For years, podcasting sat on the side-line of media buying, perceived as niche, hard to measure and reserved for the brave. But in 2025, advertisers who overlook podcasting are leaving influence and impact on the table. With high trust, unmatched attention and scalable ad tech catching up, podcasting is finally having a “must-have” media moment.
Podcasting blends attention with trust, a potent mix that not only drives brand recall but leads to real-world action. And now, after years of being treated as a side experiment, podcasting is finally being seen for what it is: a high-performance media channel that turns engagement into outcomes.
“Ten years ago I was CRO of an ad network with better data than podcasting has today,” says Greg Glenday, CEO of Acast, the world’s largest independent podcast company. “We still have work to do. But advertisers are starting to realize: this works.”
The Trust Dividend
Acast’s 2025 Podcast Pulse report delivers some interesting data points. 67% of daily listeners say they’ve taken action after hearing a podcast ad. 58% have made a purchase because of a recommendation from a host. Podcast hosts rank at the very top for brand trust, equal to journalists and ahead of YouTubers, influencers and celebrities.
When podcast listeners are considering a purchase:
70% say a recommendation from a podcast host made them consider a brand they hadn’t heard of.
64% say they trust podcast hosts to give genuine endorsements.
49% say podcasts have changed the way they think about a brand.
“Podcasting is intimate,” says Glenday. “It’s a one-to-one experience. It’s someone in your ear while you walk the dog or commute. You don’t need five impressions to make an impact, you need one good one.”
Low Clutter, High Impact
Unlike social or video platforms, podcasting hasn’t been oversaturated with ads and that’s part of its power. According to the Podcast Pulse report:
71% of listeners hear mid-roll ads.
60% say podcast ads feel light compared to other channels.
45% say podcast ads are more memorable than those on YouTube, Facebook, or even cable TV.
This balance, a lean ad load with a deeply engaged audience, is what makes podcasting unique. It offers a rare chance for brands to speak without shouting.
And the results are increasingly measurable. Nearly 85% of global daily podcast audiences have taken some form of brand action after listening, from visiting a website or using a promo code to making a purchase.
The AI Assist
The common pushback for podcasting has always been that it is hard to buy at scale. No longer.
“We’ve built AI-powered tools that remove friction for advertisers,” says Glenday. “From smart show recommendations to creative generation, we’re solving the scale problem.”
Acast’s self-serve platform, powered by data from Podchaser, lets small and mid-size advertisers use natural language inputs (“I own 100 pizza shops in the UK”) to receive customized media plans. They can then auto-generate ad scripts and audio spots using AI tools, no agency or studio required.
This is opening podcasting up to thousands of advertisers who would otherwise never have participated.
Creator Authenticity Still Reigns
Importantly, AI is not being used to replace the hosts or content, a trend Glenday firmly opposes.
“We are not interested in synthetic personalities or AI-generated shows,” he says. “People come to podcasting for the companionship. They want real people.”
This focus on human authenticity is also why podcasting thrives where other channels struggle. In a world of deepfakes and AI influencers, podcast hosts offer consistency, credibility and community.
A Must-Have, Not a Maybe
Podcasting’s next leap will be less about creative innovation and more about media normalization.
“We want podcasting to become a standard part of the media plan,” Glenday said. “It’s brand safe. It drives sales. It shapes perception. And now we can prove it.”
What’s needed now, he says, is for advertisers to stop thinking of podcasting as a “risky” or “experimental” channel and start seeing it for what it is: a performance medium.
From cultural cachet to commerce conversion, podcasting is delivering. And for advertisers looking for high-impact, low-clutter, trust-filled environments in an AI-fatigued media world it might just be the best deal in marketing today.
This article is based on an interview with Greg Glenday from my podcast, The Business of Creators.
Publicis’ multibillion-dollar, five-year acquisition spree—including Epsilon, CitrusAd, Profitero, and Mars United Commerce—has given it an edge in advertising’s fastest-growing segment. Meanwhile, Omnicom and IPG’s combined commerce media capabilities include Flywheel, Axciom, and Intelligence Node.
Stacked against each other, Publicis still wins out—meaning Omnicom will need additional retail media data and tech capabilities to really compete with its French rival, according to independent retail media analyst Andrew Lipsman.
Feature image credit: Ольга Логвиненко/Adobe Stock
There are plenty of sports on the TV and streaming schedules, but could there be a better way for advertisers to play this game?
WPP Media believes so. The media-buying outlet, part of British ad giant WPP and once known as GroupM, is launching a new sports practice it says will harness better sets of data to help clients place their advertising dollars with increased confidence.
Many advertisers have longstanding ties to certain sports events, but the amount of money being spent on professional and collegiate sports is soaring, says Martin Blich, an executive director at WPP Media, and head of U.S. sports investments and partnerships, during a recent interview. “The truth is we need to be able to say to the client, ‘Hey, let’s take a step back and look at data, understand who the fan is, understand who the league delivers and the platforms they have access to that can really drive business.” Blich will lead the new offering.
