At Advertising Week Europe 2025, most brand sessions centered on scale, spend, and safe bets. Burger King UK, on the other hand, showed up with postpartum hunger, hospital room selfies, and an unapologetically human campaign that sparked a national debate.
At Advertising Week Europe 2025, the question wasn’t whether influencer marketing works—it was whether it’s gotten too powerful. And if you were in the packed audience at this headline session, you know one thing for sure: no one held back.
While many sessions at Advertising Week Europe 2025 buzzed with the usual talk of performance metrics and AI-driven innovation, one quieter, more intimate discussion delivered something rarer: a blueprint for building brands that don’t just include disabled consumers—they center them.
This era won’t be defined by commercial breaks or rented space alongside this new wave of entertainment — it will be about helping co-create it.
Instead of asking “what’s the minimum we can do to get this out the door?”—ask “what’s the sharpest, most emotionally resonant idea we can build a world around for our brand?”
Experian’s Debbie Oates explains that there’s help on hand to understand the new tectonic shifts in the make-up of the average UK household, so marketers can avoid being left behind.
Once you define the problems you solve and for whom, your people can show-up as focused experts not hopeful generalists.
Brands need to move from risk aversion to value alignment. Stop worrying about backlash and start focusing on why you’re showing up.
The goal for any business should be to capture today’s demand while projecting and protecting a go‑to‑market narrative that is both clear and consistent.
If you’re a major brand or large agency considering starting an internal production offering, I see two main roads ahead of you.
Gaining consumer attention is a must for any brand, but in a more and more fragmented media world, the industry must seek fresh approaches to break through all the noise and clutter.
When leveraged ethically and insightfully, social norms tap into the deep emotional wellsprings of behavioral change —creating room for people to feel more seen and aligned with their values.
The underbelly of programmatic has always had issues like these. Right now, this double game appears to be a remarkably common state of affairs among ad platforms and their clients, and I think it’s time we all looked at it a bit harder.
Products (and charismatic CEOs for that matter) alone won’t protect businesses from the inevitable moments when something goes wrong – when tech falls behind, when consumer preferences change, or when market conditions evolve.
In 2025, 80% of women still can’t correctly identify a vulva on a diagram. That is a mind-blowing stat, and it’s frankly dangerous that we know so little about ourselves.
Brands are more successful when they integrate naturally throughout the process, instead of just popping in and feeling like an ad drop.
Misinformation isn’t just a problem for users anymore — it’s a branding crisis. As media platforms scale back moderation, advertisers are being forced into the role of risk manager—whether they like it or not.
Before your brand ever said a word, it could have dropped a beat. Not just any beat — the beat.
