The Advertising Association’s UK Advertising Export Group (UKAEG) will lead two high-profile trade missions this autumn, bringing UK advertising expertise directly to international markets. The missions will take place in the United States during Advertising Week New York (9-11 October) and in Saudi Arabia for the Athar Festival (19-22 October) to showcase the UK’s creative capabilities while fostering commercial opportunities and industry collaboration. Registration for the trade missions is open until 2 October.
The Rugby Football Union (RFU) has announced Ocean Outdoor, the Digital Out of Home (DOOH) advertising company, as the Official DOOH Media Partner of the Red Roses. Under the terms of the three-year partnership, Ocean will broadcast behind-the-scenes content from the Red Roses alongside ticketing updates, player imagery and match highlights. Ocean’s premium large format DOOH network covers 18 UK cities. As World Rugby’s Official DOOH partner for the 2025 Women’s Rugby World Cup, Ocean is broadcasting more than 300 hours of rugby action and managing the Official Women’s Rugby World Cup fan zone in London at Battersea Power Station.
Meanwhile, Manchester City Council (MCC) has awarded its large format Out of Home (OOH) advertising contract to incumbent Ocean Outdoor following a market wide tender. Ocean has held the large format contract since 2010. The new contract runs for 10 years from October 2025 with an option to extend for a further five years. Under the terms of the agreement, Ocean will fully modernise the estate including the conversion of backlights to digital screens. Sixteen existing screens, including Two Towers Manchester, the Digi-Bridge on Mancunian Way and Princess Road, make up the contract, with a proposed new location capturing the footfall on City Link Walk towards the Etihad Stadium.
Taboola (Nasdaq: TBLA) has achieved one million web push notification subscribers for leading online news publisher, The Independent. The one million milestone comes just seven weeks after The Independent launched Taboola Push, with the editorial push notification solution now driving a total 2% of The Independent’s audience traffic. The new integration automatically sends out personalised notifications based on Taboola’s advanced algorithm, which uses over 100 different audience signals to provide the most relevant, interesting and timely content for each subscriber, saving valuable editorial time in the process.
Creative effectiveness platform System1 and JCDecaux UK, the Out-of-Home (OOH) company, have released a new study connecting creative quality in OOH advertising with real commercial impact. The Double Take study was conducted in 7 markets and found that when OOH creative sparks emotion and is clearly branded, it delivers twice the commercial impact. Double Take draws on System1’s predictive testing of 1000+ OOH campaigns with 180,000 consumers in Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Spain, UK and USA – using its Test Your Ad platform. For the first time, a subset of these results have been linked to JCDecaux’s campaign performance data to reveal how emotion and branding drive brand and commercial effects in one of the world’s most powerful media channels. To download the research, visit https://system1group.com/out-of-home or download here at JCDecaux UK.
In other news, System1 and Aardman, the award-winning animation studio behind classics like Wallace & Gromit and Chicken Run, have launched a new book for the advertising industry: Putting On a Show: Exploring The Aardman Effect. The publication explores how stories with character, characters with heart, and advertising with a smile create lasting business effects, as evidenced by top-performing commercial campaigns developed by Aardman. Using System1’s Test Your Ad platform, Putting On a Show looks at 96 campaigns from across the globe that Aardman has produced over the past 40 years, which consistently make audiences feel intense, positive emotions and score in the top 1% for creative effectiveness.
Mail Metro Media has launched Headlines: an evolution of the Daily Mail’s long-established native advertising format. Built on the strength of the Daily Mail editorial platform, Headlines immerses brand content directly into the newsbrand’s most powerful discovery environments, to deliver a guaranteed outcome and unrivalled exposure. Delivered to audiences on the famed Right Hand Rail and crafted by award-winning editors, Headlines is powered by dmg::ID, accessing over 200 billion datapoints allowing for precision targeting and relevance to selected target audiences across the highly-engaged Daily Mail platforms. Created specifically to capture the attention of the homepage’s organic audience, Headlines delivers sponsored content targeted to audience groups, ensuring maximum relevance and deeper resonance with target audiences.
Research released by LoyaltyLion shows that younger consumers see Black Friday as more than just a discount weekend. Survey data from 2004 UK customers shows loyalty has emerged as the real currency of Black Friday and Cyber Monday – a currency that not only drives sales in the moment but also creates a foundation for long-term, profitable growth. For many, it is the point where they commit to loyalty schemes of brands they’ve shopped with before, and bring forward future purchases, making it a loyalty tipping point as well as a sales one. The survey found that eighty-five per cent of 25–34s said they would join a loyalty programme during the sales, compared with 56% across all ages. Eighty-four per cent said they would visit stores where they have points to redeem, far higher than the 48% of over-55s. 85% said they would redeem loyalty points or rewards during Black Friday, compared with 63% overall.