WPP Media Sports, the new practice, will not only offer strategy and investment services, but also analytics; activation of sponsorships and partnerships; and content production tied to influencers. WPP Media Sports will use GumGum, a company that specializes in delivering digital ads in relevant environments, and its subsidiary, Relo Metrics, which measures and tracks the value of sponsor logos and brand mentions across live TV broadcasts, streaming, social media, and other venues.
WPP Media launches a dedicated sports practice at the start of a heady year, one that will contain a Winter Olympics and a World Cup tournament, along with the usual NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL seasons. WPP Media has kept its eye on how sports has developed in a new era. In 2024, the company created a dedicated marketplace for women’s sports, starting in the industry’s “upfront” market. Clients including adidas, Ally, Coinbase, Discover, Google, Mars, Nationwide, Unilever and NBCUniversal’s Universal Pictures said at the time that they were interested.
The company is also seeking to redefine its business after several tough years marked by client losses and executive turnover. WPP Media Sports will vie with such entities as Publicis Media and the sports media operations of Omnicom Group, which recently acquired its rival, Interpublic Group .Advertisers have always relied on sports broadcasts to reach large audiences, but more of them are doing so in the streaming era. When traditional dramas and comedies are viewed increasingly at times of a consumer’s own choosing, sports remains one of the few programming formats that draws broad crowds together all at once — meaning a sponsor can reach more potential customers in a single moment.
In recent months, top sports events have sold out earlier and with greater speed than in the past — including the Super Bowl. NBCUniversal sold the bulk of its commercial inventory tied to next month’s telecast of Super Bowl LX months ahead of schedule.
The heightened demand for sports has boosted prices for all games and matches. ” That means there’s more realization that it’s more expensive to make a mistake,” says Blich. “You can no longer just throw a piece of grass up in the arena and hope it flies in the right direction,” he says. “You have to have data and make the proper decisions as part of it.”
One might well wonder if, at this point, OpenAI is less a company than an ongoing marketing event with UFC type muscle. Brawn and attention-grabbing knock-out power accompany billion-dollar—scratch that, trillion-dollar–valuations,existential safety dilemmas,AI porn debacles, copyrightlawsuits,corporate coups andsudden product launches. And that’s just before lunch. The sheer strength is amazing to behold, and the pace is, if you will, breakneck. The stakes? Enormous. And the unsetting weight throwing feels intentional, structural rather than accidental.
Let’s start with the numbers, because though we have heard them, they sound made up. ChatGPT, just three years old, is one of the fastest-adopted consumer products in history, with800 million monthly active users (as of this writing),$20 billion in annual recurring revenue and an ever-expanding role in how people write, code, search, study, shop and work. It has challenged successfully many of the former digital leading players, bursting into the fight cage of digital advertising and marketing like a strutting young bully able to put up its dukes against the older incumbents in search, and in the search for ad revenue though that has been more whisper than self-proclaimed goal… for the moment.
OpenAI has burned through staggering amounts of cash to train ever-larger models, and raised capital at valuations that would have sounded like satire even a few years ago($830 billion to $1 trillion?! WTF). Each product release lands like a macroeconomic head spinning punch, disrupting any players and any business processes that existed before its arrival. Each model update ripples across media and markets.
On top of it all is the enormous, unprecedented scale in audience shift in loyalty, time and attention from older digital participants to the new world order of ChatGPT (as well as a sprinkling of other AI platforms). Consumers aren’t just ready to be engaged, and occasionally bewildered, by AI-driven interactions, they are deep down the rabbit hole and adopting the possibilities with vigor.
Then there’s the ambition. OpenAI isn’t just a frontier research lab with a chat interface.Hiring Fidji Simo to help build an application ecosystem signaled a clear shift toward platform-competitive thinking with plugins, agents, custom GPTs, enterprise tooling and a growing sense that ChatGPT is a layer that all companies are expected to build on.
The timeline? All the foregoing has happened on a product that wasn’t even launched until November 2022—a reminder of just how compressed the AI timeline really is.
The kicker? The rest of us in digital advertising can’t ignore OpenAI even if we wanted to, as regulators in the US and Europe seem happy to do as they once again stay determinedly focused on where the puck once was. Campaigns, content operations, creative teams and customer experience are now operating in an AI-accelerated landscape. One week, AI promises unprecedented personalization and hyper-scaled content. The next, it surfaces compliance or brand safety challenges no one could have anticipated.
Where Marketers Need to Focus
To be clear, this is not to say we should root for any harm to come to OpenAI. Quite the opposite. An increasing share of the U.S. economy and our collective 401ks now depend on OpenAI’s momentum. But it’s hard to ignore how brutally we’re all being wrenched by its news cycles. One week AI will eliminate half of all jobs (a white collar bloodbath); the next—Oops, just kidding!—it will merelyaugment them.
This is where a WeWork analogy becomes useful (remember that boondoggle?). Not because OpenAI is a vanity real estate play or because its technology is a sham (it plainly isn’t), but because WeWork embodied a particular Silicon Valley hubris confusing scale with inevitability and visionary language with immunity from reality. WeWork CEO Adam Neumann didn’t fail because offices weren’t useful. He failed because his story ran faster than the fundamentals could support.
