Understanding what separates high-performing agencies

The benchmarking data offered a clear view of the key metrics shaping agency success, including  growth, hourly rates, profit, cash, and confidence for the year ahead.

A consistent theme was the widening gap between top-performing agencies and the rest. The strongest businesses are not just growing faster, they are operating with greater discipline, charging more confidently for their work and building more sustainable models.

There was a clear message that success is becoming less about scale alone, and more about how effectively agencies manage and monetise their time and expertise.

Profitability is recovering, but still under pressure

While profitability across the sector is showing signs of improvement, agencies continue to face sustained pressure from rising costs, tighter client budgets and increasing delivery expectations.

The discussion highlighted that many agencies are still underpricing their work or failing to fully understand their true cost base. As a result, revenue growth does not always translate into improved profit.

• Top tip: focus on real utilisation, not just capacity. Understanding how much of your team’s time is genuinely billable, and at what rate, is critical to protecting margin.
  

Moving from volume to value

One of the strongest themes from the session was the shift away from volume-driven growth towards value-led models.

Agencies that are clearly positioned, with a defined specialism or expertise, are better able to command premium pricing and build stronger client relationships. In contrast, those trying to be everything to everyone often face increased price sensitivity and lower margins.

• Top tip: be known for something specific or aim to specialise in 2 – 5 services. A clearly defined proposition makes it easier to sell, price and scale.

Pricing confidence remains a key opportunity

Pricing continues to be one of the biggest levers for improving profitability, yet many agencies remain hesitant to increase rates.

The data suggests that top-performing agencies are more confident in how they price their services, often moving away from time-based models towards value-based approaches.

• Top tip: review pricing regularly and do not be afraid to adjust. Small increases, applied consistently, can have a significant impact on overall profitability.

From elusive creativity to structured methodology

A particularly interesting part of the discussion focused on the industry’s historic reliance on “elusive creativity” and the shift towards more structured, repeatable ways of working.

While creativity remains at the heart of agency value, the highest-performing agencies are increasingly systemising how that creativity is delivered. This means building clear processes, frameworks and methodologies that can be applied consistently across clients and projects.

Rather than relying on unpredictable bursts of inspiration, agencies are creating environments where strong ideas can be developed more reliably, efficiently and at scale.

• Top tip: codify your approach. Turning your thinking into a clear methodology not only improves delivery, it strengthens your proposition and makes your offer easier to sell.

AI adoption is accelerating, but strategy comes first

AI was a key area of discussion, with many agencies already integrating tools into their workflows to improve efficiency and output. However, still only 15% of those surveyed are utilising AI right the way across the business. 

In addition, the session reinforced that simply adopting AI is not enough. The real opportunity lies in how it is embedded into the agency’s proposition and commercial model.

In addition, the session reinforced that simply adopting AI is not enough. The real opportunity lies in how it is embedded into the agency’s proposition and commercial model.

Top tip: review all your workflows. How can you make them AI-first, with human oversight? Think about how this impacts your people structure, both now and over the next three years.

Building for long-term value

A final theme centred on building agencies with long-term value in mind. This includes improving profitability, strengthening leadership, creating scalable structures and reducing reliance on individual clients or revenue streams.

The agencies performing best today are making deliberate decisions about who they work with, how they deliver services and where they invest for the future.

• Top tip: think beyond short-term revenue. Building a resilient, well-structured business will always outperform quick wins over time.

Key takeaways

• High-performing agencies focus on efficiency, not just growth
• Profitability is improving, but requires active management
• Strong positioning enables better pricing and client relationships
• Moving from creative reliance to structured methodology improves consistency and scale
• Pricing confidence is a major opportunity for many agencies
• AI should be integrated strategically to enhance value
• Long-term thinking is critical to building a sustainable agency

Take the next step

If you want to dive deeper into the data and see how your agency compares, download the full BenchPress report from The WOW Company. It is the most comprehensive view of agency performance available and offers practical insights you can apply immediately.

You can also benchmark your own business using The Wow Way to Profit™. In just a few minutes, you will get a clearer picture of your profitability, where the gaps are, and where the biggest opportunities lie to improve performance and long-term value.

News

That is exactly where the IPM’s experiential work has been focused. Through its communities, the IPM has been building a stronger foundation for the sector, bringing together different skillsets and perspectives to create positive change across promotional marketing. The experiential community in particular has been centred on common workstreams including measurement, effectiveness, best practice resources and training, all designed to help the industry speak with greater clarity and confidence.

One of the clearest examples of that work is CORE, the insight platform launched by the IPM and SpaceandPeople to help brands and agencies access better experiential data. Developed in response to the need for stronger metrics and benchmarks, CORE gives campaign teams access to live activation insights across areas such as footfall, distribution and sign up performance, helping make experiential easier to plan, optimise and defend.

An iconic venue for an industry built on experience

The choice of venue feels fitting. Located beneath one of Europe’s largest advertising screens. The Venue at Piccadilly Lights is built for immersive brand storytelling. Landsec describes it as a brand performance space at the centre of everything, while venue materials position it as a place where brands can craft campaigns with global impact and transform stories into experiences at one of the busiest and most culturally resonant locations in London.

