How do you think advertising on audio will change over the next three years?
We’ll continue to see broadcast and digital come closer together, offering advertisers a powerful blend of scale and precision. At Bauer Media, that’s something we’re already enabling through platforms like audioXi, our digital audio product, which brings together the scale of broadcast with the targeting and measurement capabilities of digital audio in a single, cohesive proposition.

Data will play an increasingly important role, enabling smarter targeting, better measurement and more personalised messaging, but crucially within trusted, regulated environments. That’s going to matter even more as the industry grapples with issues around brand safety and transparency.

At the same time, I think we’ll see a renewed appreciation for the quality of media environments. In a world of increasing fragmentation and misinformation, trusted audio brands will become even more valuable to advertisers looking for safe, effective ways to reach audiences.

How can media agencies get the most out of audio for their clients?

Start by thinking about audio differently.

Use it not just to amplify campaigns, but to drive them. Lean into the strengths of the medium – storytelling, emotion and context. The most effective audio campaigns are those that are creatively tailored to the environment, rather than repurposed from other channels.

Secondly, embrace the full audio ecosystem – from broadcast radio to digital streaming and podcasts – to build both reach and relevance.

And finally, work closely with media owners. At Bauer, we have deep audience insight, creative expertise and measurement tools that can help agencies unlock the full potential of audio. The best results come from true collaboration.

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Why are some brands still so hesitant to delve into the world of advertising within gaming?

Gaming accounts for just 1-2% of overall UK advertising spend, though investment is increasing, forecasted to reach £1.8bn in 2026. Only now is the advertising industry starting to take notice of the opportunities that gaming as a media channel can provide to brands.

Over the past few years, we have seen consumers diversify their time across a number of apps and channels. Brands can’t be reliant on running the majority of media spend within a single channel anymore. To be front of mind, you need to diversify your message across a greater media mix of platforms that work together to move your audience down the funnel, from awareness and attention to conversion. Gaming is a high-attention channel, great at driving awareness and mid-funnel activity that fuels conversion activity.

However, to put it bluntly, a lack of understanding is holding many brands back from taking advantage of the opportunities that gaming provides. Slowly, outdated stereotypes that see the gaming audience as a homogenous group of teenage boys in their bedroom are being put to one side. A surge in online gaming over the past 10 years has largely been driven by an increase in gaming across mobile and tablet devices. It’s estimated that 70-75% of the UK population can now be classed as a ‘gamer’. The average age of gamers has also increased, with the dominant age group in the UK now those aged 30-39. This is down to both an increase in gaming during COVID-19 as well as older individuals who played video games during their childhood in the 90’s, continuing to play them as they grow older. Finally, while historically gaming skewed towards a male audience, today gamers are more evenly balanced reaching close to a 50/50 split between men and women.

If we look back a few years, there was a similar hesitancy with brands launching on TikTok as we have seen with gaming. This is a common reaction to the emergence of new channels, especially when they’re tied to brand safety concerns. But, as with TikTok, the gaming space has developed to ensure key brand safety measures are in place. There’s a process of test and learn both in how the media is bought and how creative is best used to understand what strategy will deliver the greatest success. A hesitancy to undertake a period of test and learn can also act as initial blocker, but the sooner we test the sooner we can grow and strengthen performance.

Measurement and a holistic view of success

Sometimes brands get too bogged down in being super-efficient, losing sight of the importance of incremental growth. They can be too quick to write off a channel after a single test because it didn’t immediately result in strong, attributed direct conversions.

However, we know that no media works in isolation. No consumer sees a single ad and then converts immediately. Each channel is part of a wider mix working together to build frequency, covering multiple audience touchpoints and cutting through the advertising noise that consumers absorb each day.

Whilst we can incorporate tracking to show the short-term results gained from incorporating gaming into your campaigns, it’s important to look at the wider picture and understand how diversifying your media mix and creating opportunities for incremental growth have impacted the bottom line.

Brands must stop viewing gaming as a bolt on to their main campaigns

Gaming has achieved mass reach. Brands need to stop viewing it as a ‘nice to have’ or bolt on to their main campaigns. Instead, they need start including gaming in an integrated media plan from the start. While overall media spend in gaming is still small and audience growth hasn’t yet been matched with media investment, there’s a real opportunity here!

Click here to sign up to be alerted when the next in our Media Innovation series is published. Head to our news page to read previous posts in this series about AV,  Retail Media and AdTech.

Gaming has moved well beyond its old stereotype, but plenty of media plans still treat it like a side experiment. This Q&A with Adam Peck, Head of Advertiser Sales, UK, at iion, is really about that disconnect between perception and reality. The audience is there, the formats are there, and the outcomes are there, yet the channel is still too often treated as optional. 

