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.
Education-led marketing is a smarter way to connect with buyers, build lasting relationships, and drive real results. Ultimately, brands that make this shift don’t have to fight for attention. They stand out because buyers seek them out.
As content creation abilities and consumer expectations continue to evolve, it’s becoming ever more essential for brands to be bolder and embrace a new approach.
Without the right information, education and level of engagement, sustainability will always just be a buzzword that’s thrown around as a supposed point of difference for brands.
Cheetos and Amazon Ads seamlessly integrated their strengths, leveraging the extensive consumer touchpoints across Amazon channels and the inventive storytelling of Cheetos.
Advertisers will need to take a moment of bravery and recognize that they need to break from the past and shift what they measure and value. The result will be a better Internet and better business results.
Brands that demonstrate how they’re keeping audiences rooted in what’s real – whatever that means to them – and supporting them from being overwhelmed amid an algorithmic apocalypse will resonate.
By Kristal Walton, SVP, CPG & Retail Industry If you work in marketing, especially tactical…
Once marketers and advertisers understand their audience’s activities across various digital domains, including things like social media, streaming, gaming and shopping apps (and TikTok of course!), they can use this intelligence to capture waning attention in the most effective way possible.
Knowing your enemy is one thing, having the courage to fight them is very definitely another. Courage manifests in different ways.
Becoming customer-centric and data-driven requires dedication, but the long-term rewards for your business are significant. Embracing a coherent, first-party data plan will help you to truly understand and serve your customers better.
Leveraging MMM can help marketers understand “hybrid” shopper journeys and the synergies between retail media and other channels, which has the potential to drive efficiency and unlock incremental ROI.
But what were the major discussions? Which topics will likely shape the industry in 2024? Here are my four key takeaways from the most important topics discussed at the event.
In the evolving marketing landscape, OOH is a channel that is often overlooked and misunderstood. It is an iconic means to build brand awareness, but marketers should not be scared of adding OOH to their performance marketing strategies as well.
Consumers would prefer to browse social feeds, swipe through reels, or watch videos without interruption. Downtime is precious, and watching ads isn’t as entertaining as those other activities!
It’s not the first time the ad industry has been under pressure though and disruption is often necessary to drive evolution. It remains to be seen what the next few years for ad-based freemium hold but one thing’s for certain, it won’t look the same as it does today.
