The Future of Media is…
Everyone wanted to talk about AI, attention and creativity. But the real story at Future of Media London was more uncomfortable: audiences aren’t changing—but the model is.
The below is my reflection on part of this year’s Future of Media London conference, hosted by my old employer Adwanted Events, the publisher of The Media Leader, where I was editor and remain a columnist.
I stress it’s an analysis of “part” of the conference, namely the first morning of the first day (The Future of Media takes places over two days with two rooms of activity).
This year’s Future of Media London conference wasn’t really about attention, or the resilience of creativity over audience targeting, or even that AI thing everyone continues to obsess about.
Forget the “new normal.” The industry is struggling to face up to the old one.
If there’s one chart you needed to see, it’s this:
When we actually break down our behaviour into what we do rather than how we do it, we find that we’re pretty much the same as we were a decade ago: we still watch, read, listen, and interact with each other through media as we did before Covid, TikTok and ChatGPT.
Audience behaviour isn’t changing much at all, yet the continued migration from analogue to digital media keeps wrecking the economics of selling, planning, and measuring advertising.
So the conference revealed a hard truth: media may have moved on, but the business model hasn’t.
The mood in the room
You could sense it in the tone of the presentations—equal parts optimism and quiet dread.
WARC Media’s Alex Brownsell, who provided the above chart about media behaviours (courtesy of IPA Touchpoints) opened the morning with a brisk tour of the “five forces” shaping global ad markets. Ecommerce, he noted, has regressed to the mean after the Covid lockdowns. But his real insight was macro: advertising no longer functions as a simple bellwether of economic growth.
I warned about this divergence nearly two years ago, and it’s only deepened since. Ad spend keeps rising—set to top a trillion dollars globally—while effectiveness quietly erodes year by year. SMEs, dependent on a handful of Big Tech platforms for reach, are fuelling growth that now flows mainly to those platforms themselves.
His thesis was simple but devastating: advertising has broken from its historical correlation with economic growth, entering a new era dominated by digital platforms, SME performance budgets, and low-attention environments.
“It’s a trillion-dollar fantasy land… but not an easy time to be in marketing,” Brownsell quipped.
Consumer habits, he showed, are remarkably stable—it’s advertising that has drifted away from where real attention lives. Growth now comes from new money (SMEs and trade budgets) flooding measurable channels, while power reconcentrates around Meta, Alphabet and Amazon, who together will soon command 60% of global spend.
Yet, as almost half of advertising now appears beside user-generated content, effectiveness is becoming volatile and hard to prove.
Brownsell’s conclusion was stark: the global ad market is bigger, more concentrated, and less effective than ever—and media planning, not automation, will decide who still creates value.
“The ad market is fundamentally changing… That poses effectiveness challenges at an industry level. Media planning is required more than ever to help brands navigate their way through this complexity.”
In other words, the craft of planning—the human judgment connecting data to cultural understanding—is the last defence against a trillion-dollar efficiency trap.
That set the tone for the rest of the day: a polite theatre of progress, set against a deep anxiety about whether advertising still works.
The Big Tension: Peter Field vs Niel Bornman
Nowhere was that clearer than in the uneasy contrast between two sessions: effectiveness expert Peter Field’s argument for high-attention media and Publicis Media chief Niel Bornman’s defence of connected data ecosystems.
They weren’t on stage together, but what fun that would have been!
Field, speaking alongside Newsworks and Lumen, seemed visibly frustrated to be making the same plea he’s made for years—that investing in proven, quality media channels drives superior business results. His evidence was, as always, impeccable.
Field’s exasperation was palpable.
“What brands are suffering from at the moment is the top-of-funnel under-investment on a massive scale.”
Which is because:
“[Tech platforms] have totally convinced [C-suites] there is a new model based on low-attention platforms and performance marketing. We’ve got to undo that… It does have a value, but it’s at the bottom of the funnel, not at the top.”
Then came Bornman, the UK chief of Publicis Media, whose recent success makes him arguably the most commercially powerful voice in the room. His interview was a masterclass in salesmanship, a calm assertion that proprietary tech and first-party data will deliver “growth certainty” for clients under pressure.
