burch and Kristina Field...
Jun 16, 2025•51 min•Season 5Ep. 47
There is a lot going on at Paramount. There's a proposed merger with Skydance on the horizon, a sudden change in its media agency, strong growth for Paramount+, managing a rebrand with 5 – and it’s all happening against a challenging TV ad market. Amid the state of play, Paramount president of international ad sales Lee Sears joins Jack Benjamin to unpack how he and his team are working to drive revenue growth across the recently rebranded 5, streaming service Paramount+ and FAST service Pluto T...
Jun 09, 2025•44 min•Season 5Ep. 46
We all get older and with age comes wisdom and, especially today, a whole lot of purchasing power. But the ad industry is appearing to suffer from a severe bout of ageism. According to the latest IPA Agency Census , just 8% of people working in agencies in the UK are over the age of 51. Meanwhile, over-51s account for over 33% of the overall UK workforce and 22% of the information and communication sector. To consider the issue in more detail, the IPA released a report in April titled Time for S...
Jun 02, 2025•28 min•Season 5Ep. 45
There is an interesting tension brewing between broadcasters and platforms as we enter into a rapidly shifting era of media consumption. The two types of media owners are increasingly working together. Incremental audiences are being found by the likes of ITV and Channel 4 on YouTube. News publishers are needing to disseminate information to especially young consumers via TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. Podcasts, including this one, can be found almost anywhere. Spotify is pivoting to video and ...
May 27, 2025•33 min•Season 5Ep. 44
It’s not often you hear of a media agency going out and acquiring a venture capital fund. But in February, independent shop MNC bought Grwth, a VC fund with a focus on consumer brands. Luke Bristow, who has been MNC’s CEO for nearly a year, told The Media Leader at the time of acquisition that the model gives MNC skin in the game with clients. “It’s a great way for us to not only have an exciting external-facing proposition, but actually for us to put our money where our mouth is,” he explained....
May 19, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Season 5Ep. 43
Something big is going on in Austria. Last year, Austrian broadcasters and media buyers launched an upgraded linear TV audience measurement system and adopted a whole new currency. Austrian advertisers can now access real-time audience data on linear TV . Not addressable TV, streaming or programmatic. But for the purpose of advertising, linear is now acting a lot more like digital. Sebastian Hinterstoisser is CEO of TV Insight and the developer behind the project when it was commissioned by Red ...
May 12, 2025•39 min•Season 5Ep. 42
How do brands keep up with social trends? It’s a perennial question in an era marked by the sheer speed at which social media moves. But as brands continue to lean further and further in to advertising on platforms and with creators, it’s important to understand best practice for driving positive outcomes, especially as metrics like views and impressions become less valuable than building and speaking to online communities. Melissa Chapman is CEO of Jungle Creations, a publisher-powered social a...
May 06, 2025•49 min•Season 5Ep. 41
Ahead of The Future of Brands on Tuesday, Jack Benjamin is joined by Specsavers head of media, connections planning and insights Ian Maybank to discuss how the retail chain has built a strong brand through media investment. The pair speak about how brands can work to bring creative and media closer together, the importance of consistent brand messaging and humour, and how agency-client relationships have changed and are likely to change in the near future. Maybank also explains why he believes m...
Apr 28, 2025•36 min•Season 5Ep. 40
Social media gets a lot of flak. Its critics accuse platforms of causing massive negative externalities on society – everything from crumbling democracies to mental health crises gets blamed on social media. And “social media” as a term has even become so toxic that social media companies themselves prefer to call themselves anything but “social media” . The tagline to Snapchat’s marketing campaign last year was: “Less social media. More Snapchat.” TikTok calls itself an entertainment platform. ...
Apr 22, 2025•43 min•Season 5Ep. 39
Alan Rusbridger is one of Britain’s most acclaimed journalists. As editor of The Guardian for 20 years, he oversaw the outlet’s transition into the digital world and landed a Pulitzer Prize for publishing information leaked by Edward Snowdon about the US National Security Agency. Since 2021, he has worked as editor of Prospect , a leading British current affairs magazine celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. Prospect had an exceptional year in 2024, nearly doubling its digital circulation ...
