The retail giant confirmed on Thursday it will raise prices on everyday goods this summer – and not because it wants to.

According to Walmart CFO John David Rainey, tariffs on Chinese imports are to blame for upcoming price rises. “The magnitude and speed at which these prices are coming to us is somewhat unprecedented in history,” he told The Wall Street Journal. Shoppers can already see the impact. A banana at Walmart is now 54 cents a pound, up from 50.

This is the kind of honest messaging consumers say they want – a brand being transparent about cost pressures. But in today’s hyperpolarized climate, even that honesty can look political. Especially when it’s wrapped around trade wars, inflation or comments from Walmart’s CEO thanking President Trump for tariff progress.

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Yet more data has arrived to show that CMOs are under pressure to do more with less – a downward force that hasn’t been slow to reach agencies. Their answer, according to a recent panel of agency leaders: a shift in strategic thinking about contracts and pricing.

Just this week, two pieces of research have cast light on the pressures facing chief marketing officers (CMOs).

First, out of Gartner’s Marketing Symposium in London came news that a hoped-for return to growth of marketing funds failed to materialize. Measured yearly for its CMO Spend Survey, marketing budgets had reached 11% of overall revenues before the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. This fell to a dismal 6.4% in the year leading up to 2021, took a bounce-back to 9.5% in 2022 and has been in steady decline since.

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We catch up with Abhinav Kumar, global CMO of TCS, in New York and hear all about the brand’s all-in embrace of mass-participation sports​.

At the end of the TCS New York City Marathon, one of the company’s clients crossed the finish line holding hands with his wife. It was her first marathon and it marked a special moment in their marriage: one made possible by Tata Consultancy Services. “I took a picture of them at the finish line,” recalls Abhinav Kumar, global CMO of TCS. “It’s now sitting in their living room. Our brand is in their living room at one of the high moments of their marriage. That doesn’t normally happen to a technology services brand!”

And yet, it’s entirely by design.

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The work, titled ‘Tana Sutra,’ marks the sun protection brand’s first major advertising campaign.

Hawaiian Tropic has teamed up with media personality Alix Earle on its first major ad campaign. The work, from BBH USA, sees the internet star in a playful Kama Sutra-inspired spot of ‘tan-tric positions.’ The film was shot in Miami by LA-based director Aerin Moreno.

“This is a breakthrough moment for Hawaiian Tropic. ‘Tana Sutra’ is the largest creative campaign in the history of the brand,” said Veronique Mura, senior vice-president and general manager at Edgewell Personal Care.

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Be it Nike’s creative partnerships or Dove’s community-driven campaigns, influencers are shaping the brands they are working for. Landor’s Anna Kohl believes there is more to come.

For years, brands operated on a simple formula: control the message, repeat the asset, and build recognition. Now, the influencer economy has driven a fundamental shift in branding where consumers no longer experience brands in a linear, one-size-fits-all manner.

Instead, they engage with them across fragmented digital landscapes - TikTok trends, Instagram memes, YouTube deep dives. As Gen Z increasingly shapes culture through authentic online interactions, brands must adapt to stay relevant.

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Over the last few months, Mark Challinor has been interviewing senior media executives across the world as part of his News Horizons column in The Drum. Here, we have aggregated the first 23 interviews to identify the key trends redefining the future of media.

What’s really going on inside the world’s leading media companies? Over the past few months, Mark Challinor – former INMA president and senior voice in the global publishing industry – has been speaking to media leaders across five continents to find out. Conducted as part of an ongoing News Horizons series with The Drum, these conversations have revealed a sector not in crisis but in quiet reinvention.

This report brings together key themes and insights from those interviews so far. The research is still unfolding, with new voices added each month, but already a clear picture is emerging: from São Paulo to Stockholm, publishers are rewriting the rules, leaning into AI, rethinking revenue and rebuilding trust from the ground up.

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Far from being an industry in crisis, a new report finds publishers pivoting from reach to relevance, from ad dependence to diversified resilience.

A new report released today by The Drum’s Business Intelligence Center reveals how traditional media companies across the globe are quietly carving out new roles for themselves in a world where AI and platform algorithms dominate. Based on 23 interviews conducted with senior media leaders on five continents, the report captures the strategic rewiring happening inside the world’s biggest media businesses.

You can see the full report now on The Drum Business Intelligence Center.

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At the 20th anniversary of Kantar’s BrandZ report in New York this week, one voice cut through the marketing buzzwords with something sharper: a warning.