For an event focused on the future of experiential, there could hardly be a better backdrop. It combines scale, visibility and flexibility with the kind of theatre that reflects the ambition of the industry itself.

More than an event

The IPM hopes The Experiential Expo will become a staple in the calendar for marketers, agencies and partners working in live brand experience. More than a one off event, it is intended as a platform the industry can build on year after year, evolving alongside the sector and helping accelerate its growth, recognition and long term impact.

For the IPM, that sits squarely within its wider role as the UK’s leading authority on promotional marketing, supporting the industry through standards, insight, guidance, legal support, training and community. The Expo brings those strengths into a space that feels especially timely: one where creativity, measurement, conversation and commercial relevance need to work hand in hand.

Join us at Piccadilly Lights

The Experiential Expo takes place on 24 June 2026 at The Venue at Piccadilly Lights, Piccadilly Circus, London, W1D 7ET

Further details on speakers, sessions and opportunities to get involved will be announced soon.

Interested in attending, partnering, or becoming part of the IPM’s experiential community?

IPM Member get access to exclusive tickets. Please contact jodyb@theipm.org.uk to redeem. Get in touch with the IPM team to find out more at info@theipm.org.uk.

When Collectability Meets Compliance

If you’ve been anywhere near a McDonald’s recently, you’ll have seen it: customers opening packs at tables, comparing duplicates, and working out whether they’re one card away from something bigger. It’s a familiar behaviour, but with a slightly new twist. This time, it’s CARDS; a nationwide collectable promotion built around nostalgia, brand equity and just enough gamification to keep people coming back.

On the surface, it’s simple. Buy a qualifying product, receive a pack of cards, and start collecting. Some cards deliver instant rewards, others contribute to completing sets that unlock prizes. But as with any promotion that combines purchase, chance and reward, the simplicity is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Because underneath it sits a structure that has clearly been built with the CAP Code front of mind.

The key here is that this is not a lottery. UK promotional marketing rules are very clear on that distinction. Where chance and payment are both present, you’re immediately in risky territory unless you introduce mitigating mechanics. McDonald’s leans into a well-established promotional format: a blend of instant wins and collect-to-complete sets. That hybrid approach helps ensure the campaign sits comfortably within permitted promotional frameworks rather than drifting into something that could be interpreted as an illegal lottery. It’s not new, but that’s exactly the point. Familiar mechanics are often the safest ones, both from a legal standpoint and in terms of consumer understanding.

From an ASA perspective, what matters most is clarity and expectation. Consumers need to understand what they’re getting into: how to participate, what they can realistically win, and how difficult it might be to do so. Collectable campaigns inherently manage this quite well. There’s an implicit understanding that completing a full set is challenging, particularly where rarity tiers are involved. That works in McDonald’s favour. Rather than overpromising easy wins, the campaign leans into the idea of collectability and chance in a way that feels transparent. That balance is crucial because misleading consumers about their likelihood of winning, even unintentionally, is where brands tend to run into trouble.

There’s also the broader question of gamification. Promotions like this are designed to encourage repeat behaviour, and that always raises the question of where the line sits between engagement and undue pressure. In this case, the structure helps again. The inclusion of smaller, instant-win rewards creates a sense of accessibility, while the larger prizes sit behind more complex collection mechanics. That layering reduces the risk of the campaign being seen as exploitative or overly reliant on repeated purchasing to achieve an outcome. It’s a subtle point, but an important one in the current regulatory climate where the ASA is increasingly attentive to how promotional mechanics influence consumer behaviour.

Then there’s the data piece, which is often less visible but just as important. Campaigns like this no longer operate in isolation; they tend to connect with apps, digital journeys, or redemption platforms. That opens the door to valuable first-party data, but it also brings GDPR squarely into the conversation. Any data capture needs to be transparent, proportionate and clearly linked to the purpose of the promotion. Participation shouldn’t hinge on unnecessary data collection, and consumers need to understand exactly what they’re opting into. The strongest campaigns are the ones that offer a clear value exchange; if consumers feel they’re getting something meaningful in return, engagement follows naturally, but the compliance obligations don’t go away.

Of course, the real backbone of any promotion like this lies in the terms and conditions. That’s where the campaign either stands up or falls down. Eligibility, prize descriptions, availability, redemption mechanics, deadlines; all of it needs to be watertight and aligned with what’s being communicated publicly. With a campaign at this scale, even small ambiguities can quickly escalate. The fact that McDonald’s continues to run and evolve these kinds of promotions is a good indication of how much rigour is going on behind the scenes.

What’s particularly interesting about CARDS is that it shows how compliance and creativity aren’t opposing forces. In reality, the constraints of the regulatory framework are part of what shapes the campaign into something that works. The gamification is controlled, the messaging is clear, the mechanics are familiar, and the risk is managed without stripping out the fun. That’s not easy to achieve.

Promotional marketing always sits in that tension between excitement and regulation. Push too far, and you risk falling foul of the rules; play it too cautiously, and the campaign loses its impact. What McDonald’s has done here is find a balance that feels engaging without being misleading, and commercially effective without being non-compliant. From a compliance perspective, that’s exactly where you want to be, even if most consumers never realise just how much thought has gone into keeping it that way.

