Media

Publicis Groupe is building an alternative media and audience reach network to legacy media channels, leveraging the $650m in influencer and creator platform acquisitions it has made in the past year to tap under-utilised and cheaper audience channels for identity-linked advertising campaigns. Gaming is next. It heaps more pressure on legacy media channels under sustained revenue assault from Meta, Google, Amazon, TikTok and retail media networks, which between them are taking upwards of 75 per cent of the circa $800bn global digital ad market. According to WPP Media, the digital ad market commands 81 per cent of total global ad spend, which will surpass $1trillion for the first time in 2025.

Packaging up lots of fragmented audience channels with consumer attention thresholds lower than what many say is effective - including the work from Dr Karen Nelson-Field and Amplified Intelligence - is a reality, says Analytic Partners' VP, Dr Grace Kite. "Aggregate Attention" in a study by Havas Media Network and Lumen shows "seeing lots of little ads is a perfectly good substitute for lack of attention on any one ad," Kite posits. Equally Tom Roach, a one-time understudy to 'The Long and Short of It' co-author Les Binet at Adam&EveDDB, now at Jellyfish, challenges System1 – and Mark Ritson's Cannes keynote – that ad wearout doesn't exist. Instead, we're facing an emerging "battle between the theorists" of ad effectiveness and the all powerful platforms whose algorithms reward freshness – daily.            

Pepsi completed its $1.95bn acquisition of pre-biotic US soda challenger brand Poppi in May with all the fanfare of a new shiny breakthrough coveted by the marketing profession – creator-influencer Alix Earle, with circa 10m followers across TikTok and Instagram, played a central role in the deal as a Poppi collaborator and investor that reportedly tipped Pepsi’s decision to buy Poppi over archrival Olipop – along with the brand’s blend-in of traditional TV ads. Poppi rolled the dice on a TV ad in this year’s Super Bowl and new data from System1, which measures consumer emotional response levels to advertising and creative work, outlines the best explainer yet on the grand tension emerging between traditional brand advertising and what works in the creator economy.     

The open web’s only challenger to Google – and increasingly Amazon – in automated advertising trading exchanges has warned Amazon’s powering global ad business is lifting Google’s strategy by luring advertisers to consolidate their digital ad buying using its demand side platform. Amazon’s $60bn advertising business is growing faster than its online commerce juggernaut – the allure for brands is the promise of an advertising and data tie-up to Amazon’s vast online shopping customer base via Amazon's commerce focused search. But the problem is anticompetitive self-preferencing of Amazon’s own advertising assets across its global shopper juggernaut and Prime video streaming service, now with ads, according to Jed Dederick, chief revenue officer at US$33bn listed rival, The Trade Desk. “We’ve seen this movie before,” he told Mi3 at the Cannes Lions Festival last week. “This is Google’s playbook that came out in the antitrust trials”. Dederick should know – he was called by the US Department of Justice as an expert witness in its successful case last year against Google’s market manipulating adtech stack – the DoJ is seeking to break up Google’s ads and data products from its YouTube and search units, which it hopes will create a more level playing field for publishers across the open web. 

Procter & Gamble CMO Marc Pritchard delivered an unapologetic brand building 101 at Cannes, urging marketers to get off the "content hamster wheel" and get back to basics on craft, consistency and consumer insight, or watch growth tank. But Analytic Partners and Jellyfish presented counter-evidence that suggests the old marketing rules around attention and wear-out may no longer apply in a platform dominated world, requiring a rethink of some key effectiveness fundamentals.

Amid warnings that measuring TV outcomes in real time could backfire because it cannot capture the totality of TV’s long-term effects, Adgile’s Stu Carr says it doesn’t have to. That’s because its purpose is to stop budget leakage to platforms that promise speed over substance. It doesn’t replace market mix modelling, nor audience measurement from OzTam or Kantar or digital platform or agency tools – and it doesn't have to be perfect. It just fills a very urgent gap: real-time outcomes-based accountability. Otherwise spend will keep being diverted – and there is little time left to lose.