If any of the themes from this month’s roundup resonate with you, you might end up on Mark’s hitlist next
Using marketing concepts that quietly rot your strategy from the inside. Ignoring a media platform where purchase decisions happen because it’s not in your plan. Creating a structural pricing problem when you need focus on your positioning and proving value. Or spending a billion dollars getting the world to recognise you without having a strong differentiator (being chosen at the point of purchase).
Oh, and if you’ve used words like “engagement”, “brand love” or “disruption” recently, you might want to read the first article before doing it again.
ADWEEK: These Marketing Concepts Have Become Meaningless—and They're Sabotaging Your Strategy
When it comes to jargon, no one does it better than marketers. We go crazy for a new buzzword or trend, but Mark warns that buying into misunderstood concepts could be doing more damage to your media spend than you think.
Ad breaks: The idea that a viewer remains locked in during the ad break is foolish, yet media buyers “price reach against an exposure that, for the majority of impressions, never actually happens.”
“The TV industry’s own behavioural data shows more than half of in-room viewers disengage entirely during commercial breaks.”
Engagement: If you had a room of 10 marketers and paid them all £1 million each, I don’t think they could come to a consensus on what engagement actually means.
“The metric of choice for the strategically lost. A Like is not engagement. A comment is not engagement. A share, in most cases, is not engagement.”
This misnomer causes marketing teams to fixate on the 0.5% who interact with brand content while ignoring the 99.5%, who are just as likely to purchase.
Brand Love: No behavioural dataset has ever supported an emotional bond between consumer and brand. Marketers need to forget about making consumers love their brand and focus on coming front to mind at the point of purchase.
“Yes, we all have one or two brands we actually love. But the other 2,984 in our current repertoire don’t make our heart skip even a little beat.”
Consumer: “A consumer portrait is likely to be 900 words on what they think, feel, hope, and want from a brand’s product—which should be one sentence. The remaining 875 words should be about a human: their job, kids, fears, Saturday mornings.”
If we start looking at them as humans first, we’d be able to understand them better and create advertising that resonates.
It’s about time marketers learn which concepts are genuinely valuable and which need to be left behind. Watch Mark’s Five Steps to Proper Advertising webinar on-demand and get practical guidance for building effective advertising campaigns.
The Drum: Marketers can no longer afford to laugh at Reddit
10 years ago, anyone would’ve laughed you out of the room for suggesting Reddit was a legitimate platform for paid social.
“After all, Reddit was the place where middle-aged men in basements with usernames like SovereignPotato69 debated fluoride’s mind-controlling capabilities.”
Fast forward to today, Reddit now achieves $2.6bn in advertising revenue each year.
In Fospha’s State of Retail Commerce 2026 report, the firm found that when cross-channel sales were measured properly, when it accounted for someone reading a Reddit thread before making a purchase, Reddit’s ROAS jumped to 82%.
“The platform that everyone was allocating crumbs to, on the assumption that its inventory was immeasurable and its audience uncommercial, turned out to be a hidden engine of huge retail demand.”
So how has Reddit quietly become one of the most meaningful platforms for marketers?
First, Reddit’s category and product-specific threads offer a goldmine for market research. It’s where people go to share real-life product experiences, what they need the product for, and to give frank reviews and recommendations to other consumers.
“The audience is interest-led, self-selecting and disclosing its purchase consideration in real time.”
Second, Reddit has a major content deal with Google and OpenAI. Meaning a significant amount of the answers AI dishes out to its users are influenced by Reddit threads. “The result is that Reddit influences purchase decisions on every AI surface you and your customers touch.”
Whilst the platform will never replace Meta, the giant of advertising where the majority of B2C marketers should allocate the biggest proportion of their spend - Reddit should no longer be dismissed by marketers.
Reddit has placed itself across two areas that no single platform occupies: organic search via its AI licencing agreement and post-search consideration via its online communities.
“The platforms that ultimately matter to advertisers are not the ones that grow fastest or earn most. They are the ones that command durable, specific consumer attention in moments of purchase consideration.”
Don't let Reddit go unnoticed for another annual cycle just because it isn’t in your media plan, the marketers that get ahead are the ones that challenge their media agencies.
In the MiniMBA in Marketing, our Marketing Communications module helps marketers learn the best mix of channels to create a seamless, multi-touch journey for their customers.
