By Tom Gunter, Co-Founder & Head of New Markets, Avid Collective
Media partnerships were once one of the most exciting parts of the industry. When a brand, usually its agency, and a media owner aligned around a smart campaign idea, the impact was tangible, the work stood out, and collaboration felt like a genuine competitive advantage. But that was in a radically simpler market.
Today, the UK has more than 11,000 publishing businesses, a level of fragmentation that makes partnerships increasingly absent from plans. , (*UK Publishing Industry 2025 ). What used to be a manageable process, now forces advertisers and agencies to navigate a maze of different ways of working, long before a single idea can take shape.
Partnerships should be more valuable than ever. They offer cultural connection and trust at a time when audiences are increasingly sceptical and frankly fatigued of standard ad formats. But the truth is they’re now too hard to deliver, with great ideas smothered by fragmentation and messy, manual workflows.
The Massive Cost of a Fragmented Market
On paper, having thousands of publishers should be great for the partnerships category. In practice, it’s led to a system where every publisher operates with its own definitions, templates and processes, while every agency has its own way of briefing, evaluating and delivering work. Nothing fits neatly together. Everything requires translation and configuration.
And agencies are feeling the strain intensely.
Our recent industry survey found that 90% of agency respondents say inconsistent processes and language across publishers slow them down, and 80% believe manual workflows limit quality and impact of their work. *Avid Industry Survey. What should be energising collaboration now feels like an exhausting attempt to hold together mismatched systems. Hours that should fuel strategy and creativity are lost to email chains, version control and duplicated documents.
The cost isn’t just operational, it’s human. Creativity is suffocating under the weight of a system that was never designed for the scale and complexity of today’s market. And the uncomfortable truth is the “unique ways of working” we all treat as a competitive edge are actively killing the category.
Individuality should show up in the work, not the workflow. If we want the category to grow, the workflow can’t be bespoke for every single campaign. Every single time.
Why This Really Matters & The Revenue Opportunity We’re Leaving on the Table
With smaller teams and rising pressure to deliver, advertisers default to whatever is easiest to activate, not what’s most effective. While we’ve been trying to make spreadsheets work harder, platform spend has exploded. The big tech platforms now capture over 74% of UK digital ad spend (WARC Expenditure Report 2024) despite consumers’ spending only 43% of their time online inside these walled gardens. (The Trade Desk, Open Internet Report 2024)
In other words, 57% of consumer attention sits outside the platforms, but only a fraction of the investment follows it. That gap is a very real, very large opportunity for all publishers.
Partnerships still work. They build trust, create emotional connection in ways the platforms can’t. But when the process of planning, buying, delivery and measurement feels clunky, slow or unpredictable, it’s easy to understand why spend has defaulted to walled gardens that are so easy to activate campaigns on.
But here’s the exciting part:
Advertisers want to diversify, 71% say they plan to reduce major platform dependency (IAB UK) — but operational complexity is consistently cited as the biggest barrier to this.
Fix that barrier, and the money moves.
Fix it at scale, and the category grows.
Fix it together, and the UK can rebalance spend back into high-quality, high-attention environments, the places audiences are actually spending more than half their online time in.
This isn’t just a workflow problem.
It’s one of the biggest commercial opportunities the UK industry has had in years. If we make partnerships easier to buy, deliver and measure, we unlock an enormous opportunity sitting in plain sight.
Addressing The Problem
For partnerships to thrive again, the system supporting them needs to be far simpler, one that gives advertisers confidence to reinvest and grow their investment into the category.
That means connected workflows, shared infrastructure and systems that allow everyone’s unique value to show up in the work, not get lost in the workflow.
Unifying how we work together doesn’t erase individuality.
It protects it, by removing the friction that stops collaboration from functioning at scale.
This isn’t about automating creativity — it’s about freeing it.
Imagine if agencies, brands and publishers could collaborate through purpose-built systems instead of disconnected documents. Imagine if ideas could move at the pace of culture again.
That’s the industry we could be working in, and the one we should be aiming to build.
Where We Go From Here
This is a problem the entire industry needs to be part of solving. If we want to win market share back from the big tech platforms, we can’t do it in silos.
The future of UK media won’t be shaped by whoever automates the fastest. It will belong to the companies willing to lean into fixing the system that sits beneath the work together. It will come from publishers providing a united front and consistent advertiser experience so we can rebalance the over spend going into Google and Meta rather than competing against each other for the final 1% of a shrinking budget.
If you’re seeing these challenges in your day-to-day, or if you have a perspective on what’s needed next, I’d love to hear it. The more openly we can talk about what’s broken, the faster we can build something worthy of the work this industry can create.