“We’re heading toward a world of no kids,” said J Walker Smith, the consulting giant’s chief knowledge officer, delivering a keynote titled A Future View that combined demographic doom, AI disruption, and a hard reset for marketers everywhere.

While the room was there to celebrate two decades of BrandZ data, Smith wasn’t there to reminisce. He was there to jolt the room awake. And he succeeded.

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The influential agency leader spills the tea on why the day he founded MSQ still gives him nightmares, the advice he lives by, and what he would do if he finally landed his dream job...CEO of Southampton FC, of course.

Well, I couldn’t do this series too long without featuring my agency group’s boss, could I? That would not be a sensible career move. But luckily, Peter Reid ticks every box for the 10 Questions Hot Seat, and then some.

Pete is global CEO of one of the world’s fastest-growing marketing groups. If I was responsible for MSQ’s marketing (and, funnily enough, I once was), I’d say that it’s a bit of a recent UK success story, tripling in size to almost 2,000 people in the past 5 years and proving that the smaller, nimble, agency group model works.

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For this week’s Agency Advice, we give marketing leaders the right of reply to decades of media that all predict a hellish advertising future.

In John Carpenter’s 1988 masterpiece They Live, a drifter discovers (via some pretty special sunglasses) that humanity is secretly puppeteered by a ruling class of aliens manipulating them to buy products and maintain the status quo via hidden messages in mass media.

It’s an idea that informed artist Shepard Fairey’s iconic Andre the Giant ‘Obey’ posters and a generation of science fiction artists as part of a rich lineage in dystopian science fiction, which locates advertising right at the center of the nightmarish futures it imagines – often presciently so. As the ad business deepens its obsession with the idea of personalization at scale, it’s uncanny to go back to watch Steven Spielberg’s 2002 adaptation of Philip K Dick’s The Minority Report, in which Tom Cruise’s detective Anderton is beleaguered by creepily whispered bespoke messages for Guinness and American Express as he walks through public spaces.

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A new report lists an unsurprising top three in the B2B brand world, with rising success from Asia and AI leaders.

The third edition of the Most Valuable B2B Brands index from valuation consultancy Brand Finance, the International Advertising Association (IAA) and agency Stein has dropped, revealing the world’s top 250 B2B brands.

There aren’t many surprises at the top: Microsoft remains the leader, having grown its brand value by a third this year, followed by Amazon. Nvidia, the leading manufacturer of chips used in artificial intelligence (which in 2024 had one of the most impressive financial years of any company in recorded history, adding $2tn to its overall market value in 12 months), sits third. Nvidia was also, by some distance, the fastest-growing B2B brand in the world, adding 98% to its brand value over the year.

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‘London, It’s Our House’ also features a host of stars from the club’s men’s and women’s teams, as well as Madness lead singer Suggs as a cab driver.

Chelsea FC and Nike are promoting the 2025/26 kit launches with a star-studded love letter to the club and London. Featuring a star-studded cast, including rapper and West London native Central Cee, the short is heartwarming and witty.

Soundtracked by Our House from ska/pop band Madness, the short also features lead singer Suggs as a taxi driver in the city.

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Much is said about the dominance of holding companies in the marketing industry. Andrew Orr of TRO explains how being part of a wider network fosters opportunities and collaboration.

As Omnicom continues to work towards the acquisition of IPG, there has been a lot of chat across the industry about the pros and cons of network holding companies. This bold move will create the largest community of advertising and marketing agencies in the world – a convergence of talent, tools, and ideas unlike anything the industry has seen. What is there not to like?

There is, of course, an alternative view that suggests this could be an opportunity for independent agencies to gain market share, attract talent, and win new clients by offering a more agile and flexible approach.

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Kantar used the 20th anniversary of its BrandZ report in New York this week to deliver a clear message to marketers: your work doesn’t just matter – it’s adding more business value than ever before. And the companies that get it? They’re growing, bouncing back faster and building the kind of brand equity even AI can’t replicate.

“Marketing matters more than ever,” said Martin Guerrieria, global head of BrandZ at Kantar. “We now calculate that brand equity contributes 33% of a company’s total value. That’s up from 30% in 2023. So your job matters 10% more than it did three years ago.”

It was a fitting moment to launch this year’s Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands, led once again by Apple. But Guerrieria’s keynote wasn’t just a celebration – it was a roadmap, using real brand examples to show how marketing builds not only equity, but resilience.