What Brits Want from Promotions 3.0 Recap

Promotions are not fading into the background. They are still one of the clearest ways brands can drive action, reward loyalty and stay visible in a crowded market. But as the IPM’s latest webinar with Mando made clear, the promotions that cut through in 2026 are not simply the loudest. They are the ones built around what people actually want.

Drawing on fresh YouGov data and Mando’s own campaign performance insight, What Brits Want from Promotions 3.0 offered a timely look at how British consumers really think, feel and behave when it comes to promotions. The session moved beyond the usual question of whether promotions still work. The answer to that was clear from the outset. They do. The more useful question was why they work, what shapes participation, and how marketers can build stronger campaigns from that insight.

The headline picture was hard to ignore. Brits continue to see promotions as a positive part of the brand experience, with strong appeal and rising participation showing that this remains a highly effective part of the marketing mix. In a climate where brands are under pressure to prove value quickly, that matters.

Why people still engage

What stood out in the discussion was not just that people like promotions, but why. Brits engage because promotions still feel like a smart choice. They like getting a good deal, getting something for nothing, and feeling they have little to lose by taking part. That sense of savviness remains a powerful driver, and it gives marketers a useful lens through which to judge their own work.

If the value exchange is not obvious, consumers quickly lose interest. If the mechanic feels overcomplicated, the entry route feels too long, or the reward does not justify the effort, the campaign starts to weaken. The promotions that perform best are often the ones that make the benefit feel immediate and the path to entry feel easy.

That fed directly into one of the webinar’s most practical themes. For all the appetite for innovation, the mechanics that continue to perform strongly are still grounded in tangible value. Money off, cashback and gift with purchase remain highly appealing, while instant win and prize draws continue to hold their own. The point was not that brands should avoid trying something new. It was that consumers make a fast calculation about whether a promotion feels worth their time, and value still tends to win.

The same logic carried through into rewards. Money and offers remain the most wanted prize types, ahead of more elaborate or aspirational options. One of the more useful observations from the session was that the biggest sounding reward is not always the one that works hardest. Holidays and vehicles may carry headline appeal, but practical realities can quickly dilute that. The strongest reward is often the one that feels most relevant, easiest to enjoy and simplest to redeem.

Where promotions work harder

Another strong thread running through the webinar was communication, and more specifically, where promotions actually get noticed. Email and social media both continue to play an important role, but on-pack still stands out as one of the strongest drivers of engagement. That is an important reminder at a time when so much attention is focused on digital channels alone.

On pack does more than capture attention at the shelf. It reinforces the promotion again during consumption, giving brands another moment to prompt action. Mando’s data also showed that removing the on-pack can significantly reduce participation, underlining just how valuable that physical touchpoint remains. For promotional marketers, it was a useful reminder that owned and controllable channels still do a great deal of heavy lifting.

The webinar also made a compelling case for thinking longer term. Repeat promotions are not necessarily a sign of creative fatigue. In many cases, they are a sign that a campaign has the foundations to keep building. Once a mechanic has been developed, tested and understood, brands are in a stronger position to refine it, while consumers are more likely to recognise it and engage with confidence. Familiarity, when handled well, can become a real advantage.

That thinking also applies to loyalty. Consumers already in loyalty programmes are more likely to engage with promotions and more likely to view them as a positive reward from brands. That creates a clear opportunity for marketers to stop treating promotions and loyalty as separate tracks. Used together, they can strengthen retention, add value for members and create more meaningful reasons to stay engaged.

One of the freshest parts of the webinar was the focus on gamification. More than half of Brits now take part in gamified promotions, and Mando’s own performance data suggests that these mechanics can lift engagement and repeat entries significantly. That does not mean every campaign needs to become a game, but it does speak to the value of interaction, anticipation and enjoyment within the entry experience. When participation feels more engaging, consumers are more likely to stay with it.

The session closed on an important point. Promotions do more than create a short-term spike. They can increase trial, improve noticeability, encourage spend and shopping frequency, and support recommendation, loyalty and emotional connection too. That broader impact matters because it positions promotions not just as a tactical sales lever but as a more strategic tool within the brand mix.

Questions from the webinar

The questions at the end of the session helped shift the discussion from what Brits want from promotions to what marketers should do with that insight.

One of the strongest points raised was how brands balance short-term impact with longer-term brand building. Charlie Hills’ response was a useful reminder that it is less about choosing one over the other and more about being clear on the objective from the start. A promotion designed to drive trial can still lay the foundations for a longer relationship if brands think carefully about the experience, the reward and what will bring people back.

There was also a practical question around simplicity. Mark Lewis explained that many of the biggest issues still happen in the route to entry. A campaign can have a strong prize and good creative, but if the process feels too long or fragmented, people drop away. His advice was to keep the journey smooth, reduce unnecessary steps, and use tools like URNs where they can make participation easier while still proving purchase.