What are the questions you’re most often asked by advertisers? 

Brand safety is usually the first question. After that, it tends to move quickly into audience, targeting and control. The important point is that, outside of forums and user-generated content, gaming can be an extremely safe environment. Once an advertiser is comfortable with a curated list of games, they know they are not going to appear next to unsuitable content.  

That process can be quite iterative too. A brand might ask for certain categories to be removed, such as first-person shooters, and then shape the final list from there. From that point, the conversation usually broadens into how specific the targeting can be, which could be by genre, context, third-party data, intent signals, psychographics or deterministic audiences.  

For larger international brands, there’s often another question around direct supply, SDK integrations, and global reach. 

What is the biggest opportunity for media agencies and advertisers in gaming this year? 

For me, the biggest opportunity is still untapped users, incremental reach and guaranteed outcomes. Gaming gives advertisers access to audiences they may not be reaching properly elsewhere, but the opportunity goes beyond adding scale for its own sake. There’s also something useful in the way people use games, especially on mobile, because they dip in and out, pick up where they left off and move through natural pauses in the experience.  

For example, research shows that more than 85% of players log in multiple times per day. That stop-start behaviour can make well-placed ad moments feel more natural. It creates a different kind of opening for brands, even if the industry still needs more evidence to quantify that fully. 

iion is the industry’s first full-stack gaming advertising platform, transforming how brands connect with gaming audiences and publishers monetise their gaming environments. Its tagline “Real Attention. Proven Outcomes.” encapsulates their commitment to delivering measurable results through gaming’s unmatched engagement power.

With its proprietary platforms – immersiion (DSP) for brands and fusiion (SSP) for publishers – they solve the fragmentation challenge in gaming advertising. immersiion enables brands and agencies to harness gaming’s attention advantage through an intuitive self-serve interface, while fusiion empowers publishers to maximise inventory value from their unique audiences.

Gaming isn’t the future – it’s now. iion is where brands win and publishers thrive. 

There has never been a better time to watch TV. We have a plethora of choice, with big budget productions featuring A-list Hollywood movie stars released across multiple platforms. If new releases aren’t your thing, a back catalogue of previously released content is available at the touch of a button. The biggest issue is what to choose to watch and then where to go to find the content you’re looking for. Should you watch the latest period drama, comedy stand-up special or Scandi crime series? Is it on Netflix, Amazon Prime, BBC iPlayer or somewhere else? Decision paralysis, followed by a search for the actual platform is wasting your valuable viewing time!

This amount of choice affects advertisers too, providing both opportunities and challenges. TV used to be a simple choice between reach and performance. If you wanted to achieve reach, you would buy into premium peak programming. If you wanted cost efficient performance, daytime DRTV was the way to go. These days, brand and performance, or a combination of the two, remain the core aims of AV. But there are more choices that need to be made to achieve them. The market is increasingly fragmented; there are multiple routes to entry to access the same content. The lines between traditional and digital AV platforms are now almost completely blurred. An advertiser must consider traditional linear TV, addressable TV that targets at a household level, audience or specific programming on VOD, or programmatic access to TV through a DSP. All to access the same content on the same platform. It’s so easy to get lost in this that brands can be caught in the same decision paralysis that affects TV viewers.

With the right approach, AV is an environment where advertisers can achieve almost anything

There remains a contradiction in the AV advertising landscape, with a wealth of choice but a lack of uniform audience measurement. Without this, AV will remain a challenging landscape to tackle and there will continue to be many providers each with different measurement answers.

However, it is also an environment where advertisers can achieve almost anything. Reach or frequency, brand or performance, with budgets large or small. The ability to target audiences on a household level makes TV accessible and attractive to brands that wouldn’t have previously considered it. Big budgets aren’t always necessary. Niche audiences can be catered for. The key is to understand what each AV platform can offer and how to get the most out of it. There is no one-size-fits-all approach. Advertisers that are clear in their objectives can use today’s AV landscape to reach almost any desired outcome in the way that best fits the needs of their brand.

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A big misconception about addressable TV is that it’s only for advertisers with big budgets. That just isn’t true. We spoke with Steve Wild, head of sales for business development at Sky Media, who told us that, with budgets starting from £3k, powerful, targeted TV advertising is within reach for every brand. In our conversation Steve shared how addressable TV offers advertisers effectiveness, precision and proof. It’s those advertisers that commit to test, learn and scale their business which will be the winners on TV.

