Our most-read stories of 2025
2025 in Review
One question The Media Leader staff is constantly being asked around the holidays is: what was the big story of the past year?
2025 was a year of consolidation, innovation and change. WPP consolidated its media agencies; Omnicom acquired IPG; publishers began participating in the creator economy; broadcasters have laid the groundwork to compete for small business budgets; across it all, AI innovations have been pushed, with yet-to-be seen benefits.
The industry is changing rapidly, and it’s easy to forget everything that occurred this year. So, The Media Leader has decided to look back at what resonated with our audience most. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the two parts of the media industry that underwent the most change in the past year — TV and media agencies — were key topics.
Here are the year’s top five most-read news stories and features on The Media Leader:
5. UK broadcasters announce a new SME marketplace
Was there a bigger story to come out of Cannes this year?
In the summer, the big three British broadcasters united with Comcast to announce a new forthcoming marketplace aimed at making TV as easy and accessible to buy as social media platforms.
The news followed Comcast launching Universal Ads in beta at the start of the year in the US market.
The UK’s SME marketplace still doesn’t have an official name, nor an official release date, though it is expected to launch sometime in 2026. Measurement on the platform will be underpinned by another collaborative effort, Lantern.
At the Future of TV Advertising Global conference last week, Comcast Advertising president James Rooke said that Universal Ads, in conjunction with outcomes-based measurement, could well give the TV industry a fighting chance in its battle with Big Tech for adspend.
Channel 4, ITV and Sky roll out ad marketplace to attract new advertisers
4. GroupM rebrands to WPP Media
While Omnicom lined up to swallow IPG in December of last year, it was WPP that sought to consolidate its own media agencies first: in May, it was reported GroupM would be rebranding and bringing storied agency brands EssenceMediacom, Wavemaker and Mindshare under one P&L.
By the end of that month, GroupM was no more. In its place, WPP Media was launched as a “fully integrated, AI-powered company”. A week later, it had acquired InfoSum as its first “major investment” in building an AI-driven data offer. By June, the holding group had released a “large marketing model” in its WPP Open platform, which it claimed would improve efficiency and effectiveness for clients.
Its agency leadership was subsequently consolidated and reshuffled.
Cue an industry-wide uproar about replacing human labour with AI. At the inaugural SXSW London, WPP CEO Mark Read candidly admitted he had “no doubt” that “there will be fewer people involved” for media companies to accomplish the work they do today, thanks to AI-driven efficiencies.
Just days later, Read himself exited the company. He was replaced in September by ex-Microsoft leader Cindy Rose, who has been tasked with making WPP Open a credible proposition and improving employee morale at a holding group that has shed substantial business to rivals in recent years.
Overseeing her first earnings result in Q3, Rose candidly expressed that the business’s “recent performance is unacceptable” after it reported a 5.9% year-on-year decline in revenue less pass-through costs (the company’s way of reporting net revenue) and issued another profit warning for the full year.
Regardless of the company’s financial performance, Read’s assessment has appeared prescient: WPP cut 7,000 jobs between the summer of 2024 and the summer of 2025.
3. UM launches its Full Colour Media proposition
Even as holding groups consolidate agencies, agency leadership has still worked hard to find a competitive edge, differentiating themselves through new planning propositions.
Case in point: UM, formerly part of Interpublic Group (now part of Omnicom), unveiled its Full Colour Media proposition in January.
The global omnichannel media planning proposition aims to “stand against bland” in an era in which AI risks regressing critical thinking and creative standards to the mean.
Underpinned by custom research developed in partnership with University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School professor Felipe Thomaz, UM seeks to understand how “brand patterns” drive growth through increased purchase intent and considation.
Though each brand has its own unique brand pattern, informed by an interdependency of various metrics across what UM calls the “3 Vs”: visibility (eg. attention and ad awareness), vibrancy (eg. social engagement, word of mouth) and variability (eg. differentiation through customer intrinsic value), brands are “often using similar media strategies”, meaning they are not tailoring their media planning to their strengths.
As global chief strategy officer Dan Chapman explained to The Media Leader, this finding required a philosophical reimagining of how to drive effective media, lest brands “sleepwalk into blandness”.
UM has since been purchased, along with the rest of IPG, by Omnicom Group. It is yet unclear how the new ownership will manage its embiggened agency portfolio.
UM unveils ‘Full Colour Media’ proposition to fight brand blandness
2. YouTube viewership is perceived as bigger than it is
Is YouTube TV?
It remains one of the most hotly-debated questions across the media industry. YouTube, its critics argue, is wanting to have it both ways: it can promote itself as a platform in order to skirt TV measurement standards, but still hunt for TV budgets as more viewers engage with the service on the big screen.
But is TV viewing of YouTube really all that big? According to Nielsen, in the US YouTube accounts for 12.9% of TV viewing — more than any other streaming service. YouTube TV (the platform’s over-the-top streaming service) is also projected to be the top pay-TV distributor in that market.
But as Anthony Jones, Thinkbox’s head of research, explained at an event in March, YouTube viewership on UK TV sets has some way to go to catch up with its popularity in the US.
Citing Barb data, Jones suggested that “there’s a perception that YouTube is significantly bigger than it is”, with demonstrably skewed viewership. In December of last year, he explained, the heaviest quartile of YouTube viewers on TV sets accounted for 87% of total viewing time on the platform. In comparison, the other three-quarters of YouTube viewers accounted for just 13% of viewing time — equivalent to five minutes per day.
The debate over YouTube was reignited in July, when Barb began reporting TV-set viewing of a cross-section of top YouTube channels.
While the usefulness and efficacy of this effort has been questioned by brand marketers and agency buyers, Barb’s findings have revealed a stark reality: YouTube viewing on UK TV sets is drastically skewed toward younger viewers, and global phenomenons such as MrBeast actually have paltry audiences in this market.
1. Netflix wants to be easy to buy
Netflix has had a big year. In February, the streaming giant expanded its programmatic offering in partnership with Google’s Display & Video 360 (DV360) and The Trade Desk to the EMEA market.
In May, it began rolling out its much-anticipated in-house adtech stack to its ad-tier markets globally. In June, it announced a partnership with TF1 to integrate TF1+’s live channels and on-demand channels into the platform beginning next summer.
And this month, it agreed to acquire Warner Bros’ studios and streaming businesses (though the deal may no longer go through after a Paramount launched a hostile takeover bid of Warner Bros Discovery).
In an exclusive interview in February, The Media Leader sat down with EMEA ads VP Damien Bernet to discuss how the streaming giant reached the “turning point” of its programmatic advertising expansion, though it is still unclear just how much revenue Netflix’s ads business is generating.
He explained: “We bring the positives of TV — the premium environment, the big screen, low ad load, premium content, brand suitability — in combination with what digital can bring.”
Bernet subsequently caught up with The Media Leader at the Future of Media London event in November, when it was revealed Netflix’s ad tier now reaches 190m monthly active viewers across its 12 markets, including over 12m in the UK, according to Barb.
‘Making us easy to buy’: Netflix expands programmatic offering in EMEA