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There has been even more streamlining at agency network WPP. This time, Grey is “aligning” with Ogilvy but retaining the name. Here is what The Liberty Guild’s Jon Williams makes of the move.

With Grey moving from AKQA group into Ogilvy to “realign financials,” the writing is on the wall for the agency, even if it retains its name for now. It’s the staff you have to feel sorry for. I think Grey (now nicknamed Greyvy by LinkedIn) will eventually be taken out of the back of the WPP cowshed and buried next to JWT and the others. It could be messy. We need only look at the GroupM announcement for evidence of that. Will everyone be hitting the violins for the loss of another precious adland brand?

Either way, that’s not the headline for me. What is more interesting is what the move says about the wider WPP business model.

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The holding company is running ‘Closed Door Sessions’ at the festival for a second year.

Last year, Publicis execs descended on Cannes Lions with one mission: take the bullshit out of AI for clients.

In the months leading up to the ad industry’s annual gathering, it had been the buzzword du jour, yet most CMOs were still scratching their heads about what it actually meant for their businesses. In response, Publicis quietly ran a series of “closed-door” sessions with its biggest clients to dispel scepticism and sell a big-picture idea of how it could be integrated into the marketing function. And, of course, to pitch its own platform, CoreAI.

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At the 2025 Upfronts, TV’s biggest players didn’t just compete – they aligned. From Netflix to NBCU, a clear consensus emerged: live content, brand integration and data-driven innovation are the future. The Drum unpacks the 10 biggest shifts shaping the entertainment and advertising landscape.

After a week in New York that saw marketers wooed by cheerleaders, roasts, AI-powered ad tools and reality shows about reality shows, a few patterns began to emerge. Yes, every network had its own flavor, but the undercurrents were surprisingly aligned: a search for cultural relevance, a scramble to integrate commerce and a growing realization that brand strategy can no longer be separate from content strategy.

Here are The Drum’s 10 big takeaways from the 2025 Upfronts.

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From authoritative creative directors wielding red pens to decisions needing six approvals and a thumbs-up emoji. Dave Billing asks if trading tyranny for teamwork lost advertising its vital vision and storytelling power.

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Yeats.

There was a time when the most feared person in the building was the creative director.

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This marks the second project the artist has worked on with the fashion house. This time, she was inspired by a Japanese puzzle box.

To promote its H08 watch, Hermès has once again partnered with digital animation artist Annie Choi, renowned for her whimsical, anime-inspired style. For this latest collaboration, Choi drew inspiration from intricate Japanese puzzle boxes.

In the short film, a hand picks up an object from a Hermès store, which soon transforms into a watch box, unveiling the product within. The soft color palette and playful animation style evoke a dream-like world.

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Digital media consultant Mark Challinor continues the News Horizons series by talking to the people shaping tomorrow’s media. In this issue, we sit down with Sherry Weiss, chief marketing officer, Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal.

Sherry Weiss is a customer-focused marketing and experience leader with a passion for creating marketing programs that drive growth, engagement and retention. Sherry oversees all marketing activities at Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, responsible for driving customer acquisition, retention and subscriptions; enhancing and promoting the brand; and optimizing marketing efforts across the Dow Jones ecosystem. Beginning as a niche news agency in an obscure Wall Street basement, Dow Jones has grown to be a worldwide news and information powerhouse, with prestigious brands including The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones Newswires, Factiva, Barron’s, MarketWatch and Financial News.

As we venture into 2025, what have been the growth/encouragement areas for you in your media company in the last year?

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At its third-ever Upfront, Netflix made one thing clear: it’s no longer the ad-free disruptor of old. It’s now a full-fledged, ad-funded media powerhouse – just one that happens to still sell subscriptions too.

For a platform born out of binge culture and subscription revenue, Netflix has taken a strikingly different path from rivals such as Hulu. While Hulu started with ads and later added a subscription tier, Netflix is flipping that script, introducing a cheaper ad-supported plan that now boasts 94 million global monthly active users, up from 40 million a year ago.

“This time last year, we told you what we’d deliver – and today, we delivered it,” said Amy Reinhard, Netflix’s president of advertising. “We’re now live with our in-house adtech platform in the US and Canada and expanding globally by June.”

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For the first time, the organization has handed over its British Pavilion to an international team, while Templo has conceived aat draws on themes of decolonization and new identity th ecological and architectural reparation across the Rift Valley.

