The Campaign Podcast

Three awards have been withdrawn from Cannes Lions 2025 over fabrication of case studies and concerns around their legitimacy. In the weeks that have followed Cannes Festival of Creativity, the integrity of advertising awards has been questioned and what was once widely accepted in advertising awards, has now been exposed.

DM9's “Efficient way to pay” was the most notable withdrawal as it won the Grand Prix in the Creative Data Lions. The DDB agency was caught using AI to fabricate news coverage in the case study and misleading the jury. Two other DM9 awards were also with...

From custom emotes to immersive live streams, this sponsored episode of The Campaign Podcast explores how Twitch is enabling brands to participate in culture firsthand versus watching it happen.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As 2025's Pride Month comes to a close, Campaign reflects on how the global DEI rollback has impacted the way brands show up for LGBTQIA+ communities.

Gay Times' chief executive Tag Warner said the news outlet has lost £5m in ad revenue this year due to eight of its top ten advertisers pulling their contracts, and Thinkbox's head of marketing Chris Dunne, who is also chief executive of Outvertising, also commented on the noticeable drawback by brands. While it might on the surface seem like the changes to DEI this year have impacted brands' support for L...

Campaign asked this year’s A List cohort to name their favourite TV ad ahead of the upcoming 70th anniversary of commercial television. Guinness “Surfer” by AMV BBDO came out top.

One trend that emerged from the choices was that many of the most popular ads were more than 25 years old. Armed with this finding, Campaign reporter Eszter Gurbicz wrote a feature exploring the industry’s love of old ads.

This episode of the Campaign Podcast dissects the qualities that make ads stick in peoples’ minds and shares the industry’s view on whether ther...

Campaign’s editors from around the world come together after the Lions festival for the final episode of the Campaign Cannes global podcast in partnership with Ocean Outdoor.

We review the festival and talk about the work that won, the big trends that emerged, the first year of Campaign House and the best parties.

Gideon Spanier (far left), the UK editor-in-chief of Campaign, hosts the podcast and is joined by Maisie McCabe, editor of Campaign UK, David Brown, co-editor of Campaign Canada, and Luz Corona, editor of Campaign US.

Further re...

Campaign’s editors from around the world come together at Campaign House at the Lions festival for the second episode of the Campaign Cannes global podcast in partnership with Ocean Outdoor.

Gideon Spanier, the UK editor-in-chief of Campaign, hosts the podcast and is joined by Maisie McCabe, editor of Campaign UK, Nikita Mishra, editor of Campaign Asia, Chris Powell, co-editor of Campaign Canada, and Luz Corona, editor of Campaign US.

We talk about the buzz at the midway point during the festival, including the first Grand Prix winners, how the awards juries reach th...

Campaign’s editors from around the world come together ahead of the Lions festival for the first episode of the Campaign Cannes global podcast in partnership with Ocean Outdoor.

We preview the festival and talk about the work we want to win, the mood in the ad industry and Campaign House – our exciting new venue at Cannes. 

Gideon Spanier (centre in picture), the UK editor-in-chief of Campaign, hosts the podcast and is joined by Maisie McCabe, editor of Campaign UK, Nikita Mishra, editor of Campaign Asia, David Brown, co-editor of Campaign Canada, and Luz Coron...

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Group M, the world's largest media buying group, has undergone a titanic course correction and "simplification", re-emerging as WPP Media. While the destination "makes sense", according to Campaign's editor-in-chief Gideon Spanier, the reorganisation is coming at a huge cost to those that work there.

In February this year, The Campaign Podcast asked 'What is Group M?' and in the three months since, the group has merged agency brands into a single P&L, got rid of agency specific jobs titles and begun making roles redundant around the world. More recently, WPP's chief executive Mark Read...

Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity 2025 is only a few weeks away. With the prejudging completed last week, Campaign speaks to three jurors on what they're expecting this year at Cannes and what purpose the festival serves in a year of economic turbulence.

Tech editor Lucy Shelley speaks to Kate Stanners, president of the Film Lions and global chief creative officer and chair of Saatchi & Saatchi; Dan Clays, president of the Media Lions and chief executive officer EMEA at Omnicom Media Group and Noel Bunting, juror on Digital Craft Lions and chief creative officer at Publicis London.<...

VCCP London’s chief executive Andrew Peake is the special guest in the studio, joining Campaign’s creativity and culture editor Gurjit Degun, deputy editor Gemma Charles and features editor Matt Barker.

Andrew explains why VCCP are moving out of their home in London’s Victoria after 23 years and heading over to Fitzrovia, prompting a conversation among the quartet around the role that offices – and crucially, office cultures – have to play in attracting talent.

That then leads to further chat about socio-economic factors, career development and other motivating factors that come into play when choos...

