Analysis, trends and the advertising industry.
Mexico will host, South America will watch hungrily, and regional brands must choose: patriotic postcard or living activation.
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Brands want culture, but culture no longer lives only inside agencies. It lives in people with audience, taste and speed.
The industry has learned to generate assets with AI. The adult question is different: who has an idea worth automating?
FIFA sells the tournament; brands sell belonging. The real fight lives between official sponsorship, local activation and elegant opportunism.
The brand returns to the territory it knows best: selling celebration before product. The question is whether it still surprises.
Messi, Beckham and an impossible cast are not the real point. Adidas is selling football as shared memory again.
OpenAI's self-serve advertising platform launched to 50,000 advertisers in June 2026. Early performance data is promising but attribution gaps remain.
Marketing measurement has moved from a technical discipline to a board-level conversation in 2026. What changed, and what it means for how marketing gets evaluated.
Marketing's relentless focus on short-term performance metrics is systematically defunding the brand-building work that drives long-term business value.
Retail media grew 28% in 2025 and shows no signs of slowing. The proliferation of networks is creating new opportunities and new headaches for brands.
The Titanium Grand Prix at Cannes 2026 went to a campaign that lasted 72 hours, generated no media impressions, and changed a global brand's product development process.
Brands that switched from reach-based to trust-based creator selection in 2025 are reporting 40% better return on creator spend. Here's what changed.
The Outdoor Grand Prix at Cannes 2026 went to a campaign that used public space not to advertise but to create legislative pressure. What the work reveals about OOH's evolving role.
For the first time in digital advertising history, Meta's quarterly ad revenue exceeded Google's in Q1 2026. The implications go deeper than the headline.
The Health Lions at Cannes 2026 showed pharmaceutical and healthcare advertising evolving beyond informational compliance into genuine emotional craft.
Google's AI Mode crossed one billion queries in June 2026. The lessons for advertisers are significant and not all of them are comfortable.
Coca-Cola's World Cup 2026 strategy sells shared feeling as its core product. The execution is technically brilliant and worth examining closely.
The Sustainability Lions in 2026 showed the category maturing past greenwashing — but also revealed how few brands can actually prove environmental claims.
Adidas turned the World Cup 2026 into a backyard narrative. Why 'Backyard Legends' works as a brand strategy and what it costs.
Sir John Hegarty's Cannes 2026 address argued that precision targeting has produced advertising that is technically correct and emotionally inert.
The new Data Lions category at Cannes 2026 signals the industry's belated recognition that how you prove effectiveness is as important as the work itself.
After two years of cautious acceptance, Cannes Lions judges in 2026 began disqualifying AI-generated work that lacked demonstrable human creative authorship.
Nike is not an official World Cup sponsor in 2026. Its absence is deliberate, its alternative strategy is working, and the lesson is more nuanced than it appears.
Google's Asset Studio promises to generate advertising creative at scale. The results are impressive in volume and concerning in quality consistency.
Procter & Gamble's Cannes Laureate recognition in 2026 prompted a rare public discussion about whether P&G's approach to brand building is a model the industry has actually followed.
Heineken's 2026 Cannes Gold Lion was not the most spectacular work in the shortlist. It was the most coherent, and coherence won.
With the tournament hosted across the US, Mexico, and Canada, World Cup 2026 attracted the largest sponsorship investment in football history. What brands are actually getting.
Every brand claims first-party data as a priority. Research shows that fewer than 30% have infrastructure capable of activating it effectively for advertising.
When Svedka replaced its creative team with AI and consumers noticed, the brand discovered that transparency about AI use is no longer optional.
As brands scale creator programs, the infrastructure supporting creators remains thin. Burnout is rising and it is starting to affect campaign reliability.
The pitch for agentic AI in media buying is compelling. The current implementation reality involves more human supervision than the vendors suggest.
Chinese collectibles brand POP MART's India launch in June 2026 revealed a market more sophisticated about blind box culture than expected—and a marketing playbook worth studying.
Programmatic advertising in Latin America grew 31% in 2025. The market dynamics differ sharply from the US and Europe, and international brands are missing them.
Ogilvy's dedicated AI Studio, launched in Q2 2026, is a structural bet that AI-native creative production is a practice requiring specialist capability.
The shift from viewability to attention metrics in 2025-2026 changed how media is bought and priced. The early evidence on whether it improves outcomes.
Amazon's decision to add ads to Prime Video in 2024 generated controversy and subscription losses. One year later, the advertising business is performing well for Amazon and reasonably for advertisers.
WPP, Publicis, Omnicom, and IPG reported Q1 2026 earnings with AI appearing prominently. Parsing the actual AI revenue from the narrative.