Another useful question asked what marketers should take from this year’s findings. Beccy Purvis brought it back to the fundamentals: clear value and simplicity still matter most. That means designing promotions that feel easy to enter, rewarding to take part in, and worthwhile beyond a single headline prize.

The final audience question touched on the meaning of “promotions” itself. Charlie made the point that it is more useful to think broadly. Promotions are not one narrow mechanic. They stretch from money off and cashback through to gamified experiences, loyalty-led activity and hybrid models that blend several elements together.

Taken together, the Q and A gave the webinar a useful closing note. Promotions remain highly effective, but the discussion underlined that strong results depend on smart design, clear objectives and a broad view of what promotions can do.

The takeaway

So what did the webinar tell us? Promotions remain one of the most effective and adaptable tools available to marketers, but the strongest results come when campaigns are built around real consumer behaviour rather than assumptions. Brits want promotions that feel easy, worthwhile and rewarding. For brands, that means reducing friction, choosing mechanics and rewards carefully, and designing campaigns that work harder over time.

Watch the full webinar on demand
IPM members can access and watch the full webinar on demand via the IPM Members Area.

If you are planning an upcoming promotion, whether it is UK only or running internationally, the IPM Legal Advisory Service can help you get it right from the start. Available to both members and non-members, our team can sense check mechanics, strengthen Terms and Conditions, and flag the key compliance risks before you launch. Get in touch with the IPM to discuss how we can support your next campaign.

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Start with the markets, then build the mechanic

The strongest theme throughout the session was sequencing. The safest approach is to confirm where you are running, then shape the mechanic around what those markets allow and expect.

That matters because “game of chance” and “game of skill” can be treated very differently depending on the jurisdiction. Some markets push teams towards genuine skill-based entry, while others allow chance mechanics but introduce administrative steps that change your timeline.

The practical takeaway: if you start by forcing the same mechanic everywhere, you risk retrofitting compliance later. That is when budgets, timelines, and comms get squeezed.

Be precise on chance versus skill, because design details change compliance

Zoe highlighted how small creative choices can shift the regulatory profile of a campaign. If a market expects a true game of skill, the details matter, including how questions work, how ties are resolved, and how judging is organised.

This has real operational impact. Judging criteria, local language considerations, and winner contact windows all need to be defined upfront, particularly when entry volumes are hard to predict.

A useful mindset from the webinar: treat “skill” as a format you must be able to defend, not just a label you apply.

Timelines are not uniform, and filings can be the hidden blocker

A recurring theme was lead time. Some jurisdictions require pre-launch filings, permits, or documentation that is easy to underestimate if you are used to UK norms.

The session explored examples where documentation and process expectations can bring in fixed deadlines ahead of launch, and where winner selection requirements and local oversight can remove flexibility later in the campaign.

The practical takeaway: build a timeline that is market-led, not campaign-led. If you want one European launch date, you need to work backwards from the slowest moving jurisdiction.

Translation came up as a real risk point, not just a production detail. Once Terms and Conditions are submitted for translation, changing clauses later can mean rework, delays, and cost.

In practice, that means teams benefit from locking core mechanics, key terms, and local compliance requirements before translation begins. It also means aligning internal stakeholders early, because “one more tweak” after translation starts can have a disproportionate impact.

The webinar also covered how tax can affect promotions, particularly where games of chance attract different tax treatments to games of skill.

This is where early scoping pays off. If tax is triggered, who pays it can vary. That single question can affect your prize pool budget, finance approvals, and how you communicate prize receipt and any conditions to winners.

The practical takeaway: treat tax as a scoping question at the start, not a finance check at the end.

Fulfilment is part of compliance, and prize design needs local common sense

Gemma brought the delivery lens to life with a simple but powerful point: even when a prize concept looks universal, what feels desirable and workable can vary market by market.

Travel and experience prizes were a strong example. Factors like journey time, practical durations, local preferences, insurance expectations, and what is considered a complete prize in a given market all influence suitability.

The operational takeaway: the best European prize pools are designed for local reality, not just headline appeal.

Practical checklist: what to confirm before you say yes to Europe

“Some markets will require individual prize inclusion, such as spending money, travel insurance, additional nights due to flight connections, and travel time.”

So what did the webinar tell us?

Across the session, the message was clear: getting comfortable running promotions in Europe comes down to planning for difference, not hoping for uniformity. Sam set the scene by reframing Europe as a collection of jurisdictions with distinct expectations, while Zoe brought the practical reality to life, from the chance-versus-skill question and the impact of filings and lead times to the hidden cost drivers like tax and translation.

Gemma’s fulfilment lens reinforced that prize design is only as strong as its local suitability, and that details such as travel time, insurance, spending money, and market-specific inclusions can shape both compliance and consumer experience.

The result is a simple takeaway for teams scoping multi-market activity: start with where you are running, build a realistic timeline around the slowest market, lock your Terms and Conditions early, and treat fulfilment as a core part of the promotional plan, not an afterthought.

Watch the full webinar on demand
IPM members can access and watch the full webinar on demand via the IPM Members Area.