Apr 14, 2025•49 min•Season 5Ep. 1
At the tail end of March, Digital Cinema Media (DCM), the UK’s largest cinema ad sales house, hosted its annual upfronts in the Leicester Square Odeon. It was a way to celebrate cinema’s strong start to the year and look ahead to the 2025 and 2026 film slates, but also an opportunity for brands to consider whether to position the channel more prominently on their AV plans. Among the presentations, new research from DCM found that cinema is well-placed to drive price premiums – that is, consumers...
Apr 07, 2025•51 min•Season 5Ep. 38
The creative industries' fight to protect their intellectual property from AI companies reached a crescendo last month amid the end of a government consultation on how it should handle copyright in the age of AI. But will public pressure be enough to convince governments to maintain copyright laws and not cave to tech giants promising strong economic growth? Alongside the wider creative industries, the publishing sector has argued that offering tech companies leniency around copyright would seve...
Mar 31, 2025•34 min•Season 5Ep. 37
This month, JCDecaux reported strong fiscal year 2024 earnings: the global business saw 9.7% organic growth, while JCDecaux grew 18.4% in the UK — a growth figure more typically associated with tech giants. Meanwhile, the broader OOH industry is in rude health, with total ad revenue hitting record highs (£1.4bn) in 2024. JCDecaux UK co-CEOs Chris Collins and Dallas Wiles joined host Jack Benjamin to discuss what is driving such strong growth in OOH investment and why JCDecaux is making 2025 its ...
Mar 24, 2025•51 min•Season 5Ep. 36
This episode was produced in partnership with The Guardian . Last month, The Guardian promoted its chief advertising officer, Imogen Fox, to a new global role to drive commercial growth not only in the UK, but also in markets like the US and Australia, where the news outlet has seen a substantial influx of new readers. "We're growing," Fox told senior reporter Jack Benjamin. "I'm not sure that message has translated yet to the advertising community and I think that's where there's a huge opportu...
Mar 17, 2025•31 min•Season 5Ep. 35
Last week, digital advertising trade body IAB UK unveiled new research forecasting a matured digital market, a fast-growing video and retail media market, and strong potential for gaming. It also found, based on interviews with 40 industry leaders, that the marketing funnel as we have known it may well not survive a digital future in which more media channels become shoppable and generative AI proliferates, changing how consumers seek information about products and services. In a companion op-ed...
Mar 10, 2025•28 min•Season 5Ep. 34
Last month, concerns around brand safety and the opaque nature of programmatic advertising flared up again following a report from adtech transparency startup Adalytics, which found that a huge number of big-name brands have been accidentally placing ads on a website that hosts a great deal of child sexual abuse material (also known as CSAM). How did this happen? Do brands actually care about brand safety? And, if they do, what steps can they take to make sure they’re supporting quality media? E...
Mar 03, 2025•38 min•Season 5Ep. 33
Next month, Global CEO Stephen Miron will officially step back from his role after 16 years at the helm of one of Britain's largest media enterprises. When Miron joined Global as CEO in 2008, it was a £200m business with only one national radio brand. In March, he’ll leave an almost £1bn business, with numerous national radio brands, a digital ad exchange, dedicated listening app and substantial OOH footprint. Miron will still be involved at Global as chairman, replacing former ITV and Granada C...
Feb 24, 2025•41 min•Season 5Ep. 32
Are audience-targeting practices too simple in an era of big data? Advertisers and their agencies tend to use demographics to target people across media channels, but perhaps that model is outdated. Natalie Bell is CEO of MG OMD. The Omnicom media agency is coming out with new research on how community-based targeting might be a new model worth considering and she joined host Jack Benjamin to preview early findings. As a trustee of Nabs and member of Wacl, Bell also spoke to concerns around a ro...
Feb 17, 2025•36 min•Season 5Ep. 31
At a Thinkbox event in September, ITV, Sky and Channel 4 announced Lantern, a new measurement panel aimed at tracking the short-term impact of TV advertising on sales. The goal for the initiative, which is aiming to fully launch in 2026 following a period of testing and requests for proposals, is to help provide TV with “the measurement it deserves” in an era when brands have increasingly demanded more outcomes-based measurement solutions, rather than simply measuring audiences. Sameer Modha is ...