Campaign hosted its star event Media360 in Brighton this week, gathering together leaders from UK media agencies, owners and businesses to discuss and question where media is headed in 2025.

Hosted by the chief executives of Essencemediacom and Hearts & Science, Natalie Cummins and Garrett O’Rielly, the two days covered connecting with gen Z, what to do about AI and urged advertisers to support trusted journalism. Jamie Laing opened the conference in the hot seat questioned by Campaign editor Maisie McCabe.

In this bonus episode you will hear a session from the event which que...

In this special episode of The Campaign Podcast, Charlotte Rawlings, deputy creativity and culture editor at Campaign, chats to four of the industry’s top creatives about some recent ads. 

Rawlings is joined by Laura Rogers, executive creative director at AMV BBDO; Jonny Parker and Chris Birch, joint chief creative officers at VCCP; and Caitlin Ryan, creative partner at Dentsu Creative. The creatives discuss the longevity of brand mascots, their favourite type of crumpets and how the PG Tips Monkey has transformed into a loving husband.

Listen to their opinions on British Gas, Warb...

The darker side of agency life reveals that burnout is still an issue in advertising. Adland is infamously known for late night calls, weekend pitch prep and a culture of long working hours being the norm. Four years ago Campaign launched an investigation into the darker side of agency work and in this year’s follow up, it seems little progress has been made.

This week is Mental Health Awareness week, and in this episode Campaign speaks to Sue Todd, chief executive at advertising and media charity Nabs, and David Eakins, former art director and now me...

Live experiences couldn't get more real. They provide consumers with a tangible connection to a brand. But in an era of declining third spaces, consumers need to be wowed if they are to venture out their homes to attend an event.

Louisa O'Conner if the founder and managing director of experiential agency Seen Presents. She joins the podcast to discuss the change in consumer behaviour, why consumers generally prefer grassroots events to premium and how the pressure put on live experiences makes them feel like the ultimate wedding.

Hosted by Campaign's tech editor...

Women in creative leadership roles have been leaving adland. The IPA Census reported a decline in both of the last two years, down from 30% in 2022 to 25.6% in 2024. On top of this, the Census reported a widening pay gap, increasing to almost 20% in 2024.

This episode welcomes Laura Jordan Bambach to the studio, founder and chief creative officer of female founded Uncharted. Alongside editor Maisie McCabe and deputy creativity and culture editor Charlotte Rawlings, they discuss why it’s got worse, if there was any improvement seen in the first place and what needs to be done to am...

Last week, the greats of UK media gathered in London to celebrate the Campaign Media Awards 2025. The coveted Commercial Team of the Year award went to LADbible while Spark Foundry’s Mondelez Team took home Agency Team of the Year.

The winning Campaign of the Year was awarded to PHD and "Stream of (un)consciousness" for the British Heart Foundation. The gaming campaign worked with Twitch creators, interrupting their streams to teach viewers how to do CPR, and the results were powerful, with someone’s life being saved after a viewer saw one streamer’s CPR segmen...

In February this year, the UK government published a consultation on AI, proposing a change to current copyright legislation. It would allow tech companies to use creative works including film, TV and original journalism to train AI models without permission of the creators, unless they have opted out.

It was met with harsh criticism, rallying "Make it fair" campaigns and rejections from both creatives and tech platforms alike, albeit for opposite reasons. Google and OpenAI responded to the consultation saying that it would cause developers to "deprioritise the market" and that "training on the open web...

What links McDonald's "Iconic needs no explanation" by Leo Burnett, KFC's gravy take over of the BFI and Kellogg's "See you in the morning" also by Leo Burnett? These three ads are the latest in a line of out-of-home posters that zoom in on products, alter or remove logos and have minimal text. Tesco, Heinz and B&Q have also created similar ads.

While this might be a trend, it certainly isn't new. A 1990 Silk Cut ad "Slash" by Saatchi & Saatchi also had a similar minimalist style and more recently in 2023, Barbie released an entirely pink...

Campaign's Agency of the Year Awards took place last week celebrating the best shops in adland across creative, media, independent, customer engagement, start-up and more.

This episode chats to three of the big winners: Mother, who took home Creative Agency of the Year, MG OMD which won Media Agency and Rapp which celebrated five awards with three golds: Performance Marketing Agency, New Business Leader and Customer Engagement Agency Leader.

MG OMG's CEO Natalie Bell talked about the importance of an entrepreneurial spirit while Rapp's CMO Tracey Barber discussed how to protect employees from...

Principal-based media buying, which includes inventory media and proprietary media, has become a key practice for large agency groups, but it remains opaque, with finance trails and pricing structures largely in the dark. 

In March this year, ISBA updated its media services framework calling out media agencies for lack of transparency and "non-compliance", which it said has been leading to "tensions" between advertisers and agencies. The IPA hit back at ISBA for suggesting "systemic malpractice" in principal-based media and painting “a misleading picture of how agencies operate”, serving "only to perpetuate the myth that agencies are acting...