Every other year, La Biennale di Venezia – or the Venice Biennale as you may know it – hosts an international exhibition where countries showcase architectural thinking while touting their national brand as an export.

In recent years, the British Pavilion has questioned this traditional format, with, for example, Dancing for the Moon in 2023, which was curated by six UK diaspora artists.

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Marketers have never had more data at their fingertips. But is more always better? Not according to Usercentrics CMO Adelina Peltea, who is on a mission to fix the broken trust in digital marketing by championing a new way of doing things.

“For the last decade or so marketers were in a candy shop... with all the data we can have, we can measure everything… but it got to the point where it was too much.” According to Adelina Peltea, chief marketing officer at Usercentrics, the age of endless data is over – and the future is all about consented data that respects the user and earns their trust.

With the world on track to generate 181 zettabytes of data by the end of 2025 (that’s enough to fill 1.4 trillion smartphones), the temptation to hoard every click and data point is strong. But attention is scarce; trust is even scarcer, so marketers are waking up to a new kind of data strategy – rooted in building long-term relationships that understand you don’t need access to everything upfront, you can build it up slowly and mindfully over time.

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Warner Bros Discovery has officially admitted what many in the industry suspected from the start: HBO still matters. Just two years after the company dropped the iconic name from its streaming service in favor of the more generic Max, it is bringing it back. The platform will relaunch as HBO Max this summer.

“We’re well aware of what the HBO brand means to the industry and to consumers,” said Casey Bloys, CEO of HBO and Max Content, on stage at Madison Square Garden. “With the strong momentum we’re enjoying, we believe HBO Max far better represents our new consumer promise.”

The original rebrand to Max – an attempt to unify prestige drama with reality and lifestyle content – was one of the most controversial decisions in recent streaming history. The company tried to steady the ship by making the Max interface look and feel more like HBO. It didn’t stick.

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At the LTK Upfronts in New York, marketers gathered in the hope of catching a glimpse of the future. What they got instead was something far more valuable: an honest, unfiltered look into the present from the perspective of the generation that’s shaping it.

Hosted by Reesa Lake, LTK’s VP of creator partnerships, the panel brought together three of the platform’s most magnetic Gen Z creators: Kit Keenan, Brandon Edelman (aka @branflakezz) and Alexis Wilkerson. Their brief? Explain what makes Gen Z tick and how brands can connect in ways that feel genuine rather than grafted on.

What followed was less like a panel and more like eavesdropping on a group chat between friends who also happen to shape what your audience sees, buys and shares.

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We catch up with the influencer marketing platform’s general manager, Kristi O’Brien, in New York.

At its first-ever Creator Upfronts in New York, LTK didn’t storm the gates of traditional media. It didn’t have to. Instead, it positioned itself as something subtler – an essential layer augmenting how modern commerce, entertainment and social media fit together.

“This isn’t about poking anyone in the eye,” says Kristi O’Brien, general manager of LTK’s brand platform. “We’re here to add value to the entire ecosystem.”

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The ad industry has forgotten its purpose and how to deliver it. Paul Burke believes we need more people like Steve Hudson to explain the real power of good work to increasingly skeptical clients.

Unless you’ve been living in a remote Highland croft with no access to the internet, you must be aware of Steve Hudson. He posts regularly on The Power of Advertising to explain exactly how some of his award-winning ads made the long journey from script to screen.

Now, with a new online seminar, he goes a bit further, breaking down the whole process of advertising and explaining how the process itself is broken before outlining the simple steps he believes will fix it.

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Despite Jimmy Kimmel making the same gag that Seth Meyers had made 24 hours earlier at NBCUniversal Upfront, Disney’s Upfront wasn’t just a punchline parade. It was a serious play for ad dollars.

At this year’s Disney Upfronts, the message was clear: when it comes to content, it has range. From Moana 2 to The Bear, Only Murders to Daredevil, the company showed it can do heart, horror, lightsabers, touchdowns and talking animals – all at global scale and all wired into its tech and data infrastructure.

But amid the firepower of its slate and sales pitch, something else became clear, too. In 2025, even Upfronts have a format. And, oddly enough, they now seem to come with the same punchlines.

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We take a look at the big winners from the night ahead of the upcoming half-year update to the World Creative Rankings.

The Clio Awards returned to New York last night with a ceremony that offered early clues into who might dominate The Drum’s World Creative Rankings in 2026. Hosted by the ever-theatrical Alan Cumming, the event played out in front of a crowd of around 500 creative industry insiders, complete with live music, cocktails and more than a few surreal acceptance speeches.