ADWEEK: The Real WPP Story Is in the Margin, Not the Revenue
WPP’s first-quarter numbers show a 6.7% decline in net revenue, and its 2025 full-year results were even less encouraging. The company reported margins of 13%, down from 15% in 2024.
“Two hundred basis points in 12 months—the kind of compression you associate with recessions or category collapse, not with a company that has a turnaround strategy in-market.”
Is this a cautionary tale for the big agency holding companies whose positions have remained while the industry has changed around them?
Accenture has taken strategy and tech work at the top end, brands have brought more work in-house in the middle, Meta is absorbing media spend, and AI is eating into production and media planning from below.
“WPP, like every big agency peer, faces a decade of simultaneous price and volume compression because it is no longer the default answer to a question only it can answer.”
With revenue from WPP’s top 25 clients down, the next big question is “what drove the decline? Reduced scope of work, fee pressure, or outright budget cuts?”
Cindy Rose, the CEO of WPP, confirmed in late 2025 that it was all three. Scope reductions and budget cuts are cyclical problems (caused largely by external economic factors but recoverable), whilst fee pressure is a structural problem.
“Winning accounts while revenue drops is the diagnostic signature of a business defending share by cutting price. Every account won on tighter terms resets the floor for the next pitch.”
WPP’s Elevate28 strategy aims to claw back $675 million in savings in a ‘margin-defence-operation', but the real challenge is rebuilding a new position strong and differentiated enough that customers pay full price.
There are two problems at play here; a pricing problem and a positioning problem. Structural pricing has eroded WPP’s top line, but not having a strong, differentiated position against new, alternative solutions in their category has left them up the creek without a paddle.
Download our MiniMBA in Marketing course brochure, where we teach you how to avoid these problems and retain your margin.
The Drum: The Crypto.com brand banked on being remembered. All without a why
After six years as CMO of Crypto.com, Steven Kalifowitz is set to become adviser to the CEO next month. “Anyone who has spent five minutes inside a holding company knows what that means: corporate purgatory for executives who cannot be fired publicly but will not be allowed to make another decision.”
One of the focal points in the Kalifowitz era is the ‘Fortune Favours the Brave’ campaign, featuring Matt Damon and a CGI montage of historic moments encapsulating human ambition. That, on top of a $700 million deal to rename the Staples Center to the Crypto.com Arena and countless sports partnerships, resulted in Kalifowitz spending over one billion dollars during his tenure.
“The strategy was simple. Assume the budget is there, and be everywhere the consumer who might buy crypto is looking. By every measure of salience, it worked. Awareness of Crypto.com rose faster than any financial brand in modern memory.”
The budget was well spent, salience and brand recognition grew tenfold, but there was an elephant-sized piece of the puzzle missing. What were Crypto.com actually known for?
“I challenge you. Watch the ad again, on mute, and try to identify the category, the proposition, or the reason to enter the market or switch from your existing exchange.”
Compare this to other brands in Cyrpto’s category, all of which have a strong, defendable and differentiated position. Coinbase, under Brian Armstrong, is the legitimate exchange and grown-up financial institution. Binance, under Changpeng Zhao, is positioned as the faster, fewer questioned asked offshore provider.
“Armstrong does not own a Super Bowl ad. Zhao does not own an arena. They own something rarer and more valuable in a commodified category. They own difference. A reason to exist.”
That is what happens when you achieve distinctiveness without differentiation.
You will be recognised without differentiation, but what for? At what point will you come to mind during purchasing consideration? And without distinctiveness, you won’t come to mind at all. That’s why brands should strive for bothism, achieving relative differentiation and relative distinctiveness within your category.
“Most brands fail to achieve any differentiation. On that we can all agree. But that does not mean relative differentiation is impossible, it means it’s fucking hard. Rare. And more valuable as a result. Take Crypto.com as an example. The brand remains, after a billion dollars, a logo in search of a reason.”
Distinctiveness isn’t enough on its own. Without also achieving relative differentiation, you’re only paying to be recognised, not remembered.
See how KitKat achieves 'Double D marketing' using their distinct brand palette and their differentiated brand position, that taking breaks are good for us.
Images (from top): Vera/Adobe Stock, daily_creativity/Adobe Stock, WPP