Campaign has released its biggest project of the year, reviewing and marking the top 92 agencies in the UK for Campaign's 2025 School Reports, in partnership with Nielsen.

In this episode, Campaign's editorial team reveals its overall impression on the reports, what they divulge about the health of the industry by analysing the billings across media and creative and how diversity has been impacted in the last year. They discuss how creativity fared in 2024 and the consequence of a few huge media pitches (Amazon, L'Oreal and Ebay, to name a few).

Hosted by tech editor...

"There is an unofficial reason why pre-testing is so popular, and that's that clients work in very complex organisations with lots of stakeholders," says Martin Beverley, former chief strategy officer at Adam & Eve/DDB.

Beverley joins the Campaign team on the podcast to discuss the efficacy of pre-testing and its contentiousness in adland: some say data can stifle creativity while others argue it’s a sure method to improve advertising effectiveness.

Marketing professor Mark Ritson said it wasn’t divisive but actually a "no-brainer", that it’s essentially infallible, and we now live in a d...

"Unprecedented","furlough" and "bubbles" are a few of the words that are reminiscent of 2020. On 23rd March five years ago, the UK prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that the UK was entering a lockdown as a result of the spread of Coronavirus. 

Now in 2025, the way in which we work has been upturned and a "new normal" is being established. As for the advertising industry, has it changed for the better, or is it still looking back to years gone by?

In this episode, the campaign team will answer the question if adland h...

Holding company solutions are on the rise, particularly for large clients whose spend is in the £100 millions. 

Publicis Flame is the latest to ignite, created after Santander appointed Publicis Groupe to its global creative and media business. Ongoing pitches include Natwest which is also looking for a single holding company to take on its media and creative business.

Holding companies have been expanding their offerings across creative, media, tech and data to service client needs, but do these solutions really work? And what becomes of the individual agency brands when amalgamated into one so...

One would think that the answer to "what is Group M?" would be a short one, but after many changes, mergers, shuffles and dissolutions at WPP's media arm in the last 12 months, the answer is not so.

Group M is the largest media buying group in the world and in this episode, Campaign's journalists discuss what the company was when it began in the early 2000s, what has happened in the last 12 months including losing Sky, the closure of EssenceMediacom X and axing its global agency CEO roles, and what it is now. The team examines...

The advertising industry accounts for 3% to 4% of global emissions, twice that of the aviation industry, found research from the IAB. Is it truly making an effort to reduce its impact on the environment?

In this episode, Campaign speaks to Stephen Woodford, chief executive of the Advertising Association, on its Ad Net Zero program, the power adland holds in making positive change and whether tech platforms really doing enough.

Before we speak to Stephen, Campaign's journalists gather to discuss media's varying impact, what happens to agencies with fossil fuel clients, and AI's impact on...

In this bonus episode of The Campaign Podcast, Charlotte Rawlings, deputy creativity and culture editor at Campaign, is joined by Maisie McCabe, Campaign’s UK editor, to discuss the ads that aired throughout the 59th Super Bowl on 10 February. 

Rawlings and McCabe are joined by Lynsey Atkin, outgoing chief creative officer at McCann London; Noel Bunting, CCO at Publicis London; and David Kolbusz, CCO at Orchard. 

The trio of creatives discuss Buffalo sauce, Steve Rogers’ love for donkeys and whether the Super Bowl formula of celebrity cameos is truly effective. Listen to their opinio...

When a new boss steps in to lead an agency, they must weigh up how much they change the business and how much the business changes them.

Conrad Persons, president of Grey London, who joins the podcast team in this latest epsiode, says: "'That’s how we do things round here' is one of the most abominable phrases in business."

Persons is joined by Campaign's deputy editor, Gemma Charles, and premium content editor, Nicola Merrifield. The episode, hosted by tech editor Lucy Shelley, looks at balancing change, the importance of likability and technology's imp...

As we approach Covid's five year anniversary, much has changed about the world of work and where we do it.

After WPP's chief executive Mark Read announced that the holding company will be mandating four days a week, adland has had plenty to say on the approach to hybrid working. A petition was started by WPP employees to revoke the order and has almost reached 20,000 signatures. (It is open for anyone to sign up).

Three weeks since, the topic is still one of Campaign’s most read. In this episode Campaign's editorial team di...

Sneezing, coughing and catching a cold from the other side of the Atlantic might be this year's theme for UK advertisers.

In this episode of The Campaign Podcast, host and tech editor Lucy Shelley is joined by deputy editor Gemma Charles, features editor Matt Barker and culture and creativity editor Alessandra Scotto di Santolo. The team discusses brands' reaction to Trump's re-election, after his inauguration on 20 January, and to Meta's overhaul of its global DEI programmes and US fact-checking policies. From purposeful ad campaigns that will bridge divides in society, to the re-adjustment of media spend on...

