At The Year Ahead event in London earlier this month, The Media Leader’s content director James Longhurst and senior reporter Jack Benjamin parsed through the key themes of 2025 and open questions for 2026, with input from industry leaders.

The group, convened by non-profit Inside track, has released a memo warning that the industry is failing in its moral duty to society by funding hate, paying lip service to sustainability, and rolling over in the face of anti-DEI rhetoric.

Tom Laranjo speaks to The Media Leader about why Serviceplan Group restructured its agencies under the House of Communications banner, and his plans for the new entity.

The industry trade body has created a thought-leadership platform to help ad agencies navigate practical AI deployment.

Analysis: OpenAI has taken on a huge amount of debt to make its AI future a potential reality. An advertising model is needed to drive increased revenue, but are advertisers interested?

The Observer’s new commercial chief speaks about why he’s prioritising a “luxury” experience for clients, and the effort to diversify the title’s fledgling product offering.

Podcast: The co-founders and chairs of the Alliance of Media Independents discuss their plans for expansion and why indies might be the beneficiaries of a consolidating agency landscape.

ITV business development director Jason Spencer says the broadcaster has made greater use of AI ads in sales pitches and the creative process, rather than just in the final result.

In response to widespread backlash against xAI’s chatbot Grok creating and disseminating nude and lewd images of people on X, the platform has said it has “implemented technological measures” aimed at preventing users from utilising Grok to “[edit] images of real people in revealing clothing such as bikinis”. Whether the changes are effective is another matter.

Total marketing budgets likewise remained flat in the Golden Quarter, with cost pressures, muted economic activity and budget constraints cited as reasons for the lack of growth.