Feb 10, 2025•57 min•Season 5Ep. 30
On 7 January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced changes to its platforms’ content moderation policies that, he admitted, will mean the company is “going to catch less bad stuff” across Facebook, Instagram and Threads. Among the raft of changes, Meta announced it was halting its third-party fact-checking programme in the US and replacing it with a Community Notes feature. It also updated its hateful conduct policy to now allow users to call women “household objects” or refer to transgender or no...
Feb 03, 2025•46 min•Season 5Ep. 29
In November, a report from global advisory MediaSense found that an overwhelming majority of advertisers — three-quarters — are looking to make changes to their agency compensation model in the next three years. A similar number of survey respondents indicated that they are seeking to better align agency compensation to business performance, however it may be defined by the brand. According to Ryan Kangisser, chief strategy officer at MediaSense and co-author of the report, it is “unprecedented”...
Jan 27, 2025•33 min•Season 5Ep. 28
The new year always brings with it the inclination to not just future-gaze, but to consider how to future-proof. One media agency that has always billed itself as a future-forward organisation is Omnicom’s Hearts & Science and UK CEO Garrett O'Reilly joined Jack Benjamin to discuss the shop's growth strategy. O'Reilly discussed the challenges in scaling the business while remaining future-forward and what big client wins like Jaguar and Allwyn have meant for the agency. He also shared initia...
Jan 20, 2025•31 min•Season 5Ep. 27
What’s really behind that view? Are all views created equal? What truly keeps our attention? Are consumer habits really changing that much? As marketers increasingly shift towards outcomes-based assessments of their ad effectiveness, behavioural research is likely to become more relevant to understanding how video ads can cut through to audiences in what has become a highly competitive environment for attention. At the inaugural Future of Video event in December, senior reporter Jack Benjamin in...
Jan 13, 2025•44 min•Season 5Ep. 26
On the surface, the global ad industry appears to be in rude health. GroupM upwardly revised its This Year Next Year global ad revenue forecast for 2024 and expects it to surpass $1tn for the first time – and that’s excluding US political advertising, which itself totalled $15.1bn. In the UK, despite uncertainty regarding the country's political and economic future, the ad market grew 8.3%, with further 7% growth now expected for 2025. But, of course, there are numerous unpredictabilities next y...
Dec 09, 2024•31 min•Season 5Ep. 25
2024 is winding down and for their last weekly news podcast of the year, host Jack Benjamin and editor-in-chief Omar Oakes sat down to look back on the past year in media and advertising. It was a year in which digital giants continued to grow, retail media surged, OOH prospered and TV streaming services became largely profitable. It was also a year that saw Big Tech facing renewed antitrust efforts, changes to Google and Meta's algorithms punishing online publishers and the industry reckoning w...
Dec 05, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 5Ep. 24
Serial agency founder and digital media pioneer Pete Robins talks to editor-in-chief Omar Oakes about why he believes there's never been a better time to plan media. Robins is set to launch his fifth media agency, Project5 – named after his belief that the industry has entered "the fifth age of media". Four-fifths of all media is delivered by a form of technology shaped by some sort of data, Robins explains. While the principal goals of media have not changed, the possibilities to plan media hav...
Dec 02, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Season 5Ep. 23
Sarah Prentice, head of media strategy and planning at Heineken UK, Rachel Coffey, chief strategy officer at Initiative UK, and Peter Rowe, head of media at NatWest Group, answer audience questions on planning. During the discussion, the trio debate what truly drives consideration, the role of AI in strategic thinking, how diversity, equity and inclusion informs their work in a practical sense and so much more. In particular, they also respond to one of the hot questions this year: how much is t...
Nov 28, 2024•28 min•Season 5Ep. 22
Are managers well-equipped to wear all the different hats we ask of them in today’s workplace? It’s a question worth considering in an era when, according to Nabs’ All Ears study, managers are increasingly being hired younger, report being undertrained and have become more responsible for the mental health of their team. Sue Todd is the CEO of Nabs, the media and advertising industry charity focused on workplace wellness. After joining The Media Leader Podcast last year to discuss concerns aroun...
Nov 25, 2024•34 min•Season 5Ep. 20