OpenAI may not be there yet or ever, but it flirts with the same risks. Its governance structure remains unusually complex for a company of its size and scale. The economics of ever-larger models are still unsettled (just to drive home the point, OpenAI hascommitted $1.4 trillion to data infrastructure projects over the next 8 years, more than the current value of the company). All the while, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s tone oscillates between sober warnings about existential risk and breezy assurances thatthis is all fine. Again, hubris doesn’t necessarily mean being wrong. It does imply, as we have seen in Silicon Valley before, blithely assuming you are the Chosen One.
For marketers, that’s a warning. Hype can drive engagement, but it can’t fix governance, trust or execution. Brands that adopt AI without a tight, explicit strategy may look cutting-edge on day one and like amateurs on day 100.
Up and to the Right: Open AI CEO Sam Altman at the Snowflake Summit last June (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Getty Images
Meaning for the Year Ahead
So, what does all this insanity tell us about the year ahead?
The biggest risk is AI normalization. AI already feels less magical and more like electricity. When everything is “AI-powered,” differentiation shifts from wonder to reliability, cost and trust. The transition is brutal for companies whose valuations are fueled by momentum rather than margins and tends to favor the OG infrastructure players, not the loudest storytellers. That’s why Meta’s Mark Zuckerbergwas willing recently to spend $2 billion on the little-known Chinese AI agent startup Manus. Differentiation will come from execution, integration and reliability, not novelty. Brands that lean on momentum alone will be seen as noisy rather than innovative.
Job disruptions could well be messier than headlines suggest. The stories about mass job elimination have been eye-catching, but reality will be more likely focused on quasi automation and wage pressure. In advertising particularly, AI may speed production, but so far few are those who have mastered leveraging it for restructuring creativity.
The platform era will fragment before it consolidates. Despite OpenAI’s push to become the default layer, everyone is hedging aggressively. Multimodel strategies, open-source fallbacks and regulatory constraints will prevent any single company from cleanly owning the entire stack. Could this year look more like the early cloud wars than iOS lock in?
Safety debates will shift from apocalypse to accountability and solutions. This year we’ll all argue less about whether AI will wipe out humanity and instead worry about the clear and present danger of how AI is quietly reshaping hiring, credit, healthcare and overall business ethics. And we’ll push on the positive potential, too–how AI can automate safety solutions. That’s a much more complex conversation, and one that won’t be addressed by white papers and blog posts alone. Conversations will be in person and in debate as much as in collaborations. Technology might well become the way to fix safety issues at scale. Marketing leaders will need to navigate AI content, personalization and interactions with radical transparency.
Whatever happens, OpenAI will define our reality even if it doesn’t dominate it. History can be unkind to pioneers but tends to be generous to their influence. Even if OpenAI eventually cedes ground to competitors or economics, it has already set basic terms for the AI era.
OpenAI is an iconic company, and it is undeniably changing how the world communicates, creates and buys. And let’s be honest, it’s also completely bonkers. It may well end up proving an old dot-com adage: You can tell who the pioneers are by the arrows sticking out of their backs. But regardless of whether OpenAI becomes an enduring operating system of the AI age or an early cautionary tale, the rest of us will be living with the opportunities, the risks and, yes, the insanity, for a very long time. Welcome to 2026!
A new study published in Marketing Science has found that some of the most widely considered online advertising safety and fairness policies may actually boost ad platform revenues while improving fairness outcomes. The policies at the centre of the study are around ads that are designed to help ensure that women, minorities and other protected classes are not disproportionately excluded from job, education and financial opportunities.
The study, “Is Fair Advertising Good for Platforms?” by Di Yuan of Auburn University, Manmohan Aseri of the University of Maryland and Tridas Mukhopadhyay of Carnegie Mellon University, investigated whether policies intended to equalize exposure to economic-opportunity advertisements help or hurt ad platforms financially.
Contrary to industry assumptions, the researchers found that when platforms implement an Equal Exposure with Equal Treatment (EET) policy that requires equal per-capita ad exposure across demographic groups, competition among advertisers intensifies, increasing the total number of dollars spent on advertising.
Empirical reporting has shown that protected groups such as women and minorities are less likely to encounter job, housing or financial opportunity ads online.
Case in point is the female demographic. Because women are a highly sought-after consumer marketing demographic, it costs more online to target them with consumer advertising. But when trying to target women as a demographic for economic-opportunity advertising, it is more expensive to reach them with economic opportunity ads, so as a result they are less likely to be as exposed to those kinds of ads.
Economic-opportunity advertisers (like employers or universities), by contrast to consumer marketing brands, value all users equally but cannot simply outbid specialized retailers to ensure that women see their ads.
“This asymmetric valuation creates a systematic disparity,” said co-author Aseri. “Retailers unintentionally crowd out opportunity-focused advertisers for certain demographics, resulting in fewer job or education ads reaching those protected groups.”