The questions I’m most often asked by advertisers tend to be very consistent. “How honed is your targeting?”, “What budget do I really need?”, “How do you measure success?” and “Can I use my own data to help targeting and relevance?”. Clients want effectiveness, precision and proof. We can give them all three. We use advertiser data to plan and target efficiently and we know that relevance boosts effectiveness.

The one thing I wish every advertiser knew about our addressable solution is this: AdSmart from Sky genuinely gives you the best of both worlds. You get the brand safe environment and quality content of premium TV, but with the precision targeting you’d expect from digital. It’s TV that works harder and smarter. And it works for advertisers of all sizes, giving them a competitive advantage. One of the biggest misconceptions we still hear is that addressable TV is only for big budgets. That just isn’t true. With budgets starting from £3k, it puts powerful, targeted TV advertising within reach of every brand. Through smart targeting we limit wastage. Typically, advertisers hone reach to around 15-20% of the available audience which makes better use of their budget.

Using first party data to unlock a competitive advantage on TV

The biggest opportunity for advertisers and agencies this year will be the smart use of first‑party data. As viewing continues to shift, the advertisers who combine their audience insights with premium inventory and relevant targeting will be the ones who unlock real competitive advantage.

Our latest development, Norman, is a unique database which analyses 2,400 campaigns across six years to provide useful insights by sector in terms of targeting, frequency, creative message and norms in effectiveness. We’re fortunate at Sky Media to have a four million-strong viewing panel who we have a billing relationship with, providing second-by-second viewing data across our ecosystem. This enables us to understand what is driving effectiveness throughout the various stages of the sales funnel to optimise the way we enable addressable TV for clients. Combining first party data with the benefits of our insight reporting database will give clients an addressable advantage.

A great recent example of this is our work with Attraction Tickets, a leading provider of theme park tickets that uses Sky AdSmart to combine performance-driven marketing with brand building and storytelling. Together we focus on Attraction Ticket’s two core audiences: families with younger children and those with teens. We then use further targeting such as household affluence and proximity to major airport hubs to make budgets go further. We tracked attribution and performance across 7-14-30 day windows and the result was over six times ROI. Have a look on our website to see the client’s testimonial.

Looking ahead, those that commit to test, learn and scale their business will be the winners on TV

Looking ahead over the next three years, I expect even smarter data for targeting plus tighter integration between our TV and digital channels to maximise reach and response. This will result in a surge of new advertisers discovering just how effective addressable TV can be.

Brand safe content will also continue to be important. Sky spends around $10bn a year on content; from sport (which is mostly watched live) and news to documentaries and drama (which is mostly streamed on demand). This is important, because it’s quality content that people want to watch and be entertained by that engages audiences. With over 90% of Sky’s content viewed on a big screen, it is very attractive for advertisers.

The advertisers that will come out on top over the next few years will be those that are pushing for better: better measurement, better creativity, better outcomes. The people who build effective media solutions and the clients that commit to test, learn and scale their business will be the winners.

Click here to sign up to be alerted when the next in our Media Innovation series is published. Head to our news page to read previous posts in this series about Retail Media and AdTech.

We couldn’t be more proud to share that our inimitable and downright fantastic Jo Blake has won Mentor of the Year at Campaign’s Inspiring Women Awards!

The awards celebrate women in the marketing, advertising, media and technology industries, honouring those who have demonstrated exceptional achievements and led the way for others.

Jo embodies what it means to be a mentor, empowering others to grow with purpose, confidence and resilience. With over 30 years of experience in media, Jo now sits on our senior leadership team as Head of Investment and Head of People. Her dual focus on commercial excellence and people development underpins our strategic vision to Accelerate Growth across the business, its clients and its people. 

As a qualified business coach and mental health first aider, Jo combines professional expertise with empathy, ensuring every individual at MI feels heard, supported and inspired. She has introduced formal mentoring programmes, overhauled the appraisal process and delivered workshops designed to unlock personal and professional growth. Her initiatives have contributed directly to MI achieving both the IPA’s People First and CPD Gold accreditations. 

Beyond agency life, Jo’s impact resonates across the industry. She is a founding member of Bloom and Women in Trading, two networks dedicated to championing women through mentorship, education and community. Jo currently mentors six women formally, providing tailored guidance on confidence, career progression and leadership. 

Jo’s mentorship has transformed the lives and careers of many women, guiding early-career professionals through to senior leadership. Her approach is authentic, personal and lasting. As one mentee said, “I genuinely believe I owe my career to Jo Blake, and I don’t know what I would have done without her mentorship.”

