Native brand ownership refers to which function, team, or individual inside an organisation holds genuine strategic authority over the brand, not just custodianship of the logo or sign-off on the style guide. In most companies, that question has no clean answer. Brand lives in a gap between marketing, product, HR, and the CEO’s office, and…
Marketing agency M&A activity has been running at an elevated pace for several years now, and the deal flow tells you something useful about where the industry is heading. Private equity consolidators are buying up independent shops, holding companies are divesting non-core assets, and founder-led agencies are taking chips off the table at a rate…
Affiliate marketing and strategic partnership are the same channel wearing different clothes. One is managed by a performance team optimising for last-click conversions. The other sits in a boardroom deck about long-term growth. In practice, the mechanics overlap considerably, and the businesses that treat them as separate disciplines tend to underperform in both. When affiliate…
The linear attribution model divides conversion credit equally across every touchpoint in a customer experience. If a customer saw a display ad, clicked a paid search result, opened an email, and then converted through organic search, each of those four interactions receives 25% of the credit. It is one of the simplest multi-touch models available,…
Millennial brands are companies that built their identity, audience, and market position around the values, behaviours, and expectations of the millennial generation. The ones that survived past the initial hype did something specific: they connected a genuine business model to a cultural moment, rather than just borrowing the aesthetic of one. The ones that didn’t…
Growth partnerships are commercial agreements where two or more businesses share resources, audiences, or distribution to create growth that neither could generate as efficiently alone. When they work, they compound. When they don’t, they consume time that could have gone into channels you actually control. The problem isn’t that companies build too many partnerships. It’s…
The best marketing campaigns of 2025 share one quality that most award entries don’t: they moved a commercial needle, not just a sentiment score. This article breaks down five campaigns that did something genuinely different, examines why they worked, and draws out the strategic principles behind each one. I’ve spent a long time watching campaigns…
FTC endorsement guides require affiliate marketers and the brands that work with them to clearly disclose any material connection, including financial compensation, free products, or any other benefit that could influence a recommendation. The rules apply to influencers, bloggers, review sites, coupon publishers, and anyone else in your affiliate programme who earns a commission for…
The largest ad agencies in the US are dominated by four global holding companies: WPP, Omnicom, Publicis Groupe, and Interpublic Group (IPG). Between them, they control the majority of major advertising spend across every category, channel, and geography. If you are a senior marketer evaluating agency partners, understanding who owns what, and how these organisations…
Cross-channel CRO is the practice of optimising conversion rates across multiple traffic sources simultaneously, treating channel behaviour as a variable rather than a constant. Most CRO programmes fail not because the testing is wrong, but because they treat every visitor as equivalent, ignoring the fact that a paid social click and an organic search visit…
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