If you are planning an upcoming promotion, whether it is UK only or running internationally, the IPM Legal Advisory Service can help you get it right from the start. Available to both members and non-members, our team can sense check mechanics, strengthen Terms and Conditions, and flag the key compliance risks before you launch. Get in touch with the IPM to discuss how we can support your next campaign.

News

Thank you, Michael, for taking us behind the scenes of the award-winning Pringles x Super Mario Campaign. Congratulations to Brand Culture for clinching the IPM Grand Prix 2025, who will take home the coveted trophy in 2026? Find out more about the IPM Awards 2026 here.

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Superman vs AI Slop

2025 told marketers to look up. Not just because DC perched an 11-foot Superman on The Shard, but because Merriam-Webster named ‘slop’ its Word of the Year, says IPM host Harry Kelf. But while TikTok Shop clocked its biggest UK sales day to date on Black Friday, promotions stayed central to winning the supermarket basket. Kantar reported that close to £3 in every £10 spent on groceries went on promotion, while the IPA Bellwether continued to show budgets shifting towards activity that feels trackable, targetable and tangible.

One of the clearest proofs of object storytelling came from Guinness. “Pint of View” put 2.5 million beer mats out as a literal lens on life, built to spark sharing, and the Guinnbrella extended the same logic further with a pocket-sized prop designed to protect your pint from the rain. Then came Netflix’s The Thursday Murder Club, with hand-knitted postbox toppers and even a knitted billboard, because when everything looks instantly generated, “made by hand” signals trust, effort and character.

“Another telling signal this year was structural,” says Harry, citing The Wall Street Journal report that found LinkedIn job postings mentioning “storyteller” have doubled year-on-year into the tens of thousands across marketing and comms. But the bigger shift, he says, is how these stories are being told; “treating the audience not as a customer, but as the main character”. Boots staged its Beauty House Party for Gen Z to rekindle relevance, while partnerships kept supplying plot twists, from Babybel × Stranger Things taking over Wycombe Caves to Pringles × Super Mario turning the pack into play through limited-edition tubes and “mystery flavour” guessing.

“These stories don’t live in one channel anymore,” Harry adds, as the lines between disciplines continue to blur. Uber Eats’ King’s Cross “Do Nothing for 60 Seconds” started as a live dare and ended in-app through rewards, while Lucozade’s Ice Kick Vault used social clues from creators to pull people into a real-world treasure hunt for prizes and new product access. Selleys then turned an OOH billboard into a hands on demo for Liquid Nails glue, strapping a kayak, an arcade machine and even a mounted marlin to the frame and telling the public, “If you can take it, it’s yours.” People pulled, tugged and attacked, and nothing budged. The billboard became a battleground, and failure was the product proof.

Protein to Fibre, The Functional Era

“The good news for 2025,” Danielle Horsley (Elephants Can’t Jump) told the room, “Is that food and drink is adapting for the better.” Her clearest headline was functional foods, a market she said is projected to grow by around 8% year on year, as shoppers keep reaching for products that promise an outcome, not just a flavour. “Shoppers are choosing products that promise an outcome, not just a flavour,” she explained, and protein is the cleanest proof point. It “continues to power on” but no longer lives in shakes and gym culture. It is creeping into everyday formats, from lattes and breakfast through to pasta and convenience. M&S is the proof point she uses to show the pace. Demand has been strong enough for the retailer to double its protein ready-meals range.

Fibre, she suggests, is the next cue to follow that trajectory, with high-fibre claims up around 30% year on year in France and elsewhere in Europe, and new formats like Fibre Up turning fibre into a drinkable routine. The same “useful wins” logic shows up in how brands talk, too, from Graza labelling oils by how you cook with them, to Waitrose using recipe prompts at shelf, to Napolina demystifying chopped tomato formats. Even challenger growth fits the pattern. Heritage brands like Lurpak are being “nipped at the heels” by names like All Things Butter, Tony’s Chocolonely and Trip, winning by being clearer and more specific about the role they play in everyday life.

She also flags a renewed pull towards “local” and “seasonal” as a trust cue, pointing to British strawberries now being available all year round, with The Summer Berry Company in the Midlands using advanced growing tech, including LED lighting, to protect taste and quality while keeping supply closer to home.

Danielle’s final point is that indulgence has not disappeared, but it is changing, fast. “You can’t really talk about indulgence without talking about weight-loss drugs,” she said, pointing to around 2.5 million people in the UK now using them, with roughly a million starting in the last six months and pill formats likely widening uptake again. The impact is not simply people “treating less”, she argued, but cravings shifting, with smaller portions and smaller snacking rising, and a predicted 5% drop in the sugary indulgence market as an early directional signal. Her takeaway for marketers is clear. If indulgence is becoming more intentional, brands have to become more useful, with clearer end-benefit and usage-led communication that helps shoppers choose quickly and use products with confidence.

Where Experiential Won in 2025

Speaking from SpaceandPeople’s vantage point, Nancy Cullen puts a clear number on the scale of the market. The team books “about £10 million worth of space alone, per annum”, and their year-on-year growth reinforces the same direction of travel. Brands are still choosing live activity, she says, because it puts them “face to face with consumers” and creates the kind of “emotional connection” other channels struggle to replicate.

