This week we launched a powerful new fundraising TV advert with international humanitarian organisation, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). The campaign highlights what it means to donate by reinforcing the life-saving impact of regular giving.

The campaign, created by krow Group, is a bold step forward for the charity’s communications, bringing donors inside the action. With the aim of increasing monthly donations, the ad highlights the importance of donations, and how they directly impact MSF’s ability to deliver long term, independent medical aid in areas affected by conflict, disaster and disease. The ad will run across TV, VOD and Social as part of MSF’s wider Winter Campaign, in rotation with ‘The Life Saving Moment’ ad, launched in October.

Amid an overwhelming backdrop of global crises, ‘Part of the Team’ invites viewers to see themselves not as passive bystanders, but active participants. The emotionally charged film transports a donor from her living room into MSF’s world.  It places them inside an MSF frontline operating theatre, shoulder to shoulder with medical staff, to feel the urgency, witness the stakes and experience what it means to play a vital role – not as a bystander, but as part of the team.

Told through a minimalist, spot lit visual language and using sound to seamlessly transition the donor between the comfort of home and the urgency of the frontline. It captures both the emotional weight and the importance of MSF’s work. The message is simple but powerful ‘Stand with Us’.

Michaela Campion-Smith, Acquisition and Emergency Fundraising Lead at Médecins Sans Frontières said, “We know people want to help during times of crisis but often feel disconnected from the impact they can have. This film bridges that gap, showing that when someone donates, they’re not just giving money, they’re stepping into the story, becoming part of the team that saves lives.”

You can read about how we increased MSF’s donations by 50% YoY with last year’s winter appeal here.

Following the launch of OpenAI’s TV campaign, business director Annabelle Sitwell spoke to The Media Leader about how this move follows in the footsteps of many other tech giants before it.

It feels like OpenAI has broken its own fourth wall, stepping outside of its virtual world and into a world that it’s had us believe was nothing but a distant memory… linear TV.

Whilst much has been made of OpenAI’s move into TV, it seems to me that this was the logical next step. Fellow tech giant Google has always run high-budget, emotion-led traditional media advertising. Its TV ads focus on the humanity behind the searches and it’s often leant heavily into OOH to showcase its live data feeds with hyper-localised weather or traffic data.

Digital channels bring early adopters, traditional advertising deliver mainstream reach

This is the natural progression of a tech product launch. Using digital channels in the first instance to get early adopters onto the platform whilst every element is going through beta enables the team to optimise processes like product features, UX and pricing strategy. It’s important to remember that ChatGPT is likely still in its relative infancy – even though we’re already on v5! According to itself, it was first launched in 2018, but it was the 2020 version that garnered global attention. In a world where engineers need real usage data to optimise and roadmap new features, managing a gentle but steady growth curve is best. It’s important to remember how slow and often inaccurate the early versions were. Large uptake wasn’t an option. However, with all future-facing products natural growth will plateau (the same was seen with electric cars). And with large investment rounds it needs to gear up for the next level. This is the moment when brand campaigns across trusted advertising channels will deliver the mainstream reach these platforms need to become universally used.

We’re delighted that our work with SME business insurer Simply Business has been shortlisted in the TV / CTV category at The Drum Awards for Media.

The TV / CTV category rewards campaigns that leverage television, connected TV (CTV), cinema and streaming platforms to deliver impactful marketing messages and engage audiences across traditional and digital environments. The shortlisted campaigns demonstrate how these channels were strategically integrated to maximize reach, enhance targeting capabilities and engage the target audience. 

When it comes to our entry for Simply Business, it’s no secret that the insurance market is a crowded space. From opera singers and iconic meerkats, standing out isn’t easy. It takes something special to make people sit up and take notice. Simply Business set about doing just that. It had historically relied on generic PPC search and price comparison websites to drive business but recognised an opportunity to grow the number of direct customers. We needed to increase awareness and consideration for Simply Business, ultimately leading to more customers buying direct.

Truant’s creative concept centres around a memorable play on Tina Turner’s 1980s hit ‘The Best’ which captures the feeling of knowing your business is protected. Our media strategy used contextual advertising, placing Simply Business’ ad alongside TV programming that showed the euphoria of success. During a summer of sport, we secured access to premium live events, including the Premier League’s opening game and Paralympics Opening Ceremony. This was supported by spots across what we termed ‘skilled reality’ programming: reality shows that feature an element of competition.

The results of our approach were quite simply… the best! Simply Business has grown to record highs in both awareness and consideration. As of August 2025, the campaign has delivered a 50% and 28% increase in spontaneous and prompted awareness respectively, while consideration levels have increased by 18%. These improvements in brand health are reflected in the Simply Business journey, as branded search has increased by 52%, resulting in a +22% YoY growth in policies sold via brand search.

