New Digital Age

It's Always Media Thursday, NDA's regular podcast taking an irreverent look at the digital media and marketing industry, is back for 2025.Hosted by NDA Editor Justin Pearse and Publisher Andy Oakes, It's Always Media Thursday takes a sideways look at a week in digital media.In this week's welcome-back episode, we discuss how industry event speaking needs a dose of authenticity, reflect on Omar Oakes' recent column on network agencies and the continued rise of the indies, sustainable media, Cannes Lions, Possible, and our own plans for Cannes.And we debut a new feature, Challenge Andy, set to replace 2024's popular What's on the Desk segment.

Sharon Palmer’s digital career spans over two decades. Currently Client Success Director at digital agency  Idhl, she was key in the agency’s integration of nine businesses and eight separate brands into Idhl.She spent 27 years at McCann, starting as an exec, working up to MD, setting up the agency’s digital operations as digital marketing was born.In a wide-ranging and honest interview she discusses what it takes to get to the top in the digital industry, the personal characteristics that helped on this journey,  her biggest mistakes and what they taught her, and her advice for anyone starting in the industry who wants to emulate her success. And what lessons for company culture she learned from the colossal job of integrating so many brands into the unified mission of CEO Ben Wood.It’s a fascinating story of how such integration can bring huge benefits for both clients and the agency’s people. 

In this special episode of the NDA Meets podcast, in association with Hivestack by Perion, NDA Editor Justin Pearse is joined by Inés Armendáriz, International Sales Director, and Nigel Clarkson, Global Chief Revenue Officer at Taptap Digital.They discuss how programmatic has transformed out-of-home into a key part of an omnichannel strategy, the challenges this presents, the lessons that have been learnt from the online world, the opportunity for advertisers to leverage real-time marketing, and much more!

The Out of Home (OOH) advertising industry is evolving rapidly, driven by digitisation, growing scale across the globe, and the advanced targeting and measurement capabilities of programmatic media. In this time of change, how can the industry best deliver on the promise of programmatic OOH?In this special podcast, NDA Editor Justin Pearse is joined by OOH experts Lee Cutter, VP, UK & Emerging Markets, Hivestack, and Shanil Chande, Commercial & Partnerships Director, UK & International at Hawk. Topics discussed in this in-depth conversation include the new opportunities for advertisers that digital out of home (DOOH) creates, how programmatic DOOH can boost the performance of your other media investments and how some of the world’s biggest brands are making the most of outdoor advertising.

NDA’s podcast series, Masters of Media talks to heads of media at brands to understand how advertisers are able to keep pace with the frenetic speed of development of media and its fragmentation across channels. In this episode we meet Peter Rowe, Head of Media at NatWest Group.On moving from procurement to marketing: In procurement, I looked at inputs, such as how many agencies you need, and at outputs but also outcomes And procurement teams have output targets where marketing has outcomes, so they're not always aligned.  Outcomes are what got me excited, hence the move into media."On media fragmentation. "You can’t do it on your own, you need brilliant people around you. Communication is critical here to mange the complexity You need to operate a very simple model in a complex situation. Essentially you need to make sure we are backing the things we know work well, that we can measure it all and optimise it At that point was know we’re mature enough to add to that mix." On telling a consistent brand story; "The thing that’s challenging about consistency is scale and pace. In media we need to make sure that when the customer sees something from us that it’s relevant to them on any channel."Agency relationships: A one team culture if what work, when everyone’s working to the same outcomes. Relationships used to be transactional and binary but now we need a multiple of expertise from multiple sources. The relationship is  now more flexible. On search marketing: "Search is not a media channel but a behaviour and it tells you that the way people’s behaviour changes as they go from platform to platform."

n the latest in our NDA Meets podcast, Editor Justin Pearse sits down with James Hill, Chief Commercial Officer, Exte.With an industry career spanning twenty years, James is two months into the new job, with responsibility of driving growth in new markets as the Spanish-born adtech company embarks on ambitious global expansion. The conversation covers subjects including: how Exte is planning to solve the disconnect between media, technology and creativity in digital advertising; the role of AI-enhanced contextual targeting; the fragmentation of CTV advertising and its solution; innovation in ad formats; and the challenges and opportunities of cookieless advertising. "With contextual 2.0, if you can provide macro targeting at scale - we read 4 million URLs every day - we can understand the exact sentiment of that content, build a sophisticated targeting model and then overlay that with attention-grabbing formats and guaranteed KPIs, you have a very compelling proposition for a world post cookie."

In the latest NDA Meets podcast, NDA Editor Justin Pearse sat down in Cannes with David Winstone, Trading Director  UK, Channel Factory to discuss the future of the digital advertising industry.Topics covered included contextual alignment and how Channel Factory is helping brands align with the right content and using context as a proxy for performance. “Context is one of the main strategies in preparing for a post-cookie world,” he says.  We’re looking at signals like geo and IDs and working with partners like Comscore which provides us with predictive audiences.What surprises clients most is the granularity we can go into with context to let you really hone in on the audience you are after.”Other areas of discussion included how to deal with issues of mis-attribution in CTV advertising, how AI is helping to close the loop between ad delivery, context and creative, sustainability in digital media, attention and more.“Attention is a leveller as it’s the closest we’ve been able to get to a real-world measure of if people actually are watching ads, and it’s a much better predictor of brand uplift. We’re now starting to trade campaigns based on attention sessions.”

At the year's Cannes Lions Festival, NDA Editor Justin Pearse sat down with Kumar Amrendra, Head of Digital Marketing, Planning & Data Science, Sky and Elizabeth Brennan, Manager Advertising, Permutive.In a wide-ranging discussion, we examine the stage of the nation for brands today as they prepare for a world post cookie.

Sir Martin Sorrell discusses the changes in Cannes, brands adapting to a first-party future, and the current marketplace. Topics also include the evolution of advertising organizations, challenges faced by publishers in the open web, industry priorities, and the intersection of creativity, technology, and data in the industry.

Terence Kawaja, founder and CEO of LUMA Partners, discusses the resurgence of M&A activity in ad tech, industry trends, and the future outlook. Insights on creating parody videos for charity, challenges in the ad tech industry, and differences in entrepreneurship between the US and Europe are also explored.