A structural argument is emerging in the agency business: the traditional full-service model is losing to specialist networks organized around capabilities rather than categories.
TikTok's effective removal from the US market in early 2025 redistributed approximately $6 billion in annual advertising spend. The winners were not who predicted.
The FTC's updated influencer disclosure rules came into effect in March 2026. Enforcement actions have begun. The industry's compliance rate is still below 40%.
Mexico City as a World Cup host generated advertising and experiential marketing activity that surpassed every projection. What happened and who benefited.
Value-based agency pricing has been discussed for twenty years. The arguments in its favor are stronger than ever. The structural barriers to adoption are equally strong.
Argentina's advertising market collapsed 28% in peso terms in 2024. By mid-2026, it is showing signs of recovery — and some of the most interesting creative work in the region.
The CTV advertising opportunity continues to grow while the operational complexity of buying it continues to increase. The measurement gap is now the central issue.
Brands spend over $70 billion annually on sports sponsorship. The evidence base for ROI is thinner than the investment implies.
Colombian agencies won more international awards in 2025 than in the previous five years combined. What's driving the creative surge and what it means for the regional industry.
Generation Z is the first generation of luxury consumers who reject the codes that luxury advertising has used for decades. The brands adapting are outperforming those that aren't.
Podcast advertising commands CPMs two to three times higher than comparable digital audio. The intimacy premium is real — and the scale challenge is why it hasn't dominated media plans yet.
WPP invested $300 million in AI infrastructure in 2025. The question the market is asking in 2026: does proprietary AI actually produce better advertising, or just cheaper advertising?
YouTube's integration of shopping functionality into video ads has quietly become one of the highest-performing retail advertising environments. The brands that understood this early have a durable advantage.
Digital OOH grew 22% in 2025 while print advertising fell 8%. The convergence of data, creative flexibility, and high-quality inventory is reestablishing OOH as a premium medium.
The rejection of purpose-driven advertising in 2024-2025 produced a retreat to pure product advertising that is also underperforming. The answer is more nuanced than either extreme.
The traditional media plan — a document produced months in advance specifying channel allocation — is being replaced by continuous optimization systems. What this means for agencies, planners, and clients.
The advertising industry has argued about the relationship between creative quality and business effectiveness for decades. The 2026 version of the debate has new evidence — and the same old positions.
LinkedIn has been the obvious B2B advertising platform for a decade. In 2026, it is finally delivering results that justify the premium CPMs it has always charged.
A growing number of Latin American campaigns in 2026 are moving beyond symbolic indigenous representation to genuine cultural co-creation. The results are commercially and ethically distinct.
With Super Bowl spots reportedly selling at $9 million for 30 seconds, the 2027 game is testing whether broadcast television's most premium event can sustain its pricing in a fragmented media world.
After a decade of in-housing, the honest audit of what worked, what didn't, and what the optimal model looks like in 2026.
Three years after the launch of Coca-Cola's 'Real Magic' platform, enough data exists for a genuine effectiveness assessment. The results are instructive for how global brand platforms age.
The advertising industry is losing its best people to tech, consulting, and in-house roles faster than it can develop replacements. The structural causes are not being addressed.
AI-generated content, synthetic media, and the proliferation of AI-created news sites have created brand safety challenges that 2024-era brand safety tools were not designed to address.
Apple's ATT framework cost the advertising industry $12 billion in attributable revenue. Two years later, the industry has adapted — and Apple is building its own ad business.
Red Bull launched its media company two decades ago. In 2026, it remains the most cited example in marketing — and the least successfully replicated.
Meta's introduction of advertising in WhatsApp Status in Brazil and India is the most significant messaging advertising experiment since SMS. Early results are promising and uncomfortable.
The confluence of World Cup hosting, economic stability, and talent migration has accelerated Mexico City's emergence as the dominant creative advertising hub in the Spanish-speaking world.
After years of vanity metrics, influencer marketing measurement is converging on standards that actually predict business outcomes. What changed and what the new metrics mean.
Amazon's advertising business crossed $60 billion in 2025. In 2026, it is extending from lower-funnel dominance into brand advertising — and brands are taking it seriously.
The traditional creative brief was designed for a world where humans executed creative decisions. AI changes the assumptions. What the brief becomes in an AI-enabled creative process.
As e-commerce penetration deepens in Latin America, the advertising mix is shifting from awareness-heavy to conversion-focused. The brands adapting fastest are seeing the biggest gains.
The best Super Bowl advertisers in 2026 didn't just run a 30-second spot. They built OOH-anchored integrated campaigns that extended the commercial weeks before and after the game.