To read about this campaign in more detail head to our case study page.

Channel effectiveness: knowing what works and by how much

At its core, MMM quantifies how each media channel contributes to incremental sales or conversions. Using historical data on spend, impressions, sales and external factors such as competitor activity; MMMs estimate the ROI of a channel. In Bayesian, something called a posterior distribution is generated, which represents a range for the ROI of that channel, not just a single point estimates (e.g. the ROI for TV is likely between 2 -2.4).

The key metrics that emerge include:

• ROI (Return on Investment): incremental revenue per pound spent on a channel
• Elasticity: how responsive sales are to percentage changes in channel spend
• Credible intervals: the probability range for each channel’s true ROI (e.g. 50% probability that the true channel ROI lies between 2- 2.2)

For decision-makers, this means more than just knowing ‘TV performs better than social’. The outputs allow clients to ask their media agencies, “how confident are you that TV performs better than social?”

Response curves: finding the point of diminishing returns

One of the most valuable outputs of an MMM is the spend-response curve. These show how each channel’s performance scales with increased spend, capturing aspects known as ad stock (how long ads keep working after airing) and saturation effects (when returns diminish at higher channel spends).

These are estimated through nonlinear transformations made to the data using specialist functions which describe how a KPI approaches a plateau as media spend increases. Put simply, it tells you how much is too much (over-saturation) and how much is too little (under-saturation).

These curves help media agencies and their clients:

• Identify optimal spend levels per channel before diminishing returns kick in
• Understand marginal ROI at each channel spend level
• Recognise under- and over-invested channels which helps optimise spend
• Build intuitive ‘what-if’ scenarios showing the incremental revenue for different media budget channel splits or scenarios

MMM takes marketers from intuition to evidence-based decision making

The re-emergence of MMMs helps marketers use data to move from intuition-based to evidence-based media investment decisions. When MMMs are built robustly and are validated by channel experts, they undoubtably enable smarter media planning. MMMs help marketers answer key business questions such as where to spend more or where to cut and how confident we are in the return on our investment.

Modern MMMs, using techniques such as Bayesian, provide outputs alongside uncertainty. This is powerful because levels of risk can be communicated alongside more typical MMM outputs such as channel saturation, budget optimisation and scenario analysis.

At MI Media, MMM outputs are communicated to clients in MIDAS, our automated reporting dashboard which adds interactivity, allowing our clients to play with ROI tables, response curves, KPI contribution charts, budget optimisation scenarios and more. While this adds a useful interactive element over traditional presentations, it’s still important that we work closely with our clients to discuss the key business findings and how they will affect future media decisions.

Our latest membership campaign with the Woodland Trust launched earlier this month, encouraging everyone across the UK to enjoy the autumnal drama of our woods. The campaign highlights that, by becoming a member of the Woodland Trust, people can help protect and ensure the safety of our woodland’s trees and wildlife for years to come.

As the UK’s largest woodland conservation charity, the Woodland Trust already has strong brand awareness, this latest campaign needs to move audiences down the funnel to consideration and conversion.

To give people a reason to act now and become members, our Woodland Trust membership campaign will use contextual placements that build on moments of heightened emotion when people are learning about the issues and paying attention to the issues we’re facing.

To reach a combined audience of those that actively campaign for greener living as well as those that make small, conscious choices in their days to be greener but don’t actively campaign, the Woodland Trust membership campaign will run across highly contextual and engaging channels including radio Do Good Trails across the Heart network, on podcasts including That’s Just Wild & The Plodcast and in content partnerships with the Guardian and the Telegraph. We have also partnered with Goodnet, an ESG platform that curates YouTube creator lists based on the full spectrum of ESG that will place the Woodland Trust against better quality, contextual content while lowering its carbon footprint for the digital activity.

You can read more about our appointment by the Woodland Trust here.

In-person events are coming back with a bang but hybrid continues to be the best strategy 

It has been five years since the pandemic changed the face of events. 2020-2022 saw the very quick emergence of virtual events, out of survival necessity. Whilst hybrid events are here to stay (for now!), we are seeing in-person events return to popularity.  

For example in the case of charities, the UK events fundraising market appears to have shifted back to in-person experiences. In-person events made up 90% of the Top 25 Charity Events that raised the most money last year. Several in-person walking events, such as The Kiltwalk, Shine Night Walk (CRUK), and Memory Walk (Alzheimer’s Society), featured in the Top 25. In stark contract, according to JustGiving, the average amount raised per page for virtual walking events in 2024 declined. Whilst in-person is coming out as the clear winner, many charities are keeping virtual events in the mix, likely due to the cheaper running costs, meaning events remain hybrid. 

