At the start of the year, The Economist’s global head of advertising, Jamie Jouning, told us that it was a “fool’s errand” for media leaders to focus energy on macro factors they can’t influence.
“Nothing we’ve seen so far this year hints at a less chaotic 2026 – it’s a question of navigating your way through it,” he said.
As we head into the long Easter weekend, The Media Leader thought the time was right to look back at the biggest themes that have emerged in UK media during what has at times been a predictably chaotic Q1.
Platforms receive backlash – and growing revenue
Has the tide turned against the tech platforms?
Court case losses piled up at the end of Q1, with US juries finding social media companies have intentionally designed harmfully addictive user experiences and enabled harm, including child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Such material has also been generated at scale by AI chatbots like X’s Grok.
Meta, meanwhile, came under scrutiny for admitting at LEAD that fraudulent ads “might” have accounted for 3-4% of its total annual revenue in 2024 and that 30% of advertisers on its platform last year were unverified.
Channel 4’s Molly vs The Machines also highlighted the risks of online harm for teens as the UK grappled with whether to institute a ban on social media for under-16s.
Meanwhile, consumer backlash against AI has grown alongside its use, and media businesses have pushed to embrace the technology despite lacking a clear picture of its carbon impact.
One anonymous group of agency insiders has had enough, candidly criticising industry leaders, event organisers and trade bodies over their lack of action tackling such harms.
Indeed, money continues to flow toward search and online display formats, which accounted for 83% of total ad spend in Q4 last year.
A battle for the future of measurement
Some of The Media Leader’s most-read coverage so far this year centred on a battle over measurement standards. In January, Google sent a cease-and-desist to stop Barb’s efforts to measure individual YouTube channel viewing on TV sets.
Outgoing Barb CEO Justin Sampson responded in our pages with a question: “Should we continue to choose a shared currency of truth? Or do we allow confidence to erode and truth to become negotiable?”
A changing TV market
The Streaming Wars are out, and the Great Bundling has begun.
Sky’s new £24/month bundle, launched last month, includes Sky as well as the ad tiers for Disney+, Netflix, HBO Max and Hayu. The broadcaster also remains in talks with ITV over its Media & Entertainment business.
With global streamers set to box out mono-market broadcasters, more consolidation and partnerships are likely, but as Omdia’s Maria Rua Aguete warned at the CTV World Summit in March, TV companies would be wise to “be careful about who you put in your bed.”
Q1 also saw Paramount finally emerge as the winning bidder for Warner Bros Discovery, which will likely result in a conglomerate with significant debt and more centralised, Trump-friendly ownership.
Back home in Britain, there has been leadership change aplenty. The BBC has a new director-general, the first in its history without any experience of journalism, broadcasting, or programme-making. Meanwhile, GB News has audience momentum and a new revenue officer, who answered questions from The Media Leader about concerns over brand safety, cosiness to Trump and Reform, and more on a March episode of The Media Leader Podcast.
Cultural moments clash with AI opportunity
Major cultural moments during Q1 included the releases of Wuthering Heights and Project Hail Mary, with the box office poised to finish the quarter ahead of the same period last year.
Audio, meanwhile, continued its embrace of video and vice-versa, with podcast-style setups even gracing the likes of CNN. The UK’s own Goalhanger announced major growth milestones during the quarter, as well as a rebrand aimed at better communicating its inventory to advertisers.
Publishers, also investing in multimedia efforts, have continued to navigate an AI search landscape that has unravelled business models centred on scaling traffic to sell to advertisers. Reach and Future, for example, reported 8% and 20% declines in online traffic, respectively, as click-through rates plunged.
In a win for publishers, however, the Government announced in March that it had walked back its controversial proposed AI copyright opt-out policy.
The embrace of AI is continuing nonetheless. Media agency groups are increasingly situating themselves as “AI-powered” companies amid flagging valuations, and most major agencies and media owners are racing to release new AI tools to automate planning and creative decisions.
Looking ahead to Q2
It will be worth keeping an eye on how macro factors impact the marketing industry.
The US-Israel war with Iran is likely to lead to long-term disruptions. With the Strait of Hormuz poised to remain closed and an energy crisis thus on the world’s doorstep, will consumers and businesses get pinched? Will costs be cut? Will marketing budgets be slashed amid the uncertainty?
And what will come of the quarter’s biggest cultural moment, the FIFA World Cup? More on that to come next quarter.
Here are some of the other highlights from Q1:
Channel 4 has adopted a platform mindset, with a new-look commercial team.
Publicis’s public battle with The Trade Desk has raised questions over transparency and hidden fees
Independent agencies are having a moment amid holdco consolidation.
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