DMEXCO, Europe’s leading digital marketing & tech event, has partnered with market research company Kantar to conduct a study on the role of creativity in marketing. For the “Kantar Media Reactions 2025: DMEXCO Edition”, both German and international marketers were surveyed. The findings are clear: creativity, emotions, and storytelling are the key drivers of marketing ROI – but in Germany they are still not applied consistently enough. 64% of international and 63% of German brand decision-makers agree: creativity is becoming increasingly important to campaign success. Emotional appeal is ranked as the most important element of creative strategy by 55% of respondents worldwide, with the strongest impact on advertising effectiveness. In second place comes storytelling, with 41%. Other crucial factors in global creative strategies include cross-channel consistency (27%) and the use of local insights (24%). By contrast, humour (16%) and the use of AI in production (15%) are considered less relevant. Kantar’s analyses also reveal that humour in advertising has declined by 20% over the past 20 years – despite clear evidence of its effectiveness: funny ads achieve up to 46 percentile points more in future brand demand compared to neutral ones.
New data from RealityMine’s consumer tracking technology quantifies Americans’ prolific interactions with smartphone apps. The latest findings leveraging the RealityMine system – as deployed on the MFour panel – show that the average US smartphone user interacts with around 18 different apps per day, racking up 75 to 200 app sessions daily. But despite the frequent swiping, the attention economy remains tightly concentrated, with just six apps accounting for nearly half (49%) of all time spent on mobile. These six dominant platforms—Facebook, TikTok, Safari, YouTube, Instagram, and Google Chrome—have created an attention bottleneck in an otherwise crowded app marketplace. Expand the list of leading apps to 25, and you can account for 69% of total app time, with categories like social media, browsing, music, messaging, and news leading the pack. Notably, Roblox is the only gaming app to crack the top 25, while Netflix is the sole standalone streaming platform to make the cut, aside from TikTok and YouTube.
Zoo 55, part of ITV Studios, and Spotify, the digital music, podcast and video service, have announced a new partnership which will see acclaimed ITV Studios content available to Spotify users for the first time. It marks a continued expansion of video offerings on the platform, underscoring the opportunity Spotify presents for content owners looking to expand their reach to new audiences. The partnership will see popular ITV Studios shows, beginning with much-loved episodes and compilations of The Graham Norton Show, as well as VICE Studios’ series I Was a Teenage Felon and Dead Set on Life, become available to Spotify users. The additions further enrich the platform’s diverse video library, representing another major step in the evolution of video consumption on the platform.
Digital experience platform Contentful, in collaboration with Atlantic Insights, the marketing research division of The Atlantic, has released a new study, ‘When Machines Make Marketers More Human’ challenging the notion that AI will replace many marketing functions and instead demonstrates how AI can amplify marketers’ effectiveness, creativity, and impact. The report, based on surveys and interviews with hundreds of senior marketing leaders around the world, finds that “evidence-based creativity” is emerging as the defining capability of modern marketers. Whether on skills – 46% of respondents cited data analysis and interpretation as the top skill needed in the profession today – or on measuring efficacy – 34% of successful marketers define success according to strong performance metrics or ROI – it’s clear that data-driven marketing is only accelerating in the age of AI. The ability to combine human creativity with AI-driven insights is becoming essential to producing, testing, and scaling ideas with measurable impact.
Click here to read the full report.
StackAdapt has once again been recognized by G2, the world’s largest and most trusted software marketplace, for its industry leadership in programmatic advertising technology. This latest round of G2 Reports highlights StackAdapt as the leader in the Best Connected TV (CTV) Advertising Platforms and Best Digital Audio Advertising Software categories, underscoring the company’s strength in driving performance across two of the fastest-growing channels in programmatic advertising. StackAdapt is also recognized as the Best Demand Side Platform (DSP), demonstrating the platform’s broader leadership across the programmatic ecosystem. G2’s quarterly reports are powered by authentic customer reviews, making these recognitions especially meaningful. StackAdapt’s leadership in CTV and digital audio advertising reflects the momentum the company has built by continuously expanding its platform to meet advertisers where their audiences are, whether that is streaming on the big screen or listening on the go.
A new, outcomes-focused initiative will support 150 startups led by entrepreneurs from traditionally overlooked groups across the UK to raise investment and scale. Launched by a consortium of award-winning organisations, the programme replaces fragmented efforts with a joined-up national solution designed to deliver real funding outcomes. Funded by Innovate UK, Breakthrough Founders offers a 12-month, fully funded pathway to investment designed specifically for overlooked and underrepresented founders in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Breakthrough Founders officially opens for applications on 16 September 2025. The initiative, which has an objective to advance the fundraising of 150 founders, and secure funding for at least 45 startups over the next eighteen months, targets founders who identify as women, an ethnic minority, neuro-diverse, disabled, LGBTQIA+, primary caregivers and those from low-income or non-traditional backgrounds including both 18-30 and 55+ age brackets. Click here to find out more and to apply.
