THE SHIFTS SHAPING 2026

H1 lessons & h2 priorities

From Audiences to Communities: Rob Beevers, Chief Marketing Intelligence & Transformation Officer

One of the biggest shifts I’ve seen in the first half of this year is a growing recognition that audiences and communities aren’t competing ideas. We need both.

As an industry, we’ve become very good at identifying who we want to reach. We can understand individuals with increasing precision, but that only gives us part of the picture. To understand what people notice, trust and ultimately choose, we also need to look at the groups they belong to, the identities they express and the people and environments that influence them.

Audience intelligence helps us identify the individual. Community and cultural understanding give us the context around them. Bring the two together and we get a much richer understanding of how relevance, trust and influence are built. This becomes even more important as AI makes content quicker and easier to create. When almost any brand can produce more messages and assets at greater speed, simply creating more is no longer much of an advantage. The brands that stand out will be those that use this capability alongside a deeper understanding of the communities and cultures people care about, creating work that feels relevant to the spaces it enters rather than simply adding more content to them.

Looking ahead to H2, the next challenge is measurement. The brands that pull ahead will be those that connect audience insight, community understanding and creative effectiveness to real commercial outcomes. That means moving beyond looking at communities primarily through views, clicks and engagement. We need to understand how community-led activity builds trust, influences behaviour, strengthens loyalty and, ultimately, contributes to business growth.

Our Belonging in Britain research brings this into sharper focus, showing how the communities people identify with influence their attitudes, behaviours and the brands they choose to engage with.
MG OMD Belonging in Britain Research

From Individual Campaigns to Recognisable Brand Worlds: Will Selwyn, Media Creativity Director

One of the clearest creative shifts I’ve seen in H1 is the move away from creating individual campaigns towards building recognisable brand universes that audiences can continually enter, explore and contribute to.

The brands that are winning are going deeper. They are building consistent characters, rituals, language, visual codes, experiences, partnerships and recurring formats that create a richer and more recognisable world around the brand.

This gives creators, communities and media partners more material to play with, and more opportunities to interpret and develop the brand in creative ways. Rather than being limited to delivering variations of a single campaign idea, they can contribute to a broader world while ensuring that everything still feels connected and unmistakably part of the same brand.

It also changes the role of individual campaigns. Each piece of activity no longer needs to begin again or establish an entirely new creative platform. Characters can reappear, rituals can become anticipated, partnerships can deepen and familiar formats can evolve over time. Each execution adds another layer to the brand world, helping to build recognition and participation rather than only generating a temporary moment of attention.

The growth of this approach is partly a response to the continued fragmentation of media. Brands now need to show up across an increasingly varied mix of channels, platforms, communities and cultural spaces. A coherent brand world can travel across all of these without simply repeating the same advert or producing a suite of matching luggage.

Looking ahead to H2, the opportunity is for brands to think beyond consistency as simply making everything look and sound the same. The strongest brand universes will be coherent enough to remain recognisable, but expansive enough to give creators, audiences and partners space to explore, contribute and keep the world moving forward

From Principle to Practice: Tim Pritchard, Executive Director, Head of Content and Responsible Media

In H1, I think responsible media began moving much more decisively from principle to practice. One of the most significant developments has been the introduction of Ad Net Zero’s Global Media Sustainability Framework (GMSF v.1.3). By giving the industry a more consistent approach to measuring carbon across channels and markets, it provides a stronger foundation for comparison, accountability and action.

Until now, different methodologies and different levels of measurement maturity have made it difficult for advertisers, agencies and media owners to form a shared view of media emissions. Greater standardisation gives us the opportunity to move beyond broad commitments and begin embedding sustainability more meaningfully into day-to-day planning and investment decisions.

The next step in H2 is to turn that common framework into practical change across media planning, buying, measurement and reporting. That means considering carbon alongside other effectiveness measures, identifying where unnecessary waste can be reduced and working with partners to make better-informed investment choices.  It also means recognising that responsible media extends beyond carbon. Trust is shaped by the claims brands make, the environments in which their advertising appears and the behaviours of the platforms and partners they support. As scrutiny grows, brands will need greater transparency around where their investment goes and the impact it creates.

For me, this isn’t about treating sustainability and responsibility as separate from effectiveness. Reducing waste, improving transparency and investing in more trusted environments can strengthen both media performance and long-term brand value.

The opportunity in H2 is to make responsible media an integral part of how effectiveness is planned and evaluated, rather than an additional commitment assessed after the event.

From Annual Planning to Connected Ecosystems: Flora Williams, Head of Planning

For Flora Williams, Head of Planning, one of the clearest shifts in H1 has been the move away from discussing campaigns as a series of individual moments and towards longer-term media approaches built around connected ecosystems. Clients are becoming more choiceful about where and how they show up, combining horizontal, always-on activity across the upper and mid-funnel with vertical, integrated moments that create greater impact. This requires planners to identify the channels that can connect the wider ecosystem, while also considering the role of experiences and communities in helping brands cut through an increasingly cluttered screen environment.

Looking ahead to H2, the opportunity is to move from annual planning towards annual decisioning: making the major strategic choices early, identifying the channels around which the ecosystem will be built and setting clear parameters for where flexibility will be needed. This gives brands greater consistency without locking them into a rigid plan, allowing them to respond to changing behaviours, cultural moments and emerging opportunities while remaining clear about the role each channel and activation is there to play.

Client Value is Built Over Time: David Bratt, Managing Director

While technology, creativity and measurement continue to evolve, the fundamentals of strong client relationships haven’t changed.  One of the clearest lessons from the major renewals and strategic workshops we’ve been involved in during H1 is that the strongest commercial outcomes are built long before a formal renewal process begins. They’re created through the consistency of the everyday relationship: understanding the client’s business, delivering reliably, making clear decisions and bringing the right people and capabilities together around the challenges that matter.

Much of that operational work happens behind the scenes, but it has a direct influence on the value clients experience. Operational excellence is becoming a competitive advantage in its own right. Clients are navigating more channels, more technology, more data and a growing number of specialist partners. They don’t need their agencies to add to that complexity. They need partners who can simplify it, create clarity and connect different capabilities around their business.  Trust is what makes the more ambitious work possible. When an agency has demonstrated that it understands the business and can execute consistently, clients have greater confidence to embrace new ideas, challenge established approaches and innovate together.

Looking ahead to H2, I expect that confidence to become even more important. Under continued pressure to justify investment and deliver growth, clients will increasingly look for evidence of commercial value rather than activity alone. The strongest agency relationships will be those that combine high-quality delivery with strategic judgement: joining up expertise, making complexity manageable and helping clients make better decisions. In that environment, the agency’s value isn’t only in the media it plans or buys, but in its ability to operate as a genuine partner to the wider business.

Looking Ahead

If H1 revealed how quickly expectations are changing, H2 will test how effectively brands and agencies can put that thinking into practice.

Rob’s perspective points to a richer way of understanding people, combining audience precision with the identities, relationships and communities that influence real decisions. Will’s shows why brands need to build recognisable creative worlds rather than rely on a succession of disconnected messages. Tim’s demonstrates how shared standards can turn responsible media commitments into practical action. And David’s reinforces that none of these opportunities can be delivered without operational excellence, strategic judgement and trust.  Across all four perspectives, the direction is clear. More content, technology, data and capability will continue to enter the market.

The advantage will lie in knowing how to connect them: to people and culture, to consistent brand ideas, to responsible choices and, ultimately, to measurable commercial outcomes.