The researchers modelled advertiser competition under three policies: No Restriction (NR)—Advertisers can fully target based on demographics; Equal Treatment (ET)—Economic-opportunity advertisers cannot target by demographic group; and Equal Exposure with Equal Treatment (EET)—Platforms ensure equal exposure while also prohibiting demographic targeting.
While Equal Treatment is widely implemented by platforms as a result of regulatory pressure, the study showed this approach often fails to solve the problems associated with ads simply not reaching their target. In fact, the researchers found that in some cases “equal treatment” ads performed worse than if there were no restrictions at all.
“Equal treatment alone doesn’t fix the competitive imbalance,” said co-author Yuan. “Our analysis shows that it can even reduce platform profits and fail to close the exposure gap between protected and regular users.”
Under the EET policy, however, platforms that commit to boosting the effective ad budgets of economic-opportunity advertisers only when necessary to equalize exposure tend to do better. The study authors found that the mere existence of this rule changes advertiser behaviour, reducing “market segmentation” that previously let advertisers avoid competing directly.
As a result, advertisers spend more aggressively, platforms earn more total advertising revenue, and protected class demographics increase exposure to economic-opportunity ads.
“This is a rare case where fairness and profit objectives are aligned,” said Mukhopadhyay. “By removing the incentive to differentiate across demographic groups, competition itself provides the solution.”
When your brand is built on being number one, finishing second isn’t just a problem, it’s a complete identity crisis.
Some products become so synonymous with their category that the brand name replaces the thing itself. You don’t use an internet search engine, you Google it. You don’t blow your nose on a tissue, you grab a Kleenex. And for years, Elon Musk‘s car company had a similar advantage. “Tesla” and “electric vehicle” were commonly used interchangeably, almost as if no other EV brand existed.
That was Tesla’s superpower. They didn’t just make EVs; they were EVs. Every other manufacturer was playing catch-up. But now? They’re in second place. And for a brand like Tesla, second place might as well mean “first loser”. Not even the Cybertruck design debacle was as bad for the brand as this.
Reality catches up
So what’s happened? In short, Chinese manufacturer BYD has overtaken Tesla as the world’s biggest electric vehicle maker. Tesla delivered 1.64 million vehicles in 2025; down 9% from the previous year. BYD sold 2.26 million. That’s not close; that’s getting beaten at your own game. And it’s not just about sales; Tesla’s brand value has plummeted 35% in Interbrand’s latest ranking.
But here’s what’s genuinely bonkers: Tesla’s stock finished 2025 up 11%. Meanwhile traditional manufacturers like Toyota, who actually make consistent profits from their EVs, continue to be valued at a fraction of Tesla’s worth.
How’s that possible? Basically, Elon Musk is the world’s most effective one-man marketing department. He doesn’t just promote Tesla; he is Tesla. Every tweet, every wild promise about robotaxis and humanoid robots convinces investors they’re not buying a car company; they’re buying a sci-fi future.
Tesla Cybertruck (Image credit: Tesla)
The problem is, this cuts both ways. Now Musk’s own brand is inseparable from Tesla’s, his erratic behaviour and divisive politics become Tesla’s problem too.
As Michael Jordan famously pointed out, “Republicans buy sneakers too”… and the same principle is playing out here in reverse. Turns out, not entirely surprisingly, that the people most motivated to buy an eco-friendly car don’t always share the same politics as Elon.
The maturing market
It’s worth noting that the market as a whole has matured. At the outset, Tesla made electric cars desirable, fast, luxurious, aspirational. They removed the “worthy” stigma and replaced it with swagger. That was revolutionary… but that was also 10 years ago.
Nowadays, Mercedes, BMW, Audi and Porsche are making credible electric cars with decades of brand heritage behind them. Chinese manufacturers are offering quality EVs at prices that make Tesla look overpriced. The branding of EVs has shifted from “I’m saving the planet while being impossibly cool” to “This is just a good car that happens to be electric.”
All of which means that for Tesla, second place really does equal first loser. The brand’s whole identity is wrapped up in being the disruptor, the one everyone else is chasing. Coming second – especially to a Chinese manufacturer most people couldn’t pick out of a line-up – takes all the air out of this brand narrative.
Tesla Cybercab (Image credit: Tesla)
Elon knows this, which is why he’s pivoting to robotaxis and robots right now. “We’re not really a car company” is the subtext. It’s classic brand repositioning when your core business is wobbling. The question is, will anyone buy it?
After all, Tesla has spent a lot of time resting on its laurels. As a result, quality control has slipped, customer service has deteriorated and the CEO has become a liability. The brand promised – and is still promising – the future. But in practice, they’re delivering inconsistent build quality and broken promises, while continuing to talk about full self-driving being “just around the corner”… at it has been for over a decade now.
Key takeaway
Right now, Tesla faces a choice. Focus on being a premium EV brand; the Apple of electric cars. Or embrace the pivot to full tech company, betting everything on autonomous driving to AI.
What they can’t do is pretend nothing has changed. Because the results are in, and the brand that defined an entire category has been outmanoeuvred. For creatives in general, it’s a textbook case in how even the most powerful brand narratives eventually collide with reality.
