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.
Emotional intelligence puts the human back in marketing, helping brands cut through biases and connect meaningfully.
When platforms extract value from communities without consent or reciprocity, they recreate the logics of empire.
Digital marketing is powered by fossil fuels. It’s time we started counting the clicks that cost the planet.
Brands can look to help people justify their instincts for self-preservation through emotional spending, and positioning themselves and their products as a way to fuel that self-gratification many will be craving throughout 2023 and beyond.
Nonprofits are a brand like any other. As such, it is important to have an authentic vision and voice and equally important partners that genuinely believe in what you’re doing.
As ever, an omnichannel approach will be the key to success for omnipresent brands and the marketers that can build a complete picture of consumers without cookies will take the cake.
Alongside recognition that the next 12 months will likely bring more financial turmoil, there’s optimism about finding ways around challenges and harnessing emerging opportunities
Clinging to certainty is understandable, but not always the best route to survival in periods of turmoil.
Although times are uncertain, be certain you’re putting a proactive foot forward and making every customer connection count.
Shoppers expect brands to step up during the cost-of-living crisis. But many marketers are working with smaller budgets.
There are so many types of creator programs to choose from when considering what works for you, including unpaid user-generated content all the way up to working with celebrities.
By leading across strategy, product innovation, smart use of data and creative transformation CMOs must craft the brand stories that build this critical trust.
A good place to start is your marketing and sales alignment, turning your people into Smarketers. Taking a Smarketing approach combines the strengths of both teams.
Right now, using an average makes it easier for publishers as they figure out how to incorporate attention into their product design, but eventually, we might get to a requirement for every ad placement.
Instead of obsessing over the most recent “first” to hit the market, we should start solving for the new rules of media; surrounding and embracing communities to cultivate the next generation of audiences.
