Experiential marketing in 2025 is splitting into two camps: brands creating genuine, memorable interactions that shift how people feel about them, and brands spending significant budgets on elaborate stunts that generate Instagram content and very little else. The gap between those two outcomes is not a creative problem. It is a strategic one. The trends…
The Ad Age Nextgen Marketing Summit is an annual gathering where emerging marketing leaders and senior practitioners exchange ideas on where the discipline is heading. If you attend expecting a clean consensus on what works, you will leave disappointed. What you get instead is a useful cross-section of the tensions currently running through the industry:…
Impact is a partnership management platform that helps brands recruit, track, and pay partners across affiliate, influencer, and commerce channels from a single interface. It is one of the more capable tools in this category, but like any platform, what you get out of it depends almost entirely on what you put in strategically before…
Omnicom acquisitions have followed a consistent logic for decades: buy capability, buy scale, buy market access. The IPG deal, the smaller specialist pickups, the data and technology plays , each one tells you something about where the holding company believes the industry is heading, and more importantly, where the money is moving. For senior marketers,…
Convergence strategy is the deliberate alignment of multiple marketing channels, messages, and moments so they reinforce each other rather than operate in isolation. Done well, it creates a compounding effect where each touchpoint amplifies the next, making your marketing more efficient without necessarily spending more. Most marketing organisations are not doing this. They are running…
A multichannel marketing system is a coordinated approach to reaching customers across multiple touchpoints, channels, and devices, with each channel playing a defined role in moving someone from awareness to purchase. Done well, it compounds. Done poorly, it is just expensive noise running in parallel. Most businesses have multichannel activity. Far fewer have a multichannel…
The 2024 advertising and marketing landscape arrived with the usual chorus of predictions, most of which were recycled from the year before with a fresh coat of AI paint. What actually shifted was more nuanced, more commercially consequential, and in some cases the opposite of what the industry expected. If you are trying to plan…
A referral partnership is a formal arrangement where one business introduces its customers or contacts to another in exchange for a reward, a reciprocal arrangement, or simply because the fit is obvious enough to make the introduction worthwhile. Done well, it is one of the most capital-efficient acquisition channels available. Done carelessly, it produces a…
Ads with celebrities can accelerate brand growth or quietly drain a media budget, depending almost entirely on whether the partnership is built on commercial logic or vanity. The celebrity is not the strategy. They are a distribution mechanism for a strategy that either exists or doesn’t. I’ve seen this from both sides. Early in my…
Referral business is what happens when the rest of your marketing is working. It is not a channel you switch on. It is a byproduct of delivering something worth talking about, to people who know others worth talking to. Most companies treat referrals as a growth tactic. The ones that grow consistently treat them as…
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