Westfield Rise, Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield’s in-house media agency, has partnered with Universal Pictures to deliver a UK-exclusive immersive activation at Westfield London. Centred around the 21 November release of Universal Pictures’ Wicked: For Good, the activation – which runs from 13 November 2025 to 4 January 2026 – will transform the shopping centre into an immersive brand environment. Visitors will embark on a choose-your-own-adventure walkthrough, encounter a 12-metre Wicked: For Good Tree, and follow a digital Yellow Brick Road trail via the Westfield App – each element designed to fuse storytelling with interactive consumer engagement amongst Wicked: For Good’s lineup of retail partners. The activation integrates large-format screen, experiential installations, website takeovers, DOOH, app integration, and personalised e-communications. Gamified engagement includes app-led trails. The partnership also includes a social purpose element, giving visitors the chance to support Barnardo’s through visiting the experience. Alongside this, Westfield London will run ‘The Gift Appeal,’ an initiative inviting guests to select a golden tag from the Giving Tree, purchase a gift, and return it by 22December for delivery to Westfield’s local charity partner ahead of Christmas.
Media & entertainment group Global has launched a new data and effectiveness platform designed to help advertisers plan, measure, and prove the impact of their campaigns across Global’s platforms. Global:IQ brings together first-party data, advanced analytics, and AI-driven creative optimisation tools.
Confidence in retail is rising ahead of the 2025 holiday shopping season – despite caution surrounding the Autumn Budget – with 80% of UK businesses expecting higher sales than last year (higher than the global average of 72%), according to Shopify’s Holiday Retail Report. Planned seasonal spend is in the UK is up from £159 last year to £181 in 2025. However, this shouldn’t be mistaken for unlimited consumer appetite, with 63% of consumers having a clear spending cap, and 31% sticking closely to it. UK consumers are equally split between feeling indifferent (26%) and nostalgic (25%) when it comes to the holiday season. Furthermore, family and friends matter to UK consumers with 52% and 36% citing them as influencing their shopping behaviours, respectively, and 40% are driven by their mood at the time of shopping. When it comes to holiday strategies, UK businesses expect almost two-fifths (39%) of their sales to come from promotional pricing and 68% plan to introduce new types of deals.
LG Ad Solutions, LG’s connected TV advertising division, has announced a strategic partnership with data and AI platform Databricks. The collaboration will see LG Ad Solutions deliver its automated content recognition (ACR) data via Delta Sharing through the Databricks Marketplace in the US.
Origin, ISBA’s UK cross-media measurement programme, has successfully concluded the three independent audits that were announced earlier this year. The Origin solution comprises several elements, all of which require validation, and so in April 2025 Origin started this process by appointing experienced and objective audit bodies to evaluate three key pieces; Pure X Media to audit the single-source panel, ABC to evaluate the Virtual ID model deployment, and Milton Data to assess the campaign reach and frequency implementation. Since their appointment, these three companies have been working closely with Origin and its partners and have all concluded that the core elements they were tasked with assessing have been set up to the standard that Origin, and the broader market, would expect.
Channel 4 has announced two new podcasts: Untangled, fronted by Stacey Dooley and Ben Zand and A News Thing, hosted by comedian Michael Odewale, where he is joined by a selection of A Comedy Thing by Channel 4 regulars. Untangled is a weekly current affairs show where headlines at the top of social media feeds are explored. A News Thing is a weekly review of the news with a comedy twist.
Programmatic advertising marketplace Axis has announced an integration with Human, a digital fraud prevention and bot mitigation platform. Through this integration, Axis now conducts real-time traffic scanning using Human’s fraud detection technology, which aims to identify invalid traffic and bot activity before impressions are served.
Referral and influencer marketing platform Mention Me has acquired Insitu, a creative analytics company. As part of the acquisition, all Insitu employees are joining Mention Me, while former CTO Andy Done takes on a new role as VP of Engineering. Mention Me will use the acquisition to provide marketers with a holistic platform for referrals, influencer activation, and creative optimisation and analytics.
Ad tech platform Anonymised has announced new partnership with independent supply-side platform (SSP) Index Exchange. Index Exchange is the first SSP to integrate Anonymised’s proprietary data and custom algorithms as a containerised solution to unlock closed-loop optimisation of programmatic campaigns on the supply side.
VIOOH, a DOOH SSP, has announced a programmatic partnership with DOOH media owner London Lites. The partnership gives advertisers programmatic access to 49 LED screens, which are said to generate 74.5 million monthly impressions.
