FTC endorsement guidelines require anyone who promotes a product in exchange for payment, free goods, or any material benefit to clearly disclose that relationship to their audience. For affiliate marketers and the brands running affiliate programs, this is not optional, and the FTC has made clear that “everyone does it” is not a defence. The…
The Ad Age A-List 2025 is the industry’s annual shortlist of agencies that, by Ad Age’s reckoning, did the most interesting and commercially significant work over the past year. It is not a scientific ranking, but it is a useful signal: the agencies on this list tend to reflect where client spending is concentrating, where…
ROI and ROAS are not interchangeable. ROAS measures revenue generated per pound of ad spend. ROI measures the actual profit returned on total investment, including costs, margins, and overheads. Confusing the two is not a minor accounting error. It is how businesses convince themselves a campaign is working when it is quietly losing money. Most…
The best ad agencies share a small number of qualities that have nothing to do with their client roster or their award shelf. They ask better questions than their clients expect, they push back when the brief is wrong, and they treat commercial outcomes as the only real measure of success. Everything else, the culture…
Influencer tiers are the categories marketers use to segment creators by audience size, typically ranging from nano and micro at the smaller end through to macro and mega at the top. The tier a creator sits in shapes their cost, their audience relationship, and the kind of results you can realistically expect from working with…
Media agencies plan and buy advertising across channels on behalf of brands, but the differences between them, in terms of size, specialism, commercial model, and cultural fit, are significant enough to make the wrong choice genuinely costly. The top 10 media agencies by billings are dominated by the holding group networks: GroupM shops (Mindshare, Wavemaker,…
Agency partnerships work when both sides bring something the other cannot easily replicate, and when the commercial terms reflect that reality honestly. The ones that fail, and most eventually do, collapse because the initial enthusiasm masked a fundamental mismatch in expectations, capability, or accountability. Done well, a partnership extends your agency’s reach, fills genuine capability…
Influencer marketing compliance means ensuring that paid partnerships, gifted products, and sponsored content are disclosed clearly, honestly, and in a way that audiences can actually see. The FTC in the US and equivalent regulators in the UK and EU have published specific guidance on what counts as adequate disclosure, and the bar is higher than…
Brand collaboration marketing in 2025 is no longer a novelty tactic reserved for fashion drops and limited-edition launches. The most commercially interesting partnerships are happening across industries that would have seemed unlikely five years ago, driven by shared audiences, rising acquisition costs, and a growing recognition that two brands with genuine strategic fit can do…
Partnership economics describes how the financial value of a commercial partnership is distributed between parties, and whether that distribution is sustainable over time. Most partnership deals are structured around headline numbers: revenue share percentages, cost-per-acquisition targets, minimum guarantees. The economics that actually determine whether a partnership works sit underneath all of that. Getting the economics…
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