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My latest piec e for MARKETING-INTERACTIVE is out. We have boring media plans and frustrated clients. Here are some high attention (and still high reach) channels that deserve revisiting. https://www.marketing-interactive.com/boring-media-plans-these-channels-are-worth-revisiting Tha nk you Rezwana Manjur and t he team at Marketing Interactive for your support.

Yesterday morning I stood in front of 80 people at Mediacorp's offices in Singapore and made the case that the media planning industry has a problem. Not a digital problem. Not a technology problem. An incentives, skills and habits problem — that nobody was talking about. The motion was: "Media plans all look the same now." Try arguing with the data. WPP Media's own court filings show 89% of their tracked digital spend going to just five companies. This is while TTD resear

A WhatsApp group I'm in filled with senior marketers in Singapore went into meltdown yesterday over a tool called Parker. The reactions were so entertaining I had to try it myself. You drop in your LinkedIn URL. The AI tells you how replaceable you are. Brutally. With a score out of ten. Here's what it said about me. AI Threat Level: 7.8/10. Classification: DECORATED OVERHEAD. "You have spent 25 years navigating the upper echelons of media, only to realise that 'strategic me

You've probably seen this video. McDonald's CEO posted a reel awkwardly taste-testing the new Big Arch burger on Instagram. He took a tiny nibble, called it "distinctively McDonald's… delicious"… and was visibly unhappy on camera. It was rather odd and the internet was LOVIN' it. First - what was that tiny nibble all about?! I can smash a delicious McDonald's burger in about three bites. However, I can empathise with being a bit stiff on camera. I tried to make video content

By now you've probably seen the WPP transparency story breaking out of the US. This is far from new news. Any client who didn't understand that their agency was trading off their media spend and earning rebates has been, frankly, a little naive. The winners from this will be the media auditing industry. But that's not what I want to talk about. It’s my experience of reading about this story. I read about it here: https://nypost.com/2026/02/24/business/top-advertising-agen

I'm writing this from Sydney for the Lunar New Year break. I've been watching this part of the world do something the rest of us should be paying attention to: they're actually regulating Big Tech and thinking strategically about media. Australia Banned Social Media For Kids Under 16. Not guidelines. Not parental controls. An actual ban with A$50 million fines for platforms that don't comply. While the rest of the world wrings its hands about youth mental health and social

Advertising holding company share prices took a hammering last week. Omnicom fell over 11%. Publicis dropped 9%. WPP lost nearly 12%. The narrative: AI is coming for the agency model. Anthropic launched Claude Cowork, investors panicked. Meanwhile, at the Super Bowl on Sunday, the biggest advertising category wasn't beer. It wasn't auto. It was AI. Seven AI companies bought Super Bowl ads. More than beer and auto combined. Anthropic's Claude ad was measured as the single mo

The world's biggest brands are paying up to $10 million for a Super Bowl spot. Eye-watering sums of money. Is this a signal? According to an article in the the FT, NBC sold out its Super Bowl LX inventory by early September - before the football season even started. Average rates hit $8m for a 30-second spot, with a handful of brands breaking the $10m barrier for the first time. The explanation from NBCUniversal's Mark Marshall: brands want a "communal experience" rather

“Isn’t it a bit boring spending in the same place and doing the same thing again and again?” That was Imogen Fox from The Guardian, speaking at Campaign’s Year Ahead event in London last week. And she’s right. Though boring is the least of it. The panel was discussing why brands remain so reluctant to diversify away from Meta, Google and Amazon, a trio predicted to capture 56.1% of global media spend this year. Jellyfish’s Stephanie Parry called out the “homogeneity” of these

Recently I bought a ratchet set. I wanted to be able to change the oil of my motorcycle at home. I've never changed the oil of an engine. It was a bit of a rite of passage and I was glad I did it. Since then, Amazon has spent the last three months trying to sell me more ratchet sets. The other day, I went to a friend's home where I noticed that they have three Netflix profiles per member of the household. Adam 1, Adam 2, Adam 3. I thought they'd been hacked but the reality wa

Mark Ritson recently highlighted some research with implications for every marketer. Ipsos analysed over 2,000 pieces of video creative to measure which distinctive brand assets actually drive effectiveness. The results reveal a spectacular misallocation of effort. Sonic cues - audio signatures like Netflix's tudum or Intel's bong - deliver 8.5x effectiveness. Yet only 6% of brands use them. Jingles deliver 5.0x effectiveness. Only 8% of brands use them. Meanwhile, logos deli

Traditional media shaped Christmas. And Christmas is when it comes back to the fore. At least where I come from in Britain. TV, radio and print all have a place in what makes this time of year feel the way it does. Sometime in November, the ads begin. Not met with a groan, like Christmas trees appearing too early on Oxford Street, but with a quiet national cheer. These are ads as anticipation. John Lewis. Sainsbury's. Amazon. The country waits to see what they have made this

When GQ UK ran its October ’25 cover story "What's So Great About Britain?", featuring 14 celebrities (and Mr Blobby) sharing what Britain means to them… something interesting happened. It sparked conversations across broadcast media and newspapers. The BBC Radio 4 discussed it. Columnists in The Times and Daily Mail responded. In the following month's issue, the GQ UK editor reflected on this with evident satisfaction – noting how the cover had sparked such widespread conv

Last year, I mentored ten media professionals at Campaign APAC's MediaWorks event. Smart, ambitious individuals from Taiwan, Vietnam, China, Singapore, Indonesia and Korea. Not a single one had ever worked on a brand campaign. The Standard Chartered brief at that event was their first. They loved it. Why had their 5-6 year careers given them no opportunity to work on a Brand campaign? How did we get here? I have a theory…. Over the past 15 years, the industry shifted the m

Over my 23 years in media planning, I've watched billions flow to offshore digital platforms - creating some of the most valuable companies in history. This has had real consequences for local media companies in Singapore and around the world: ▪️ Less money to make local TV shows ▪️ Fewer Journalists, smaller Newsrooms ▪️ Lower investment in the content that builds and reflects local culture How did we end up here? Media planners have been trained digital first. They star

Everyone agrees that brand building matters. There's no shortage of articles urging marketers to prioritise long-term brand over short-term performance. Yet brand budgets still get cut. Performance optimisation keeps winning out. Most explanations focus on short-termism or marketers being seduced by immediate ROI. But that misses the structural reality: once advertising budgets migrated into digital channels, the industry created conditions where brand building simply became

We’re six months into the journey at Taman Warna Pte Ltd, a new kind of company built to enable creativity through smart tools,...