The question now isn’t whether Tesla can recover. It’s whether they can accept that in the brand game they’ve built for themselves, second place really does equal first loser – and that might mean completely reimagining what winning looks like. Good luck with that, Elon.
Tom May is an award-winning journalist specialising in art, design, photography and technology. His latest book, The 50 Greatest Designers (Arcturus Publishing), was published this June. He’s also author of Great TED Talks: Creativity (Pavilion Books). Tom was previously editor of Professional Photography magazine, associate editor at Creative Bloq, and deputy editor at net magazine.
In an age of AI-generated shortcuts, one Dutch lottery campaign chose a style of animation where five seconds takes a day. Madness or genius?
Picture this: your creative director walks in and announces the next campaign will be produced at a rate of five seconds per day. In 2024, when AI can generate entire commercials before lunch, when deadlines compress, and budgets tighten, when “faster and cheaper” has become advertising’s unofficial mantra, TBWA\NEBOKO‘s latest work for Staatsloterij feels almost defiant in its use of stop motion. But it works brilliantly.
For this New Year’s ad for the Dutch State Lottery, every character, prop and miniature Dutch streetscape was built and animated entirely by hand, one millimetre at a time. In 2026, it’s the advertising equivalent of making bread from scratch when you could just buy a loaf. And that’s precisely the point.
For over a decade, Staatsloterij has carved out territory in the Netherlands’ cultural calendar with its end-of-year spots. Previous campaigns have featured a cast of animals (dogs, hedgehogs, cats, even a bird in a cuckoo-clock) delivering heart warming tales of connection. But this year’s ad, titled “Give each other some luck”, marks a creative pivot: fully handcrafted human characters in a tangible, imperfect world.
Small acts of kindness
The film follows a grumpy elderly man, literally trailed by a small dark cloud (beautifully, painfully animated frame by frame), who begrudgingly accepts parcels for his entire street. When a lottery ticket arrives for a neighbour, his reluctant delivery becomes a journey through small acts of kindness that gradually shift his outlook. It’s simple storytelling, but the medium transforms it.
TBWA\NEBOKO’s executive creative director Dennis Baars is candid about the strategy. “We created a nice little story about a grumpy neighbour,” he explains. “But we really wanted to tell it in a surprising way. We were convinced that the human craft of stop motion would elevate the storytelling.”
Note the word choice here: not “speed it up” or “make it cheaper,” but “elevate”. In partnering with London’s Blinkink, the studio behind John Lewis’s legendary The Bear & The Hare ad, TBWA\NEBOKO wasn’t just buying expertise. They were buying into a philosophy that handmade work carries emotional weight that CGI often cannot replicate.
Director Joseph Mann describes watching “characters and entire worlds come alive in front of your very eyes” as pure magic. And there’s something in that observation worth unpacking.
Importance of authenticity
Stop-motion’s appeal isn’t nostalgia: it’s authenticity. Every imperfection, every subtle texture, every slight wobble in movement signals human presence. In a media landscape increasingly saturated with algorithmic perfection, these “flaws” become features.
The technical commitment was serious, involving weeks of building miniature environments; puppets meticulously crafted and repositioned hundreds of times for a single scene; a floating cloud that needed animating alongside its despondent owner. As this behind-the-scenes video notes, each shooting day yielded just five seconds of footage.
But here’s where that gamble paid off. The campaign’s message (“Give each other some luck”) finds its perfect expression in the medium itself. Because stop-motion is inherently collaborative. Teams of makers, animators, set builders and puppet fabricators working together, each bringing their craft to create something none could achieve alone. The production process mirrors the story’s thesis.
This matters particularly for the Staatsloterij brand. Their New Year’s Eve draw is watched by millions of Dutch viewers on 31 December, making it an annual ritual with real meaning in people’s lives. The stop-motion approach signals respect for that cultural moment. It says: we invested time, care and human skill because you’re worth it. Try getting that message across with stock footage and AI upscaling.
Genuine distinction
There’s also commercial savvy here. In the Netherlands’ crowded end-of-year advertising landscape, standing out requires genuine distinction. While competitors chase trending styles and quick-turn production, TBWA\NEBOKO went the opposite direction, embracing limitation as liberation.
The result feels intimate, crafted, memorable. It’s advertising that acknowledges its audience’s intelligence rather than assaulting their attention.
Animation director Sam Gainsborough’s involvement underscores another crucial element: performance matters, even at a miniature scale. Character nuance, subtle emotional shifts, the physics of a drifting cloud; these details required as much dramatic consideration as any live-action casting.
Perhaps most telling is what this project suggests about creative confidence. Choosing stop-motion in 2024 requires belief in craft, patience with process, and faith that audiences will respond to work that clearly took effort. It’s a counterargument to the efficiency-above-all mentality that’s hollowing out so much creative work.
Junk food adverts are banned on television and online starting on Monday as part of a drive to tackle childhood obesity.
The UK-wide ban stops food and drinks high in fat, salt and sugar (HFSS) being advertised on TV before 21:00 and at any time online.