Conferences remain in demand 

For our B2B clients, there is still great demand for in person-conferences. According to Events.com, “In 2025, events that help people grow, professionally or personally, are seeing strong demand. Career networking nights, skills-based workshops, and learning-driven meetups are attracting audiences across generations, not just Gen Z.” 

Event marketing doesn’t always need to have dedicated events campaigns if you don’t have the budget to stretch, especially if the event is free to attend. If your other campaigns are strong enough and you have clear signposting to the event on your website, you can expect to see cross-campaign conversions. 

However, more traditional awareness channels aren’t to be ignored. You might have the biggest brand name in the world, it doesn’t mean audiences will know about your specific events. To fill the top of the funnel, deploying OOH, TV and even programmatic display can support the rest of your event marketing activity. You need to make sure you have activity centred around awareness and consideration, otherwise you will be limiting the pool of people who live in the consideration part of the funnel.  

The event marketing industry in 2025 remains an ever-changing beast and marketing will need to keep adapting to continue seeing growth.  

Marketing Insight

Once a fierce competitor to Intel in the CPU market, AMD had slipped into distant second place by the mid-2010s.

The early 2000s had been a golden era, but when Intel’s Core architecture launched in 2006, AMD struggled to match its performance and efficiency standards. By the early 2010s, AMD’s situation was awkward. Its latest FX processors failed to meet expectations, often losing ground even to older Intel chips. Market share in desktop and laptop CPUs had dwindled to single digits. For many, AMD had become synonymous with “budget only”, a brand used when cost mattered more than performance.  For the wider public, AMD was unknown compared to Intel’s distinctive audio branding.

Financially, the company was in trouble. Layoffs, restructuring and a revolving door of leadership added to the issues.

Enter CEO Lisa Su, who was appointed in 2014. Su led the company’s refocus on its engineering efforts. Codenamed “Zen,” the new CPU architecture promised to be a complete reinvention designed with one aim in mind: compete with Intel on raw performance.  By doing this, AMD hoped to regain market share and reverse its brand image of being “budget” rather than “excellent value”.

Accelerating Growth

By addressing its brand image through product development, competitive pricing and a deliberate marcomms strategy, AMD was able to reverse its negative position. In the year since launching its first generation Ryzen CPU, AMD improved YoY growth and market share by 14%. By 2019, its revenue had increased from $4.3B to $6.48B, reversing a 27% drop in revenue that had been seen in 2015. As a result, AMD’s market share of mobile CPUs (including Laptops) went from 6.4% to 20% by 2020.

This month’s day in the life comes from our new business director, Nicole Browne, who shares what her early days in PR taught her about storytelling and how one pitch team managed to make her tear up like a proud parent.

We’d be remiss not to give ourselves a cheeky new business plug here. So if you read this and think that MI Media sounds like an agency you’d like to work with to grow your business, then get in touch at [email protected].  

What led you to a career in media?

Balancing my academic and creative sides was always my aim when trying to figure out what I wanted to do. Having studied fashion promotion at university, I realised that while I didn’t live for fashion, I enjoyed the opportunities to write and tell stories that the modules on PR offered so initially looked for jobs in this industry.

In those first few years of my career as a PR executive I had to find compelling stories in everything from abandoned shopping basket retargeting (we sent and retrieved an actual shopping basket from the edge of space), to the online deal-hunting forum HotUKDeals (one shopper filled their freezer with 300 ice creams for just £17.36 after they spotted a pricing glitch which saw ice creams going for pennies at Tesco Express). It taught me so much about how to tell stories that people want to read.

Eventually, I joined an agency that specialised in PR for the advertising & media industry. Here I worked with clients including MediaCom, Ogilvy and Leagas Delaney, before being approached by a recruiter at Omnicom Media Group UK to run its PR as part of its new business and marketing team. It was this in-house role that broadened my skills and showed me the opportunities that lay in agency new business and marketing. After a few years moving around the OMG UK network, I came over to the side of the indies at MI Media.

What does a typical day look like for you?

My role puts me in the very privileged position of being able to work with pretty much every single person in our agency. One day might see me working with a group of Business Directors to develop the conversation for an upcoming client roundtable event, another might involve working with one of our more junior team members to uncover their specialist knowledge and support them in writing an insightful article for our website.

