The Campaign Podcast

Women in creative leadership roles have been leaving adland. The IPA Census reported a decline in both of the last two years, down from 30% in 2022 to 25.6% in 2024. On top of this, the Census reported a widening pay gap, increasing to almost 20% in 2024.

This episode welcomes Laura Jordan Bambach to the studio, founder and chief creative officer of female founded Uncharted. Alongside editor Maisie McCabe and deputy creativity a...

Last week, the greats of UK media gathered in London to celebrate the Campaign Media Awards 2025. The coveted Commercial Team of the Year award went to LADbible while Spark Foundry’s Mondelez Team took home Agency Team of the Year.

The winning Campaign of the Year was awarded to PHD and "Stream of (un)consciousness" for the British Heart Foundation. The gaming campaign worked with Twitch creators, interrupting their streams to t...

In February this year, the UK government published a consultation on AI, proposing a change to current copyright legislation. It would allow tech companies to use creative works including film, TV and original journalism to train AI models without permission of the creators, unless they have opted out.

It was met with harsh criticism, rallying "Make it fair" campaigns and rejections from both creatives and tech platforms alike, ...

What links McDonald's "Iconic needs no explanation" by Leo Burnett, KFC's gravy take over of the BFI and Kellogg's "See you in the morning" also by Leo Burnett? These three ads are the latest in a line of out-of-home posters that zoom in on products, alter or remove logos and have minimal text. Tesco, Heinz and B&Q have also created similar ads.

While this might be a trend, it certainly isn't new. A 1990 Silk Cut ad "Slash" ...

Campaign's Agency of the Year Awards took place last week celebrating the best shops in adland across creative, media, independent, customer engagement, start-up and more.

This episode chats to three of the big winners: Mother, who took home Creative Agency of the Year, MG OMD which won Media Agency and Rapp which celebrated five awards with three golds: Performance Marketing Agency, New Business Leader and Customer Engagement A...

Principal-based media buying, which includes inventory media and proprietary media, has become a key practice for large agency groups, but it remains opaque, with finance trails and pricing structures largely in the dark. 

In March this year, ISBA updated its media services framework calling out media agencies for lack of transparency and "non-compliance", which it said has been leading to "tensions" between advertisers and...

Campaign has released its biggest project of the year, reviewing and marking the top 92 agencies in the UK for Campaign's 2025 School Reports, in partnership with Nielsen.

In this episode, Campaign's editorial team reveals its overall impression on the reports, what they divulge about the health of the industry by analysing the billings across media and creative and how diversity has been impacted in the last year. They discuss ...

"There is an unofficial reason why pre-testing is so popular, and that's that clients work in very complex organisations with lots of stakeholders," says Martin Beverley, former chief strategy officer at Adam & Eve/DDB.

Beverley joins the Campaign team on the podcast to discuss the efficacy of pre-testing and its contentiousness in adland: some say data can stifle creativity while others argue it’s a sure method to improve a...

"Unprecedented","furlough" and "bubbles" are a few of the words that are reminiscent of 2020. On 23rd March five years ago, the UK prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that the UK was entering a lockdown as a result of the spread of Coronavirus. 

Now in 2025, the way in which we work has been upturned and a "new normal" is being established. As for the advertising industry, has it changed for the better, or is it still lo...

Holding company solutions are on the rise, particularly for large clients whose spend is in the £100 millions. 

Publicis Flame is the latest to ignite, created after Santander appointed Publicis Groupe to its global creative and media business. Ongoing pitches include Natwest which is also looking for a single holding company to take on its media and creative business.

Holding companies have been expanding their offering...

One would think that the answer to "what is Group M?" would be a short one, but after many changes, mergers, shuffles and dissolutions at WPP's media arm in the last 12 months, the answer is not so.

Group M is the largest media buying group in the world and in this episode, Campaign's journalists discuss what the company was when it began in the early 2000s, what has happened in the last 12 months including losing Sky, the closu...

The advertising industry accounts for 3% to 4% of global emissions, twice that of the aviation industry, found research from the IAB. Is it truly making an effort to reduce its impact on the environment?

In this episode, Campaign speaks to Stephen Woodford, chief executive of the Advertising Association, on its Ad Net Zero program, the power adland holds in making positive change and whether tech platforms really doing enough.

In this bonus episode of The Campaign Podcast, Charlotte Rawlings, deputy creativity and culture editor at Campaign, is joined by Maisie McCabe, Campaign’s UK editor, to discuss the ads that aired throughout the 59th Super Bowl on 10 February. 

Rawlings and McCabe are joined by Lynsey Atkin, outgoing chief creative officer at McCann London; Noel Bunting, CCO at Publicis London; and David Kolbusz, CCO at Orchard. 

Th...

When a new boss steps in to lead an agency, they must weigh up how much they change the business and how much the business changes them.

Conrad Persons, president of Grey London, who joins the podcast team in this latest epsiode, says: "'That’s how we do things round here' is one of the most abominable phrases in business."

Persons is joined by Campaign's deputy editor, Gemma Charles, and premium content editor, Nicola Merrif...

As we approach Covid's five year anniversary, much has changed about the world of work and where we do it.

After WPP's chief executive Mark Read announced that the holding company will be mandating four days a week, adland has had plenty to say on the approach to hybrid working. A petition was started by WPP employees to revoke the order and has almost reached 20,000 signatures. (It is open for anyone to sign up).

Three weeks...

Sneezing, coughing and catching a cold from the other side of the Atlantic might be this year's theme for UK advertisers.

In this episode of The Campaign Podcast, host and tech editor Lucy Shelley is joined by deputy editor Gemma Charles, features editor Matt Barker and culture and creativity editor Alessandra Scotto di Santolo. The team discusses brands' reaction to Trump's re-election, after his inauguration on 20 January...

"It's time to ditch the 'R' word," said Nik Wheatley last year in an article on Campaign that exposed the regional divide that exists in adland, and the danger of categorising everywhere outside of London as the 'regions'.

It was revealed that £250m in billings has been lost from the North West to London in recent years, due to agencies relocations and advertisers bulling their business from northern agencies.

In this episod...

At Campaign's Year Ahead Breakfast Briefing this Tuesday 14 January, industry leaders took to the stage to give their predictions, concerns and excitement for 2025.

This bonus episode includes the final panel of the event, moderated by deputy creativity and culture editor Charlotte Rawlings, with Chaka Sobhani, president and global chief creative officer of DDB Worldwide, Iain Tait, co-founder of Food Arts & Technology and J...

After dominating news headlines throughout December, and likely well into 2025, it is all still possible for the Omnicom-IPG merger to fall through, repeating history from 2013 when Omnicom failed to merge with Publicis Groupe.

Campaign's editor-in-chief Gideon Spanier sat down in a global exclusive interview with John Wren, CEO of Omnicom, and Philippe Krakowsky, CEO of IPG, after they announced the all-stock deal on 9 December...