The Media Stack | Substack

Retail media grew 31% in the World Cup quarter. The open web shrank by a fifth.

AA/WARC puts Q2 ad spend up 11% to £12.3bn and raises the 2026 forecast to £51.3bn. Retail media is up 31%, cinema 25%, regional newsbrands down 10%

Oct 30 • The Media Stack

Who is left to pay? Two days at the WAN-IFRA Digital Media Europe Conference

WAN-IFRA brought the Guardian, the FT, Bloomberg, the Daily Mail, The Athletic and a dozen others to the Royal Institution. They disagreed on tactics…

Oct 29 • The Media Stack

Make Big Tech pay: a day inside Ricky Sutton’s first Future Media Series forum in Paris

AFP’s Fabrice Fries, Australia’s Paul Fletcher and Stephen Jones, Damien Geradin and Mikaël Hervé on where the money comes from, and why AI resets the…

Oct 27 • The Media Stack

TikTok tells studios and publishers their fans are the marketing department, and brings the numbers to back it up

Fan edits beat Lionsgate’s trailer 37 to one, Strictly searches rose 1,329% and BookTok drove 50m book sales in Europe. Inside TikTok’s UK press…

Oct 22 • The Media Stack

Humans get the covers, agents get the markdown: how Time rebuilt itself for both

Time CEO Jessica Sibley closed FIPP in Madrid with Time 3.0: a Google Zero dashboard, a franchise business built on access, and ads written for AI…

Oct 19 • The Media Stack

Most Popular

Rejected by a Human. So the AI Wrote a Hit Piece.

Feb 23 • The Media Stack

Estonia’s quiet luxury: How Lilli Jahilo is rewriting fashion’s rules from Tallinn

Sep 19, 2025 • The Media Stack

Publicis buys LiveRamp for $2.2bn, and the advertising industry loses its neutral middleman

May 19 • The Media Stack

FT Strategies on AI, M&A and the Publishing Survival Guide

Oct 14, 2025 • The Media Stack

Harvard Business Review is turning audience focus into business growth

Group Publisher Erika Heilman on HBR Executive, the 40% of subscribers already at VP level, and the AI tool HBR shelved despite good reviews

Oct 16 • The Media Stack

People Inc. blocks every bot other than 38. The rest, says its Innovation Chief, are parasites

People Inc.’s Jon Roberts told FIPP Congress in Madrid that blocking every bot except 38 licensed partners cost the publisher neither traffic nor…

Oct 15 • The Media Stack

What Duolingo, Blinkist and NeoTaste know about subscribers that publishers don’t

Lennart Schneider told Piano Academy what publishers can learn from NeoTaste, Duolingo and Blinkist

Oct 13 • The Media Stack

Loyal readers, failed cards and broken tags: where Piano Academy found the revenue

pd digital, BBC Studios, Stripe and Cloud Nine Digital on loyalty-tiered ad loads, breaking-news paywalls, involuntary churn and the data that feeds AI

Oct 8 • The Media Stack

TikTok's ad platform moves into Claude, Perplexity and Snowflake

Shopping Assistant, Smart+ search ads and an MCP connector in Claude and Perplexity; Buy Direct and Agentic Leads are not coming to Europe yet

Oct 5 • The Media Stack

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SAP's loyalty indices show AI taking over the recommendation, in shops and in procurement

SAP's 2026 loyalty indices: 69% of enterprise buyers would switch supplier on an AI agent's advice and 30% name AI their top source for supplier…

Oct 5 • The Media Stack

The Advertising Association returns to Westminster for LEAD 2027 as Ozone and the platforms share the bill

The AA's annual conference returns to the QEII Centre on 28 January, run with the IPA and ISBA, with Future Leaders following the same afternoon

Oct 1 • The Media Stack

RTL AdAlliance opens in Spain, with support from Atresmedia

The international sales house wants Spanish advertisers buying European video. The more telling detail is who is helping it in.

Sep 29 • The Media Stack

B2B buyers choose the vendor they can defend

New research from WARC, LinkedIn and LIONS Advisory shows that buying groups favour brands that make decisions easy to justify. Most B2B campaigns do…

Sep 28 • The Media Stack

Steve Davies on WPP Production and the triple-bid row

Half of UK ad spend never reaches a production company. The APA's chief executive on WPP's leaked guidance and the 85% problem with AI.

Sep 25 • The Media Stack

Top posts

Rejected by a Human. So the AI Wrote a Hit Piece.

Feb 23 • The Media Stack

Estonia’s quiet luxury: How Lilli Jahilo is rewriting fashion’s rules from Tallinn

Sep 19, 2025 • The Media Stack

Publicis buys LiveRamp for $2.2bn, and the advertising industry loses its neutral middleman

May 19 • The Media Stack

FT Strategies on AI, M&A and the Publishing Survival Guide

Oct 14, 2025 • The Media Stack

AI Is Eating Publisher Traffic. Sky News and Daily Mail Are Both Dealing With It.

Jun 19 • The Media Stack

The latest from

The Media Stack

Retail media grew 31% in the World Cup quarter. The open web shrank by a fifth.

Newsletters

What AI actually looks at when judging a news publisher

AI does not appear to judge a publisher from one definitive ‘About’ page. Instead, it assembles different evidence depending on the question it is being…

Sep 23 • The Media Stack and Steven Wilson-Beales

Your AI Ad Might Be Illegal, Yet No One Knew

Guest article by Andy Chesterman

Sep 21 • The Media Stack

Jon Slade wants the FT to be the data and the destination

The FT Chief Executive on a ‘big red button’ in AI licences, 1.23 million bot requests from a single £1 trial account, and a target of 850,000 known…

Sep 21 • The Media Stack

Pinterest names Fintan Gillespie as new UK and Ireland managing director

Former Snap and Google executive Fintan Gillespie takes over from Caroline Orange-Northey, who left in the summer

Sep 15 • The Media Stack

Cloudflare's Chema Alonso says the content-for-traffic pact is dead. The replacement starts on Tuesday.

At Media Party in Barcelona, Cloudflare's Chema Alonso talks about bots overtaking humans, the 38% of crawlers that won't say why they're there, and who…

Sep 14 • The Media Stack

‘This looks more like an existential threat’: Newman’s numbers meet Shishkin’s plumbing

Nic Newman and Dmitry Shishkin, back to back at Media Party, on collapsing referrals, creator trust and the taxonomy work nobody has done.

Sep 10 • The Media Stack

The Media Stack

The Media Stack

The Media Stack delivers in-depth analysis of the publishing, marketing, and marketing technology sectors, with a focus on emerging trends and global developments.

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The Media Stack

The Media Stack delivers in-depth analysis of the publishing, marketing, and marketing technology sectors, with a focus on emerging trends and global developments.

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