I am by far my busiest when a new business pitch hits. One of the fantastic things about MI Media is that when this happens, everyone is all hands on deck. It’s not just about the pitch team in these moments, but about the rest of the team picking up work to support those on the pitch and make sure that no one is at risk of burning out. I love everything about a pitch; they bring the absolute best out of everyone. I feel like a proud parent when I send the team off for the final pitch presentation after weeks of research, story building and rehearsals. I was so impressed by one pitch team during their final rehearsal that they managed to make me cry, which as a ‘stoic Yorkshireman’ is quite the feat.

What mistake have you learnt the most from?

Although I’m an open and direct person, I have fallen foul of worrying too much about other people’s opinion of me. As I’ve grown into my leadership role, I’ve had to learn that there will be times when I have to be firm, either with the team or in my own convictions. Not everyone is going to react positively all the time, but their reactions aren’t a reflection of who I am. As long as I truly believe in my recommendations and actions, I’ve learnt that I need to stand by them. And honestly, I can’t think of anyone who’s held a grudge against me for any of the decisions I’ve made at work!

Who’s your role model and why?

When it comes to work, I like to pick and choose what I admire or appreciate in the people I work with and try to emulate them. However, there’s one person that stands out for me who’s been doing incredible things over the past few years: Saffana Monajed.

I first met Saffana at OMG UK where she was a Media Planner at OMG Unite. Since then, Saffana has set up WhiteBoard Marketing Co., running writing workshops that get marketing teams excited about writing for their organisations. Not content with launching an incredible business (while becoming a mother of two!), Saffana is perhaps more recognisable as a voice on social media breaking down in the simplest terms how the marketing machine works. More specifically, how the Israeli government is using well known marketing tactics to get the West to buy in to, or at least stay silent, about the genocide in Gaza. Other people trying to build their client base in an industry still dominated by white, middle class decision makers might have shied away from a topic like this. But I defy anyone to watch Saffana’s videos and not develop a better understanding of what is happening, while also learning about some genuinely great marketing tactics that can be applied to their own clients.

Beyond this, the network of women that Saffana has built around her and that I’ve had the pleasure of meeting is full of incredible people. This, I think, is the best reflection of a great role model.

Marketing Insight

Currys, one of the UK’s most recognisable electrical retailers, faced the challenge of staying relevant in a market increasingly dominated by online-first competitors like Amazon. Its traditional brand positioning wasn’t working for younger audiences.

To move forward, Currys needed to shift away from adapting old marketing tactics for a new generation and instead focus on creating native, engaging content that meets younger consumers where they are, on the platforms they use every day.

Accelerating Growth

In repositioning itself as a content creator, Currys has connected with a younger digital-native audience. A lot of its successful posts were organic, meaning paid media budgets were likely saved and deployed to other areas where that budget was needed more.

Currys’ strategy paid off, the content drove 100 million organic TikTok views in six months and more importantly a 5% increase in sales in the 17 weeks to 24 August 2024. Currys has firmly established itself as a standout social brand in the industry.

Why traditional Marketing Mix Modelling still matters

For decades, Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) has helped marketers understand the performance of media and the influence of factors such as competitor spend and seasonality on business KPIs. MMM’s strength lies in cutting through the noise to isolate media’s effect and determine Return on Investment (ROI), making it a trusted measurement tool.

Today, MMM’s relevance has only grown. Privacy restrictions, cookie deprecation and tracking limitations have undermined user-level attribution, making it harder to capture full customer journeys. Unlike those methods, MMM works on aggregated spend and outcome data, making it resilient to these shifts. It’s therefore re-established itself as a core framework for marketing measurement.

The limitation of traditional MMM in measuring ROI

Traditionally, MMM has produced single ROI estimates that downplay the uncertainty behind them. This leaves decision-makers without a clear sense of investment risk. Bayesian MMM addresses this by generating an ROI range for different variables such as media channels. This shifts the focus from single estimates to a range of ROIs with their associated likelihood of being reached. This allows stakeholders to consider both expected returns and the likelihood of achieving them, making Bayesian approaches increasingly attractive in today’s market.

From single ROI estimates to risk-aware decisions

Marketing measurement is moving from an era of single-number estimates to outputting a range of estimates with their associated probabilities that allow for risk-aware decision-making. Traditional MMM has long been effective in quantifying how different media channels have affected business metrics, but its treatment of uncertainty leaves investment risk hidden. Bayesian MMM fills this gap by reframing outputs into probabilities, enabling scenario simulations and supporting more robust budget optimisation.

Bayesian MMM generates a range of values that show how different media channels have affected business metrics. The outputs of this probabilistic method are a range of media contributions, ROIs and response curves with uncertainty bands. These equip marketers with a richer and more realistic understanding of their investments. In a world of shrinking user-level data and growing measurement challenges, it is not just a technical upgrade but a practical evolution, one that is increasingly shaping how marketing decisions are made today.