It applies to products considered to be the biggest drivers of childhood obesity, including soft drinks, chocolates and sweets, pizzas and ice creams.
The Food and Drink Federation (FDF) said it is committed to helping people eat healthily and has been voluntarily abiding by the new restrictions since October.
As well as more obviously unhealthy foods, the ban also covers some breakfast cereals and porridges, sweetened bread products, and main meals and sandwiches.
Decisions over which products fall under the ban are based on a scoring tool, balancing their nutrient levels against whether they are high in saturated fat, salt, or sugar.
Plain oats and most porridge, muesli and granola are not banned under the crackdown, but some versions with added sugar, chocolate or syrup could be affected.
Firms can still promote healthier versions of banned products, which the government hopes will lead to food makers developing healthier recipes.
Josh Tilley, brand strategy director at marketing agency Initials CX, said companies will still be allowed to advertise their brand in general, but not specific products.
Adverts featuring “things like the PepsiCo logo or the McDonald’s arches” will not be banned he said, meaning that larger companies may be less affected by the new restrictions.
Smaller companies “can’t necessarily afford those bigger brand campaigns”, Tilley said. Their adverts are based on “educating people” about specific products, “and they’re no longer going to be able to do that”.
Previously, HFSS food and drink adverts were banned on any platform where more than a quarter of the audience was under 16.
Firms that do not comply with the new rules risk action by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).
NHS data shows almost one in 10 (9.2%) reception-aged children are now living with obesity, while one in five children have tooth decay by the age of five.
It is estimated obesity costs the NHS more than £11bn every year.
Evidence shows children’s exposure to ads for unhealthy food can influence what they eat from a young age, in turn putting them at greater risk of becoming overweight or obese.
The government estimates the ad ban will prevent around 20,000 cases of childhood obesity.
Katherine Brown, professor of behaviour change in health at the University of Hertfordshire, said the ban was “long overdue and a move in the right direction”.
She said: “Children are highly susceptible to aggressive marketing of unhealthy foods and exposure to them puts them at greater risk of developing obesity and associated chronic diseases.”
Ms Brown called for the government to make nutritious options “more affordable, accessible and appealing”.
The FDF said manufacturers are “committed to working in partnership with the government and others to help people make healthier choices”.
It added: “Investing in developing healthier products has been a key priority for food and drink manufacturers for many years and as a result, our members’ products now have a third of the salt and sugar and a quarter of the calories than they did ten years ago.”
Design Director at Mother Design, Bentzion Goldman, feels identity design has become safe, sanitised and downright boring in the last 12 months. Let’s flip that in 2026, he argues, and make branding weird again.
his is the third year I’ve written about trends and predictions in branding. It usually goes like this: I review the year’s biggest identity design work, layer in my own observations, and provide a light roadmap for the year ahead.
But this year was different. Looking back at the biggest rebrands, what was most remarkable was how utterly unremarkable they were. What stood out was not how bad the brands were but rather their overwhelming okayness. A troubling trend became clear: the rise of safe, forgettable branding.
2025 was the year of Cracker Barrel, the year of HBO MAX / MAX / HBO MAX, and the year of MS NOW (née MSNBC). All branding efforts landed with, at best, a sigh and, at worst, public outrage. What’s more, some of the biggest changes were so subtle you may have barely noticed them: Amazon, Tripadvisor, Verizon, Walmart, Lyft, and OpenAI quietly tweaked their brand systems, even if some of those endeavours were billed as overhauls. Creative Boom even wrote a piece on how the quiet rebrand took over 2025.
Don’t get me wrong, on two accounts. I believe in the power of a masterful brand refresh that subtly tweaks its brand elements, artfully balancing heritage with progress. And there was beautiful, innovative branding released this year. But something deeper emerged when looking at brands with the highest visibility. You might recall the ‘blanding’ era of the 2010s. I think we’ve hit a similar wall at this moment, but for altogether different reasons.
Everything is just okay
Earlier this year, I read James Poniewozik’s piece for The New York Times, The Comfortable Problem of Mid TV, which has stayed with me ever since finishing it. Poniewozik argues that we’ve entered an era in TV where everything is just … okay. He writes that a decade ago, we experienced an era of a lot of bad TV, but the risks and imagination required to make those shows also led to many standout series.
Now, the advent of high-pressure, high-budget streaming platforms and an associated low appetite for risk have resulted in a slew of shows that are beautifully shot, incredibly expensive, and yet—just okay. True creative risk-taking is exceedingly rare to find. Instead, we have a lot of the perfectly acceptable yet often emotionless middle ground.
I believe something similar is happening in the world of branding.
The enemy of a good brand used to be a bad brand: badly kerned typography, poorly chosen colours, and digital illiteracy. Today, the enemy of a good brand is no longer a bad brand, but one that is just okay.
The proliferation and democratisation of design software, along with an increasing awareness of design among the general public, have created an environment where even the smallest teams can produce competent branding. And let me be clear: this is a good thing. Design should be for everyone, and the ability for clients, beginners, and non-designers to create design work elevates the field for everyone. Per a Michael Bierut anecdote, the fact that we now have online trolling of rebrands means people care about branding!
