Interviews, insight & analysis on digital media & marketing

Zoe Jones of Zoder Collective
OOH

You can’t mark your own homework: why independence matters

The global award management market is a multi-billion-pound powerhouse. Cannes Lions alone reportedly generated over $40m in entry fees in 2025. Businesses don’t pour that kind of money into being judged out of vanity, they do it because in a market saturated with self-proclaimed ‘bests’, ‘largest’ or ‘leading’. Third-party, independent verification is one of the signals people trust.

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NDA MENA

When the Feed Becomes the Source

When did we stop asking if an image is real and start asking if it simply looks native to the feed? During a recent regional escalation, a high-production [reels] video of a night-time missile strike went viral on Instagram, accumulating millions of views in mere hours. It looked authentic, it sounded raw, and it captured the visceral fear of a city under fire. By the time digital forensics teams identified the footage as a clip from a combat simulation game, the video had already been shared by thousands and cited by several commentators. The footage succeeded because it inherited the visual grammar of trust that we associate with raw, mobile-first documentation.

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