This month’s we sat down with Principal Data Scientist, Ray You, for our Day in the Life chat. Ray tells us the questions he asks to understand the business context when building measurement solutions and gives budding data scientists advice on how to get started in data science.

What led you to a career in data science?

The story goes back to my time at university in Canada where I studied marketing. After I graduated, I tried to get a creative marketing job in Canada, but it proved quite difficult. Roles there require excellent English and a strong understanding of local culture. Having only recently moved to Canada from China, these weren’t skills I possessed yet. Instead, as I have always been a scientific and logical person, I took a curveball and went into marketing analytics.

Eventually, I moved to London in digital analytics where I got more in depth with digital advertising. Then I became heavily involved in A/B testing as a product analyst. Everything shifted when I moved to a role at Unicef. It was here that I moved into data science as I looked to face marketing challenges with modelling work. I’ve brought all the knowledge into my role as principal data scientist at MI Media!

What does a typical day look like for you?

There are three core elements to my role. Firstly, I spend a lot of my time talking to people. Taking the time to get the basic questions right and understand the business context and expectations. The more time I’ve been in analyst roles, the more I’ve found that understanding people and their context is vital to success. Once I have all the information I need, I will come up with a custom-built measurement strategy.

Next, there’s the model-building part of my role. This is the most technical area, considering statistics, coding and pipelines. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, is sharing the results. The people I deal with have a varied understanding of statistics, so I need to explain the rationale in plain English. I need to make sure they understand why I did what I did, why it makes sense and what in means for the business.

What mistake have you learnt the most from?

Early in my career I was too geeky and focused on technical solutions rather than business actions. I was part of a segmentation project that failed because the outcome constraint was not defined well enough when I started the project. The results were unusable. This experience taught me that, in any project I’m building, I need to understand what the business is trying to achieve. It goes back to my earlier comment about being a consultant. I need to know what the business can and can’t do on the back of any results I give them. Without this, I could easily make a fancy technical solution that, from a business point of view, adds very little value.

Who’s your role model and why?

I take strengths from a variety of different people. From the power of honesty and transparency from previous managers to people speaking in the industry about using unconventional ways to extract new insights. I have also learnt from my senior colleagues at Unicef the importance of not assuming that you know everything, even if you’re in a senior role. They understood that the colleagues in local markets had the best local expertise and trusted them to deliver. Finally, my peers in the analytics field such as the data director at Huel, Bhav, have given me examples of the right blend of an analytical mindset with great storytelling.

Where does growth come from in an increasingly competitive landscape?

As our clients navigate an increasingly competitive landscape, evolving and expanding beyond historic strategies has never been more critical. We need to ensure budgets are allocated with maximum strategic impact. For example, shifts in search behaviour driven in part by greater adoption of AI have affected site traffic, CTRs and CPCs. This makes ongoing testing and learning essential to optimise spend and consistently achieve KPIs. It’s our role to curate and manage AdTech innovations in a way that drives learning and incremental value, while protecting top line performance.

I’m particularly excited about continuing to broaden our digital media mix beyond the traditional ‘holy grail’ digital channels of Meta and Google. We can no longer rely solely on these walled gardens. By exploring and refining approaches across additional digital channels, we can adapt to evolving media consumption patterns and continue Accelerating Growth.

AdTech is incredibly powerful and continues to evolve rapidly, but it cannot replace strategic human oversight. AdTech provides data and targeting, but the real value comes from how we interpret that data and apply it strategically to our clients. Human expertise is essential to guide AdTech platforms toward meaningful outcomes. Not just short-term statistical efficiency, but long-term brand building and future-proofed growth. In other words: AdTech is an enabler, not a replacement, for strategic thinking. Ultimately, that strategic layer is what drives sustainable business impact on the bottom line.

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Marketing Insight

Bethesda Games Studios is a worldwide renowned video game development studio. However, the level of popularity for the studio is split amongst the gaming community. On the one hand, it’s had huge successes in the past with titles like ES IV: Oblivion (2006), Fallout 3 (2008), ES V: Skyrim (2011) and Fallout 4 (2015). In recent years however, the studio had fallen out of favour amongst critics and fans. A heavily criticised launch of Fallout 76 (2018) suffered from technical failures, server crashes and poor-quality physical merchandise. Following that Bethesda saw a 97% drop in player count in the six months after the release of Starfield (2023) due to lack of a live service model (regular content updates).

Then in 2020, Amazon announced that it had licensed the rights to produce a live-action TV adaptation of the Fallout Series. Strong casting announcements followed, with Walton Goggins and Emma Purnell taking lead roles and filming began in 2022.