But this new reality has also resulted in a sea of work that’s simply okay. Scroll through this year’s branding projects, and you’ll see a multitude of brands using the same tricks. Many of these identities have no technical fault, and yet they lack a certain emotional depth; the kind of spiritual centre that makes a brand truly resonate with its audience.
Striking a nerve
I think this exact feeling is the reason why the Cracker Barrel rebrand struck such a nerve with the general public. The original identity may have had technical shortcomings, but what the new brand gained in optimisation, it lost in emotional resonance. And now the pushback has created a heightened environment of fear where brands are now even more risk-averse, wary of becoming the next big branding flop torn apart in the comments.
In this new era of mid-branding, we need a new playbook. One that empowers designers to expand their aperture and dare to dream again.
So what’s the way forward? Allow me to advocate for the value of being weird in design.
Weird gets normalised
The simple truth is, people don’t know what they like until they see it. And until they like it, they might hate it. History is full of examples of art so novel in its time that it provoked outrage and even violence. The sans serif style of typography, now completely commonplace, was once considered so radical compared to the serif and ornamental styles of its era that people called it monstrous, ugly, and grotesque—a name that stuck.
In 1913, a ballet by Igor Stravinsky called The Rite of Spring was so innovative for its time, with its use of syncopation, dissonance, and sharp dance movements, that people hurled objects at the stage, cried, and even started fistfights in the audience. The police were called to calm the riot. And you thought the comments on Brand New were bad. Experimentation and transgression are vital for discovering new ideas and finding novel ways forward.
What’s remarkable is that these examples, once shocking innovations, are now normalised. The lesson is profound: people hate change, but, given time, change softens until it becomes the new normal. It is up to us designers to be the tastemakers and the future tellers. This is radical permission: it is a licence to look beyond familiar references and to challenge what we consider ‘good design’.
Image by Bentzion Goldman
This idea is illustrated by industrial designer Raymond Loewy’s MAYA principle: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable. This urges designers to push things as far as possible, up to the point where they remain within the tolerance of user comfort. In other words, design something unoriginal, and it will feel predictable, yet design something too radical, and you could incite a riot in a ballet theatre. Our charge, as designers, is to find that sweet spot right on the bleeding edge of innovation.
Here are three brands from the past year that do exactly that.
How to do it
Cotton Design’s identity for Eternal Research is a retro-futuristic system featuring an engraving-inspired wordmark, eleven Victorian-inspired headline typefaces, generative ornamental patterns made with code, and a triangular piece of hardware called the Demon Box. The system defies easy categorisation, balancing minimalism and maximalism in a way that feels immersive and genuinely new.
Mother Design, which I must confess I work for, released branding for Fhirst, a prebiotic soda line that burst onto the market this year. The packaging system draws on the joyful design of early 2000s soda branding, featuring a reverse-contrast script wordmark, an animal mascot for each flavour (the dolphin is my personal favourite), Papyrus as a supporting typeface, and gradients, bubbles, and starbursts galore. It’s a more-is-more system that could easily fall off the rails, but never does, thanks to careful selection and use of brand elements. Instead, the brand radiates pure joy; I have yet to see someone scroll through the project without smiling.
The final project is Clue Perfumery, with design and art directed by Caleb Vanden Boom. Its script logo is beautifully weird, with extreme contrast and bottom-heavy curves that feel both refined and expressive. The brand’s editorial tone is elevated by wildly imaginative art direction: perfume bottles photographed in fish tanks, large-scale butter sculptures, and, most recently, a limited-edition scented stone sculpture shaped like an apple. Clue is one of those brands where the connective tissue isn’t a single idea, but rather good taste and boundless creativity. The eclectic choices work in harmony, resulting in a brand that is lush, unexpected, and engaging.
A Victorian-inspired triangular musical instrument, soda mascots featuring dolphins and eagles, and a perfume bottle covered in butter: these are the kinds of daring choices that push boundaries and yield designs with emotional resonance. These brands are not weird for the sake of it; rather, the unexpected choices are deeply connected to who they are as a brand. The designers involved in their creation reject the safe route, opting instead to question, to research, and to play.
Feeling optimistic
I have every reason to be optimistic for the year ahead in design. We have more tools at our disposal than ever, which means bigger challenges and bigger rewards. I think we will see many brands that make us scroll quickly past without batting an eyelash. But through the sameness, the smartest, most creative, and weirdest brands will find a way to stand out and create inspiring, innovative work.
And for the designers among us, this framework gives us permission to step outside our peripheries and dig deeper for inspiration. In our age of automation and algorithms, designers have the privilege of interrupting the churn of predictable sameness with the uniquely human elements of taste and unexpectedness. Everything is possible, because what is bizarre, weird—even grotesque—today is merely normal tomorrow. So, my biggest hope for the year ahead is precisely this: let’s dream again.
It’s a new year, which makes it the perfect time to update your LinkedIn profile and communications strategy to make sure it is current, relevant to your goals, and compelling to the people who are checking you out. The world of work continues to evolve, and your LinkedIn profile and networking strategy must position you for success.