Her story of 2025 starts with what she calls “a big upswing in sampling”. At major UK railway stations, she says teams can be distributing up to 40,000 samples a day, spanning customer acquisition, pop-up retail and live stunts. That growth cuts across categories, from household products and pet food through to high-end beauty and wellness. Beauty is the standout in her data. Space and People “doubled the number of beauty bookings in H2”, and Nancy frames it as brands using experiential to drive footfall, build confidence quickly and sell directly from the stand, from premium players through to Maybelline, L’Oréal and Soap and Glory.

Geography matters too. London remains “the core destination for experiential”, she says, spanning everything from major railway station frontage to the South Bank and Covent Garden. “Activating in London is a sign of confidence and of intent,” she adds. Manchester is the “very clear second city”, and she notes it has now crept past Birmingham for the first time, helped by strong student numbers and a reputation as a place brand can trial formats before rolling them out nationwide. Birmingham, Leeds and Liverpool form the next tier, and venue-wise, shopping centres and travel hubs are “evenly split at the top”, with universities also a consistent part of the mix.

One of Nancy’s clearest signals for 2026 sits in tech and streaming, where brands are using live space to make the intangible tangible. She lists names including Samsung, Netflix, Audible, Virgin, Spotify, Adobe, Google and Disney+, and argues that “giving consumers a hands-on experience seems to be the route moving forward for tech brands”. Samsung is her headline example, “a huge campaign with 84 bookings”, spanning 57 venues in 27 cities and 297 live activations. The same instinct is driving newer names into the real world too, with OpenAI launching ChatGPT’s first large-scale brand campaign, signalling that tech brands are increasingly building familiarity through physical presence. For Nancy, it all reinforces the wider shift: “experiential is being planned less as a one-off and more as a scalable, repeatable system”.

“One of the clearest signals for 2026 sits in tech and streaming, where brands are using live space to make the intangible feel human and hands on.”

Same Rules, Different Mood

If Danielle and Nancy mapped where promotions grew in 2025, Sam Winterbourne (IPM) closed the session by showing where tolerance tightened. His one-line summary was simple: “Same rules, very different mood.” It was not about shiny new rules, but new expectations. Promotions now sit at the crossroads of data capture, retail media, influencer content and real-world mechanics, so a single campaign can invite scrutiny from multiple angles at once. CAP’s message was clear: using AI does not outsource responsibility, and “the AI wrote it” is not a defence if a claim is misleading, exaggerated, unverifiable or simply wrong.

He also flagged how regulators are scaling enforcement. The ASA’s Active Ad Monitoring system scanned 28 million ads in 2024 and is on track to reach 50 million a year by the end of 2025. In parallel, its influencer disclosure work found only around 57% of influencer ads were properly disclosed, which is progress, but still not the level of compliance regulators want to see.

The main course was always HFSS and less healthy food, which Sam called “the regulatory elephant in the room.” After the ASA’s updated guidance in December, his message was direct: “The preparation phase is over.” In Sam’s view, the real test is recognisability. If an asset is recognisable to the average consumer, the rules are likely to apply, and it is rarely just about a pack shot. Branding, colourways, mascots and taglines can pull you into scope even when the product itself is not front and centre.

He described October’s voluntary phase as polarising. Some brands moved early into brand-only territory, with legacy names like Cadbury leaning into the milk bottle and the colour purple rather than the bar itself. Others treated it as a last push before January, a “last hurrah” to maximise share while they still could. Sam’s warning was simple. A last hurrah does not disappear when January arrives. It becomes the evidence of how you chose to behave when the industry was asked to move.

“The practical test is recognisability. If an asset looks, sounds, or even feels like a less healthy product to the average consumer, the rules can bite. It is not just pack shots that trigger scope.”

That’s a Wrap!

Promotions Wrapped 2025 brought the year into focus through three practical lenses. From Guinness turning a beer mat into media you can hold, to protein moving into everyday formats and fibre starting to climb, to the proof points behind experiential’s momentum in stations, cities and scalable programmes, the common thread was clear. The work that wins now is built to be useful, tangible and accountable, and 2026 planning starts with the detail, especially with HFSS tightening from 5 January. Thank you to Danielle Horsley, Nancy Cullen and Sam Winterbourne for helping shape the landscape we are heading into, and for pinning down what changed, not just what happened. If you missed the session, or want to replay the examples and case studies, the full webinar is available now on the IPM Member Dashboard. And with 2026 around the corner, this is the perfect moment to turn 2025’s wrap into a sharper plan for the year ahead. We look forward to seeing you at our next IPM webinar.

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The State of UK Promotions

Over the past three years, What Brits Want from Promotions has become a key barometer of UK promotional behaviour, unpacking how consumers really feel about discounts, prizes, loyalty mechanics and digital journeys. In the last report back in 2023, the findings were striking: 85 per cent of Brits said they find promotions appealing, 73 per cent said they are more likely to try a new brand when it offers a promotion and 72 per cent said they are more likely to notice a brand when it runs a promotion.