"It's time to ditch the 'R' word," said Nik Wheatley last year in an article on Campaign that exposed the regional divide that exists in adland, and the danger of categorising everywhere outside of London as the 'regions'.

It was revealed that £250m in billings has been lost from the North West to London in recent years, due to agencies relocations and advertisers bulling their business from northern agencies.

In this episode, Wheatley dials in from his Manchester media agency Notorious Communications along with deputy media editor Beau Jackson and editor Maisie McCabe. T...

At Campaign's Year Ahead Breakfast Briefing this Tuesday 14 January, industry leaders took to the stage to give their predictions, concerns and excitement for 2025.

This bonus episode includes the final panel of the event, moderated by deputy creativity and culture editor Charlotte Rawlings, with Chaka Sobhani, president and global chief creative officer of DDB Worldwide, Iain Tait, co-founder of Food Arts & Technology and Jonathan Kneebone, co-founder and director of Glue Society.

The discussion ranged from AI’s impact on creative processes to the importance of fostering individual talent and the evolving role of experiential ma...

After dominating news headlines throughout December, and likely well into 2025, it is all still possible for the Omnicom-IPG merger to fall through, repeating history from 2013 when Omnicom failed to merge with Publicis Groupe.

Campaign's editor-in-chief Gideon Spanier sat down in a global exclusive interview with John Wren, CEO of Omnicom, and Philippe Krakowsky, CEO of IPG, after they announced the all-stock deal on 9 December to create the world's biggest agency group. Since then, the share price of Omnicom declined 15%.

In this episode, Spanier is joined by editor Maisie McCabe and media editor Beau...

How is adland going to change this year?

To get listeners ready for the year ahead, Campaign's editorial team give a taste of adland's predictions for the next 12 months, including which resolutions to give up and which take on in 2025.

Tech editor Lucy Shelley hosts the episode alongside editor Maisie McCabe, culture and creativity editor Alessandra Scotto di Santolo and deputy media editor Shauna Lewis.

After revealing their personal resolutions for the year, the team asks adland to give up cheesy collaborations for 2025 as well as the dream of certainty...

"A lukewarm snog" might be how one Campaign journalist describes 2024, but how would you?

In the final episode of the year for The Campaign Podcast, the editorial team gathers one last time to recap the year and answer a very important, hard-hitting question: would you snog, marry or avoid 2024?

From the Post Office scandal and dartsman Luke Littler, to the Jaguar rebrand and a year of elections, a lot has happened in the past 12 months both inside and outside adland's walls.

Features editor Matt Barker tells us of his appreciation...

Maisie McCabe, editor of Campaign UK and David Droga, founder of Droga5 and chief executive of Accenture Song, sat together on stage at Ciclope last month to discuss creativity, the evolving landscape of advertising and how to build meaningful connections between brands and audiences in the digital age.

"Creative to the bone," said Droga describing himself and how he feels holding a CEO role. He explained how the job of an advertising creative is to "do more" with the briefs they are given, creating transformative work.

In the 50-minute chat they discuss why...

2024 had big expectations when it came to artificial intelligence, but did the year live up to the hype... was it a year of "AI in action" as the IAB predicted or AI inaction?

Campaign's editorial team gathers in the studio in an episode hosted by Maisie McCabe, UK editor, while tech editor Lucy Shelley (and usual host) swaps over to be in the hot seat.

Also joined by features editor Matt Barker and deputy media editor Shauna Lewis, the four discuss the highs and lows of AI this year, including Coca-Cola's Christmas ad...

During the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games, Channel 4 set themselves the target of subtitling all the ads during the channel's coverage, beginning at a current level of 25%. After a huge effort, the broadcaster managed to achieve 60%.

In this episode, Channel 4's customer and commercial leader Amy Jenkins discusses how brands can do more to make ads accessible, the positive business impact this has and what, or who, is getting in the way.

Campaign's tech editor Lucy Shelley hosts the episode with media editor Beau Jackson and editor-in-chief Gideon Spanier.

Jackson brings insight...

In this bonus episode, Charlotte Rawlings, senior creativity reporter at Campaign, is joined by Maisie McCabe, Campaign’s UK editor, to discuss this year’s Christmas ads with some of the industry’s top creatives.

This Private View includes Chaka Sobhani, president and chief creative officer international at DDB Worldwide, and David Kolbusz, chief creative officer at Orchard. They chat all things festive alongside Richard Brim, outgoing chief creative officer at Adam & Eve/DDB. Brim recorded the podcast before announcing his departure from Adam & Eve/DDB.

The gang discuss Christmas spots for the likes...