Align Your LinkedIn Strategy With Two Critical Forces
Two important areas to consider while evolving your LinkedIn strategy are humanity and AI. As tech gets integrated into every aspect of business, your humanity is what helps you stand out and build meaningful relationships. That means your profile must show that you are clear, human, generous, empathic, and grounded in real experience, all the things AI and technology are not.
At the same time, you need to showcase your skill and interest in AI. AI will impact virtually every role. Make it clear that you’re using AI thoughtfully and are committed to proactively developing AI skills to remain ahead of the curve. This can show up in how you describe your work, the content you share, and the tools or approaches you reference in your profile.
The goal is not to do more on LinkedIn, but to do the right things well. Follow this these three steps:
1. Update Your LinkedIn Profile
A lot happens in a year, so if you haven’t been updating your profile regularly, it’s time to make it current and compelling.
Your LinkedIn Headshot
Your headshot makes you real in the virtual world. It allows people to connect with you on a human level. It should convey the real you and be at least current enough for someone to be able to find you in a crowded coffee shop. If you changed your headshot recently, you probably won’t need to update it if it meets these criteria.
Your LinkedIn Headline
Your headline’s job is to make you relevant and confirm for viewers that you are the person they are looking for, or a person they should get to know. LinkedIn gives you 220 characters for your Headline. Use as many as needed to captivate viewers and encourage them to read on. Your LinkedIn headline has three important functions:
It makes you relevant. Your current title, role, and company make you relevant.
It helps you get found. Use your headline for search optimization. Include in it all the keywords you want to be associated with, and those people will use to search for you.
It allows you to showcase something interesting about you that makes the viewer want to learn more. Consider including why you do what you do, how you do what you do, or the results you achieve when you do it. You could also share your passion or life purpose.
Your LinkedIn About
Your About allows you to introduce yourself, tell your story, and make a branded first impression. Because of the power of LinkedIn and how search results are presented in Google, it will likely be your first impression. When you’re thoughtful in crafting your About, it helps you:
Differentiate yourself in a crowded marketplace
Attract opportunities that align with your goals
Build trust and real human connection with others
Your About is also a natural place to convey your thoughts about AI and the role it plays in your work.
Your LinkedIn Featured Section
Because many people keep their Featured section blank, it is an opportunity for you to stand out and showcase your passions, purpose, and accomplishments. Your Featured section sits near the top of your profile, between your About and Activity sections. That means more people will see it. This section is designed to showcase multimedia. Include images and video to enhance your story and make your profile richer and more interesting. Consider including:
Your Brand introduction. Create a brief 60-second video, that highlights your interests, accomplishments and fun facts about you.
Your Success Stories. Share one or two pieces of content or stories that highlight your superpowers and differentiators.
Your Intellectual Property. Use it to convey your proprietary process, framework, or system, like your three-step formula for crafting click-worthy headlines for social media posts.
2. Define Your LinkedIn Networking Strategy
In 2026, effective networking is about relevance and relationships, not volume. With over 1.3 billion members, LinkedIn is a powerful place for networking. Your goal, though, is not to connect with all 1.3 billion professionals. It’s to identify your community and be visible to them. As the new year begins:
Get your network up-to-date. Look back through your calendar and emails and send connection requests to the people you have met in the past year.
Decide on your strategy for adding new connections as you meet people. Also, do searches to connect with other like-minded peers so you can build a community for mutual support.
Put plans in place to grow your network. Consider adding your LinkedIn profile to your email signature, and create a slide to include in presentations you deliver to encourage participants to reach out and connect.
3. Commit To A LinkedIn Visibility Plan
Once your profile and network are aligned, visibility is what brings your personal brand to life. Strong brands are visible and available to the people they seek to impact, influence, and impress. The best way to do that is to share value as your primary thought leadership priority. There’s a lot of noise in the world of social media, and LinkedIn is no exception. To stand out, commit to the three Cs of social media communications plans:
Consistent. Strong brands are known for something, not 100 things. Know your topic, message, and POV and stick with it.
Constant. Choose a cadence and commit to it. You may choose to post a couple of times a month, weekly, or even daily. Whatever you choose, treat it as you would any other important item on your to-do list.
Critical. Not critical in the sense of being judgmental. Critical meaning it is not content that is nice to have. It’s meaningful and valuable to your audience and essential for their success.
One way to achieve the three Cs of effective visibility is with a LinkedIn Newsletter. It’s a powerful way to stay engaged with the people who are interested in what you have to say, and the LinkedIn Newsletter platform makes it easy for you to create, share and promote your newsletter to followers and connections. It allows you to build familiarity and trust over time without having to start from scratch each time you post.
Make LinkedIn An Ongoing Habit Instead Of A One-Time Update
Your LinkedIn profile serves many roles in helping you build your personal brand and achieve your career goals. To maximize its impact, commit to keeping your profile up to date and staying engaged with your network. LinkedIn works when you work it, so adopt the habit of interacting on LinkedIn regularly and create more opportunities that are aligned with your goals.