Topping the unofficial leaderboard was FCB New York, which collected eight Grand Clio Awards across categories including data, design and branded entertainment.

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The Drum catches up with the Scottish actor at the Clio Awards in New York.

Alan Cumming has built a career on standing out, but he’s also spent decades helping brands do the same. When The Drum caught up with him at the Clio Awards in New York, which he was hosting just two days after presenting at Baftas, he was reflecting on what it really takes for marketers to get the best out of talent. Whether working with celebrities, creatives or influencers, he believes the key is the same: “Collaborate,” he says. “Talk to them. Ask what they can contribute. Don’t just hire someone with a voice, then ignore it.”

It’s advice drawn from experience. Cumming has starred in – and helped shape – some of the more distinctive brand campaigns of the past two decades, including a 1950s-style musical ad for Trojan Ecstasy condoms, which he co-wrote and directed with friend Ned Stresen-Reuter. “They told us the condom was shaped like a baseball bat,” he laughs. “We thought, right, it needs pizzazz. So we gave it a musical number. Ricki Lake came and played with me and we shot it at The Box in New York. It was a hoot.”

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The illustrator-turned-artist famously stopped working with commercial brands 15 years ago. Since then, he’s funded a ‘Hate Mail’ project by making a rap video, put Trump on a Whoopee cushion and made ‘dirty’ drawings of the Queen. Here, he gives insight into his fascinating take on art, social media, marketing and creativity.

In 1998, at a Gala Bingo Hall in Maidstone, Kent, Geoff Hand won £141.26 and earned the nickname ‘Bingo’ among his friends. The ‘Mr’ was added later while pissed at a flat party in Bath. It has stuck for (almost) 30 years.

When I met him in Barcelona at the Offf Festival, just after he had given a lively talk, he was on the hunt for a table to set up his shop (before eventually setting up on a bridge). I’m not quite sure what to call him. “Bingo is fine,” he says. After reading his witty website, packed with sarcastic, hilarious FAQs, I was curious to see what his one-on-one, in-person vibe would be like. By the way if you’re looking for inspiration on how to make an ‘about me’ page genuinely interesting, it’s worth a read.

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OpenAI just made a move that changes the game for brand discovery, again. Iris’s Jill Smith explores a world of possibilities stemming from shoppable AI.

ChatGPT has a new feature allowing users to browse and shop products directly through AI-generated recommendations, without a search engine, shopping site, or even a scroll.

It’s the biggest shift in digital commerce since the algorithm killed the homepage. And if brands don’t adapt fast, they’ll be left behind in a conversation they’re no longer part of.

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Simple photographic portrait campaign bets big on the power of celebrity, which may be all the brand needs.

Back in 2006, a Cristal executive made it quite clear he didn’t like the association of rappers cavorting with the brand's champagne in music videos.

The hip-hop world baulked and among those taking offense was Jay-Z, who boycotted it while promoting rival champagne brand Armand de Brignac, colloquially known as Ace of Spades. In 2014, he took a 50% stake in the brand and profits rolled in as other rappers promoted it too. Jay-Z finally cashed out in 2021, selling his share to luxury giant LVMH for around $315m.

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It is time to Make Advertising Great Again. For that to happen, we need to face a few hard home truths. Leading industry consultant and new The Drum columnist Tom Goodwin explains.

Ask a stranger in the street what their favorite TV ad is, and their face will light up in nostalgic admiration.

Ask them their favorite digital ad, and their face will screw up in confusion.

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From letting your dog shit on the grass without picking it up to stealing glasses from bars, it’s impossible to be on your best behavior all the time, as shown in this work by ad agency Dude for Yes Foundation.

Yes Foundation, a Polish organization that supports and empowers women in communities across the country, has released a tongue-in-cheek new spot. Titled ‘Good People,’ the campaign aims to eradicate imposter syndrome, embracing imperfections and redefining what it means to be ‘good’.

The film captures everyday people doing occasional ‘bad’ things, such as refusing to pick up their dog’s business or feigning sleep to avoid having to give up their seat on a bus, while reaffirming that they are still capable of doing good.

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Brands are going all in to attract new fans. But Richard Swain of DesignStudio says the playbook only works if you understand what makes people care in the first place.

What makes sport compelling is emotion. And emotion comes from people caring.

Devout fans care deeply. They care because they are willing to sacrifice part of themselves to be part of that fandom – or to make that fandom part of who they are.

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