Developed by Mando in partnership with YouGov and with expert insight from the Institute of Promotional Marketing, the latest edition in this landmark series takes a fresh look at how UK consumers want promotions to work in practice. “This year’s paper explores the latest British promotional landscape and identifies what Brits desire in promotions and how to design them to maximise participation and effectiveness,” Mando explains. “We also deep dive into hot topics such as how to build trust in your promotion, how to get communications right, whether to repeat a promotion (or not!), how promotions work in loyalty programmes, gamification and how to optimise promotional partnerships.”

Power Up Your Promotions Live

IPM Members are exclusively invited to a live masterclass marking the launch of this new white paper, hosted at Sea Containers House, London, on Thursday 22nd January 2026. This industry briefing will bring together Mando, YouGov and the IPM alongside leading brands and agencies to explore what the data means for real campaigns.

Across the afternoon, attendees will hear the key findings shaping the future of promotions, see case studies from award-winning work and take part in a live panel discussion with leading voices from across the industry. It is a chance to test your instincts against the numbers, understand how other brands are responding and ask practical questions about implementation: which mechanics deserve more investment, where trust and clarity are most at risk, and how loyalty, gamification and partnerships can be used more intelligently.

With a range of case studies and expert insight, our ambition is clear: “We hope that this inspires IPM members to recognise the value that promotions can provide in the marketing toolkit.” The aim is that you leave with a clearer sense of what really works today, what the data suggests will win tomorrow and how to start 2026 on the front foot.

“We shared the first edition of this paper back in 2021 and it’s fair to say a lot has changed since then, but one thing remains consistent: Brits love promotions and our industry continues to be at the forefront of innovation. A whopping 86% of Brits find promotions appealing,” says Mando.

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Shiny New Toys & Structural Shifts

Opening for the proposition, Oliver Yonchev, founder of cocreated and former co-founder of Flight Story, began with a confession: he has what his mother calls “shiny new toy syndrome”. He admitted openly that he has backed the wrong technologies before, saying “I was a metaverse enthusiast; NFTs… not my proudest moment”, but explained that those mistakes taught him something more important: how to recognise when a shift is genuinely structural rather than fashionable.

That realisation came not from his first playful interactions with ChatGPT but from Sam Altman’s framing that the entire economic order rests on two inputs, energy and intelligence, and that generative AI is the first meaningful attempt in history to drive the marginal cost of intelligence towards zero. At that point, Oliver argued, AI could no longer be treated as a tool. It represents a fundamental shift in what computers are, moving from passive applications to active agents that can read, write, see, hear, code and act.

“A junior designer who masters prompting can out-compete several senior colleagues. That’s the experience paradox of this era.”

From there, Oliver turned to what he sees happening inside creative teams. Barriers to creation have collapsed, he said, pointing to a junior designer in his business who immersed herself in prompting and image generation and, within six months, could outperform several more senior colleagues. Meanwhile, a seasoned creative can now use AI to strip away bureaucracy and focus on judgement, taste and direction. He described this tension as the experience paradox of the AI era: the gap between junior and senior capability narrows, yet the value of experience becomes even more powerful.

Prompting, he argued, should be treated as a core professional skill, with clear rules, codes and structures that everyone in the industry needs to understand. Productivity, he suggested, should be defined as “more fulfilling and frankly better work”, not just squeezing more output into each hour. When it came to creativity, he drew on Ethan Mollick’s idea that humans are often “stuck in our own heads”, suggesting that AI gives access to “infinite perspectives” and a powerful way to break out of our own limits. His closing line set the tone for the rest of the evening: “AI is a disruptor. The real question is how we ensure it becomes the right kind of partner.”

Eviction Notices & Accountability

Leading the case for the opposition, Dr Amr Al Khateeb, a Senior Lecturer in Marketing at Liverpool John Moores University specialising in AI, ethics and consumer behaviour, framed his argument around a single idea: the issue is not whether AI is powerful or useful, but whether the word “partner” accurately describes what is happening in practice. Drawing on examples from failed AI call-centre deployments to widely criticised AI-generated Christmas ads, he described systems that introduce what he called an accountability vacuum, where vendors blame the data, agencies blame the model, and no one carries responsibility. In promotional marketing, he argued, fairness, accountability and trust are non-negotiable, and black-box optimisation feels less like collaboration and more like risk being quietly transferred onto consumers, clients and junior staff who cannot meaningfully interrogate the outputs.

“AI fundamentally decouples revenue from human effort. It devalues the creative product to zero marginal cost. Once you’ve paid for the AI subscription, you can generate unlimited outputs at essentially no additional cost. That’s not a partnership. That’s an eviction notice.”

Amr moved from principles to people, focusing on the labour market, market structure and public trust. He cited 2025 figures showing job postings for computer graphic artists down 33 per cent and for photographers and writers down 28 per cent, stressing that it is the disappearance of junior and entry-level roles that should trouble the industry most, because no one becomes a creative director, strategist or senior planner without first spending years as a junior designer, copywriter or art worker.

