Simple Marketing Studio

What spending £5m on advertising taught me:

Budget doesn’t fix bad decisions 🏧
Doubling down and spending more CAN work, but it's rarely the solution that fixes bad decisions. The best solution? An open mind and some humility.

More tools don’t create clarity 🧰
Analysis paralysis is real, and the more tools the more acute the analysis: "well this report says this, but that report says that" - sometimes you know deep down and you've got to strip back the tools the bear necessities.

Volume doesn’t replace strategy 📈
Quality not quantity is always key when spending huge sums of money. Unless your goal is a vanity metric like impressions or brand exposure (sometimes worth doing) then focus on a strategic approach and aim for quality.

The biggest gains came from fewer campaigns, clearer messaging, and better follow-up – not bigger spend.

Simple scales. Chaos doesn’t.

Before you increase your budget, reduce complexity.

1️⃣ M&C Saatchi Forecasts Profitable Growth for 2026
British advertising group M&C Saatchi said it expects profitable growth this year driven by new client wins and cost control — a positive signal for agency confidence after muted budgets in 2025.

2️⃣ UK Marketers Name 2026’s Future Marketing Leaders
Marketing Week spotlighted the newest cohort of UK Future Marketing Leaders and revealed the key challenges brands face this year — from harnessing data to reinvigorating creativity and breaking through performance plateaus.

3️⃣ UK Tech & Regulatory Buzz: Social Ban Talk and AI Bubble Concerns
Marketing Week’s Week in Tech rounded up UK industry debate on potential under-16s social media restrictions and the idea that AI might be “a bubble,” underlining regulatory and perception headwinds for digital platforms.

4️⃣ Iceland Launches ‘UK First’ Retail Media Tech
UK supermarket Iceland rolled out digital screen tech across 766 stores with privacy-friendly sensors to measure ad engagement and footfall in real time — a big moment for UK retail media measurement and investment.

5️⃣ Debate Over Product Placement on BBC’s The Traitors
Viewers accused The Traitors (BBC) of resembling an “advert for Land Rover,” sparking discussion on BBC editorial rules and UK advertising standards about implicit product prominence on public-funded TV.

6️⃣ OpenAI Ad Monetisation Still Front of Mind
Industry analysis from WARC highlighted continued focus on OpenAI’s shift to ad models and how marketers should think about AI search and conversational ads as part of evolving spend strategies.

7️⃣ Practical Email Marketing Best Practices Circulate
Designmodo published a timely piece on building email marketing calendars and behaviour expectations for 2026 — a handy benchmark for marketers refining cross-channel playbooks.

8️⃣ Social Media Trends Continue to Evolve
New trend analysis underlined that social media platforms are becoming multi-purpose engines — part communications, part search, part commerce — forcing marketers to rethink content and measurement strategy.

9️⃣ Strategy Insight: Brands Embrace ‘Experience’ and Retail Media
A UK agency-focused campaign roundup flagged that events and experiential are the fastest-growing planned areas of spend, while retail media is poised to overtake linear TV ad budgets, reflecting a strategic pivot in 2026 planning.

🔟 Marketing Week Reports on Expanding CMO Role and Employer Pressures
Marketing Week coverage signalled evolving demands on marketing leaders, from expanding roles and team pressures to a rising focus on ROI and performance over traditional definitions of “brand marketing.”

Quick heads up if you’re running ads on a Shopify store 📰

Shopify has started rolling out a setting called Smart data protection inside the Customer Events area.

In Shopify’s own words, this feature “analyses your store to only allow marketing app pixels to access the data they need”, with Optimised data access becoming the default unless you manually change it.

What that means in practice is this:
Shopify may decide certain marketing pixels don’t need full access and quietly restrict the data they receive.

This isn’t Shopify turning all tracking off overnight.
But it does mean some pixels could stop firing properly without you realising.

If you rely on platforms like Meta, Google, TikTok, Klaviyo, or any third-party tracking, it’s worth checking this now rather than finding out through broken reports later.

Where to look:
Shopify admin → Settings → Customer events → Review your pixels

For anything critical, consider switching it to “Always on” so data continues to flow as expected.

It’s a small setting, but one that could have a disproportionate impact on reporting and ad performance if it slips by unnoticed.

Worth five minutes of your time.