HBO, Paramount and Universal had all launched successful live-action video game adaptions with The Last of Us (2023-present), Sonic the Hedgehog (2020-2024) and The Super Mario Bros Movie (2023) respectively. So how did Fallout fair when it aired in 2024?

Accelerating Growth

The show itself has been a huge hit with audiences. But what impact did it have on the video game series and Bethesda’s fortunes?

Firstly, player counts increased significantly for Fallout 76 and Fallout 4, as well as other previous Fallout games. Fallout 7 reached an all-time high of 1 million Steam players across all platforms on the day after the show’s release. Fallout 4 saw a 7,500% week-on-week increase in sales, which saw it return as the top-selling title in the European sales charts, nine years after its initial release. Overall, it’s estimated that the first series generated an additional $80 million in revenue for Bethesda.

The additional revenue and demand for the games that the series has created, allowed Bethesda to innovate further by:

• Releasing next-generation console editions of titles such as Fallout 4 to meet increased player demand
• Integrating between the live-action series and games by adding in additional content to both Fallout 7 and Fallout Shelter

Licensing its IP to Amazon to create a TV show was a risk for Bethesda. How would it be received? Would the show be loyal to the game’s lore and style that had brought previous games so much success?

The answer? Amazon’s Fallout drove significant additional revenue for Bethesda, whilst also widening its audience of fans which is going to positively impact future titles.

If you could change one thing in the industry, what would it be?

There’s a resource drought happening in the industry today. Technology has been treated as a solve-all and we’ve lost a lot of highly talented people.

I’ve always known that AI would take jobs. But I’d hoped that AI and agentic AI buying would be targeted at aspects of people’s roles that are repeatable and can be turned into automated tasks. Strategic human thinking cannot be done by AI and agents. Instead, they should provide people with the tools to free up their time to dedicate to the parts of their roles that are about developing strategies, creative concepts and meeting people.  What appears to be happening is that businesses believe AI can allow them to reduce their workforce. It’s creating a talent squeeze where fewer people are expected to manage increasingly complex roles. This impacts everything in our industry. Publishers struggle to deliver high quality journalism as they reduce their staff and rely on AI content. Agencies can’t make the most out of their strategic talent because they’re too bogged down in trying to run campaigns. And agency buyers lack the headspace to truly interrogate the ecosystem.

Yes, society needs to move on and embrace the new technology, but it can’t be to the detriment of the human touch.

If I could change one thing in this industry it would be steering companies away from getting rid of talented people, in the mistaken belief that machines will do it for them. We need to move away from ‘shoestring’ operations and give people the time to focus on the strategic work that moves the needle. We need to invest in people. I hope that as we lean more into AI and agentic buying, we use those efficiencies to reinvest in human brilliance.

How do you think advertising will change over the next three years?

Advertising workflows will be simplified and integrated, with humans in the loop supervising AI-driven processes. The hype around AI replacing humans will die out, creating a two-tier system: AI-managed, single-channel campaigns for small businesses and AI-aided, cross-channel campaigns managed by human experts for more professional advertisers.

What are you most passionate about achieving this year in media?

We have spent years perfecting the underlying technology required to operate in a restricted ecosystem controlled by privacy and the reduction of traditional signals. That work is now our baseline. Anonymised supports user privacy, reduces leakage and keeps data safe. The way that data and privacy should work.

I’m genuinely excited about being able to take our technology and give agencies and advertisers a competitive advantage. It’s something we’ve done recently with MI Media’s own client, Prostate Cancer UK. The charity faced the challenge of Meta’s healthcare category restrictions, which prevented conversion optimisation. By deploying Anonymised’s Audience Lift to create enriched lookalike audiences, MI Media’s campaign achieved a 35% reduction in cost per acquisition in just two weeks.

What I am most passionate about achieving this year is the rollout of our unique omnichannel solutions. Because our foundations are so robust, we can offer advertisers a level of audience intelligence and cross channel reach that is difficult to find elsewhere. I want to spend this year demonstrating how our bespoke approach to first party data activation provides a genuine competitive advantage. We enable our clients to achieve results that simply weren’t possible under the old models.

Click here to sign up to be alerted when the next in our Media Innovation series is published. Head to our news page to read previous posts in this series about Retail Media.

Anonymised is an AI data platform for incremental audience targeting and campaign measurement – helping advertisers target and measure relevant audiences for increased reach and performance – without using or exposing personal data. Its privacy-enhancing technology couples cross-site data with on-device machine learning to allow accurate targeting and measurement of 100% consented audiences, across all browsers and devices. Its AI technology is crucial for the future of digital advertising since 60% of the web is effectively anonymous, and therefore addressable.