He outlined Publicis’ edge in four parts:
owning and updating identity-level data on 46 million UK consumers;
integrating that data across the media ecosystem;
operationalising it for planners and client teams;
flattening structures so agency leaders can move faster.
Interviewer Jack Benjamin, to his credit, asked the obvious question: doesn’t this risk over-investing in low-attention media?
The answer Bornman gave is worth quoting at length:
Clients are under short-term pressure: brands’ tilt toward performance marketing is driven by board-level demands for immediate certainty and ROI.
“A lot of businesses are under economic pressure… they’re asking rightly: how much of my spend is wasted, how much is not appropriately invested to drive growth?”
The onus is on agencies to fix measurement: Rather than criticising performance bias, he frames it as an agency challenge to prove long-term value
“The onus is on us to provide better measurement solutions… to help them understand how brand, consideration and performance actually lead to growth.”
The problem is seeing media in isolation: His answer pivots from media mix connected customer experience, arguing that attention should be measured across the full journey — not just ad exposure.
“We’ve done ourselves a disservice to see media exposure in isolation from product or brand experience.”
In short, Bornman argued the real issue is fragmented measurement and short-term business pressure. Performance bias isn’t wrong—it’s reality. Agencies must measure better, not lecture harder.
It’s an elegant argument. But it leaves the industry trapped between two incompatible philosophies: Field’s belief that effectiveness lies in patience, and Bornman’s conviction that salvation lies in speed.
What no one said aloud
What neither side quite said aloud is that both are playing within a broken system.
If every advertiser acts rationally in the short term—grabbing quick wins to please anxious boards—the collective outcome is irrational. The “tragedy of the commons” comes to adland: everyone optimises, nobody grows.
When brands can’t build lasting connections with consumers, they lose pricing power. And without pricing power, business growth becomes dependent on cost-cutting and churn.
This isn’t a philosophical issue—it’s macroeconomic. UK Inflation remains persistently high at 4%, band the UK remains exposed to energy shocks, ongoing Brexit frictions, and further costs at home (imminent tax rises to pay down huge government debt) and abroad (Trump tariffs). In that environment, brand strength is not a luxury; the ability to use brand to raise prices and maintain loyalty is a hedge against volatility.
Yet through this reductive “marketing funnel” framing, this industry continues to treat brand building as an optional line item. If consumer marketing collapses into a direct-response dogfight, the idea of a brand itself begins to dissolve.
And when that happens, capitalism loses its mechanism for rewarding quality over convenience.
Where this leaves us
The morning’s final session tried to answer “where’s the growth?” but perhaps the answer was lying in plain sight on screen in a previous presentation: go work for Amazon.
Because the uncomfortable reality is that growth—and therefore power—has splintered. The buy side now consists of countless small advertisers, each too busy to think beyond the next campaign. The sell side is consolidated into a few global tech platforms. Neither was particularly represented on stage, and both are defining the market the rest of us strain to understand.
Instead, much of the discussion drifted toward AI—largely in the abstract. Everyone agreed “agents” will reshape media, but examples were scarce. I kept waiting for just one concrete demonstration: an AI agent integrated with a CRM, an email inbox, or even a planning tool. Instead, we got more platitudes about productivity and prompting.
Yes, large language models are already saving time and aiding creativity. But the idea that AI agents will soon reinvent entire agency business models feels like wishful thinking.
The Old Normal, revisited
Everyone at Future of Media London wanted to talk about the “new normal.” But until we fix the old one—our addiction to short-term certainty over long-term value—the future of media will stay stuck in the past.
The question isn’t whether attention, AI or data will change everything. It’s whether we’ll ever stop mistaking change itself for progress.
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Ever notice how few journalists actually cover the business of advertising and media, beyond a handful of trade publications?
I’m Omar Oakes: someone who’s been lucky enough to have spent the last decade picking apart how media, marketing, and content actually work — not how they pretend to.
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