James Swift

1 week ago | mediacat.uk | James Swift

Google’s decision to give up on reforming cookie tracking has been greeted mostly with derision by the ad industry. It’s been five years since Google first articulated its plan to remove third-party cookies from its Chrome browser, 13 months since it delayed implementing the changes for the third time, and nine months since it watered down its ambitions, from all-out deprecation to an ATT-style prompt that allows users to opt out of tracking without having to navigate the privacy settings.

2 weeks ago | mediacat.uk | James Swift

The M&A market in media, marketing, and martech has always favoured the bold — but 2025 is shaping up to favour the adaptable. We’re now entering what I’d call a Darwinian phase of dealmaking: where only the most strategically fit businesses survive, and often, that survival depends on who you partner with — or sell to. Let’s not sugar-coat it. The latest IPA Bellwether report paints a sobering picture — UK ad budgets are tightening, and core media investment is flatlining.

3 weeks ago | mediacat.uk | James Swift

The IPA’s Q1 2025 Bellwether survey of 300 UK marketers was carried out before US President Donald Trump announced his plans to tariff the world on 2 April, which might make it even more useful as a document of the industry’s mood just before the macroeconomic mayhem began. Turns out, it wasn’t euphoric. In the survey, 24.2% of respondents said that their companies had slashed their marketing budgets for the quarter, while 19.4% had increased them.

4 weeks ago | mediacat.uk | Natasha Randhawa |Elliot Wright |James Swift |Svilena Keane

Eighty-eight percent of Amazon Prime Video subscribers watched ads in Q4 2024, according to figures published this week by Digital i. By placing all Prime Video users on its ad-supported plan by default, Amazon has established the largest ad-supported base in global premium SVOD. That number neatly captures the current philosophy in streaming: scale first, worry about engagement later. Ad-supported tiers, once framed as a fall-back for budget-conscious users, are now the keystone of SVOD strategy.

4 weeks ago | mediacat.uk | Elliot Wright |Svilena Keane |Natasha Randhawa |James Swift

The7stars expected steady-but-modest results when it tested Google’s Demand Gen format. Instead, it found consistent performance gains — across sectors, budgets, and brand size. ‘I think we hoped it would deliver incremental results’, said Xanthe Pickford-Avery, head of search at the agency, ‘but the consistency we saw across the board was quite surprising.’The whitepaper is based on five geographically-based experiments across retail, travel, finance, and subscription services.