By automating the foundational work that once served as the training ground, he argued, “we are not building the future of our industry, we are dismantling it”, concentrating opportunity and power in a small number of large platforms while small agencies and freelancers see incomes squeezed. His closing challenge was not to reject AI outright, but to stop using the language of partnership until there are meaningful standards for transparency, accountability, worker protection and control; until then, he argued, it is more honest to treat AI as a disruptor than to pretend it is already a trusted partner.

“AI is not the end of creativity. It is the next evolution…” 

Seconding the proposition, Dan Hirons, Co-founder and Director at Activation, brought the argument to everyday agency work. He set the scene with a reminder that people now see more than 6,000 adverts a day and that prize promotions only work when they cut through with relevance and genuine value. Against that backdrop, he described AI as “like a team member who never sleeps,” automating data analysis, entry verification, and scheduling so humans can “think, create and connect.” For Dan, AI is less a cost-cutting gadget and more a productivity engine that gives teams back time to uncover insights, explore more routes, and craft better ideas, not just more output.

On creativity, he pushed back at the idea that automation and imagination are opposites, calling AI “a mirror, not a mind” and arguing that it should be seen as a catalyst that can generate options and variations while leaving emotional judgement and cultural nuance firmly with people: “the machine provides the clay, the human is the sculptor.” He also stressed AI’s role in protecting trust, positioning it as a frontline defence against fraud that can audit entries, filter out bad data, and help ensure prize draws are provably fair. For Dan, that combination of speed, creative stimulus, and safeguarding is what partnership looks like in practice, and his conclusion distilled the heart of his case: “That’s what partnership looks like. This isn’t disruption. This is collaboration.”

Escaping the Sea of Sameness

Mays Elansari, Marketing Director at Stonegate Group, shifted the focus from tools to people, arguing that the industry is “not experiencing an AI revolution, we are experiencing AI fatigue.” She noted that estimates now suggest 30 to 40 per cent of online content is AI generated and described how this resulting “sea of sameness” is driving consumers back towards real human connection, trust and live experiences. She pointed to the IPA’s latest Bellwether Report, which shows event-led marketing at its strongest growth in more than a decade, as evidence that people are seeking out what algorithms cannot replicate. Using Dove as a positive reference, she highlighted the brand’s decision to ban AI-generated images of women in response to harmful beauty content, contrasting it with Coca-Cola’s fully AI Christmas ad, where even the iconic truck appeared in inconsistent designs with mismatched wheels. It was, she said, “a dream-like, soulless Christmas,” a reminder that when emotion, trust and originality disappear, it may still be content, but it stops being effective marketing. 

“We’re not experiencing an AI revolution. We’re experiencing AI fatigue…” 

She then brought the point closer to home with last week’s AI-generated Christmas mural in Kingston, where distorted faces, deformed animals and a disturbing scarecrow-like figure quickly went viral as a cautionary tale of what happens when brands treat AI as a partner before they understand the risks. She linked these examples to trust and mental wellbeing, referencing research that heavy AI use can weaken recall, learning effort and cognitive resilience, and drawing on Jonathan Haidt’s arguments about always-on algorithmic environments eroding attention and emotional regulation in younger audiences. Her dividing line was simple: marketing only works when it is memorable, emotionally resonant and trusted. In her words, “AI produces volume, people produce value,” and until AI is deployed in ways that clearly elevate human judgement rather than hollow it out, it is more accurate to see it as a disruptor of the conditions that make great marketing possible, not a partner.

Voices from the Floor

From the floor, the discussion kept circling back to one question: what do we mean by “disruption”? One contributor drew a line from the Industrial Revolution to today, arguing that technologies we now take for granted were once deeply destabilising. Others pushed back, noting that progress also came with displacement, environmental cost and consequences we still live with. “We’re still living with the fallout of that disruption,” one attendee said. “Let’s not repeat the mistake of pretending it was painless.”

When the conversation turned to promotions, several contributors argued that AI, used well, could make campaigns more timely, better targeted and more relevant, with smaller brands able to use generative tools to mock up mechanics, localise assets and test ideas that once needed a full agency, studio and insight team. The note of caution came from those who reminded the room that the law “still sees a promoter, not a platform, when something goes wrong”, and that if the industry is going to call AI a partner, it must also be clear “where the human liability sits.”

On one side, AI was cast as a co-pilot, a partner that can raise standards by freeing humans to focus on judgement, creativity and fairness. On the other, it was painted as something far less comfortable, a force hollowing out junior careers, flattening originality and eroding trust at scale. As Lord Black of Brentwood, President of the IPM, remarked in his introduction, “Five years ago, if we’d been looking at this motion, many of us would have asked what this was all about. But today, AI dominates our industry.”

In the weeks before the event, a LinkedIn poll suggested optimism, with 62 per cent of respondents seeing AI as a partner. Inside the room, sentiment swung dramatically, from an initial 31–2 majority in favour of AI as a partner to a 31–29 vote against the motion. The IPM would like to offer its thanks to The Debating Group for inviting us to bring this motion to Westminster and to all four speakers, Oliver Yonchev, Dan Hirons, Dr Amr Al Khateeb and Mays Elansari, for a thrilling and timely debate. The final count left little doubt: AI is here to stay, but its claim to “partner” status still has to be earned.

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