The Media Stack

The Advertising Association has launched a new international identity for the UK advertising sector, unveiled at Outernet Londonahead of a government-backed trade mission to Cannes Lions. The campaign, ‘UK Advertising. Where Creativity Works’, arrives at a moment when the sector’s export performance gives it something concrete to support the claim. UK advertising exports reached £19.4 billion in 2025, a record figure announced earlier this year at SXSW London.

Fable 5 is pitched to execute multi-day knowledge work, not merely speed it up. For agencies and publishers built on billable hours, the harder question is no longer what the model can do, but what it does to the business model. Two months ago, Anthropic told the world it had built a model too dangerous to release. On Tuesday, it released it anyway (well sort of).

The industry still runs on an assumption that has gone largely unquestioned for two decades: that if you know enough about who someone is (their age, income bracket, browsing history, purchase patterns), you can predict what they want and when they want it. Demographic segmentation, behavioural lookalikes, and predictive models built on historical data: all are variations on the same premise. Tyler Boyd thinks that premise has a fundamental flaw. “Demographic foundation is additive,“ he says.

A.G. Sulzberger of the New York Times made an accounting argument: an AI model is built from talent, compute, energy and data; the first three are paid for lavishly, the fourth simply taken. The six leading AI firms are worth roughly $11 trillion between them, yet the licensing deals struck with publishers amount to less than half of 1% of that. His prescription: defend copyright, license only on sustainable terms, and act collectively rather than one frightened newsroom at a time.

At the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress in Marseille, FT Strategies launched the first instalment of its Future of the Newsrooms Study 2026, a global benchmark designed to track how newsrooms are actually changing, beyond what they say about themselves. The distinction matters more than it might seem. Lisa MacLeod, Director at FT Strategies, has been working on the study for most of the year.

Publishers churning out commodity content and living off Google clicks are, in Barry Adams’s phrase, in serious trouble. He was one of three search specialists at WAN-IFRA, and the least diplomatic. Adams, an independent SEO consultant whose clients include the New York Times, came with a blunt read on AI overviews and where the traffic is heading.

The session had been billed as one of the most anticipated at the congress, and the shadow of the New York Times lawsuit, whose publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, had addressed the conference the previous day, hung over it throughout, even though both OpenAI speakers declined to discuss it directly.

For three days in Marseille, the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress kept circling one question: when publishers face the AI platforms, are they stronger together or alone? On Wednesday morning the organisers gave their answer. WAN-IFRA announced a strategic partnership with SPUR, the industry coalition pushing for fair terms in AI content licensing and confirmed that 30 publishers had joined.

The Guardian may be the best-protected newsroom in the English-speaking world. No proprietor to please, no shareholders demanding a dividend, a trust whose sole purpose is to keep the paper alive in perpetuity, and a reader-revenue base most publishers can only envy. Katharine Viner spent an hour explaining how those defences were built. Only once did the harder question surface, and she answered it candidly: whether any of it protects against the threat now coming.

A.G. Sulzberger does not often raise his voice. The chairman and publisher of the New York Times argues in the measured cadence of a man who expects to be quoted accurately. So when he took the stage for the opening keynote at the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress in Marseille, where I was sitting in the auditorium, and accused the richest companies in history of an “original sin”, the phrasing was deliberate.