[Interview] Nicola Tillin, Managing Director, The World Advertising Research Center

For over 40 years, The World Advertising Research Center, WARC, has combined evidence-based insights, case studies, academic research and data to help the industry prove the commercial impact of creativity.

In this interview, Nicola Tillin, the Managing Director speaks about how the global marketing intelligence company supports brands, agencies, and media owners in navigating an increasingly complex landscape.

How does WARC support marketers, agencies, and media owners in making data-driven decisions?

WARC provides evidence-based insights, data, academic theory, practitioner experiences, and case studies to help marketers prove the business impact of creativity. Its expert team curates and tags content, enabling users to back up ideas with proven effectiveness. The goal is to empower bold, strategic marketing moves that deliver stronger business outcomes.

What innovations or new tools has WARC launched recently to better serve the marketing community? And partnerships?

WARC has evolved from print to a digital, AI-powered platform. Recent innovations include:

• AI search assistant: answers complex questions, links to sources, and translates responses.

• Ad spend data analysis: users can now identify trends across 40 years of data in seconds.

• Partnerships via LIONS: collaborations with Cannes Lions, Contagious, Effie, and Acuity Pricing.

• New products: LIONS Intelligence combines insights from WARC, Cannes Lions’ The Work, and Contagious IQ.

Upcoming collaborations include a WARC & Effie project in 2026.

How do you ensure the credibility, neutrality, and actionability of the research and recommendations WARC publishes?

Providing objective, evidence-based analysis is critical to WARC’s value proposition, so we take it very seriously. We make every effort to take into account opinions and analyses from different perspectives in our reporting. We use mixed methodology approaches to our research, combining primary qualitative and quantitative research such as surveys and 1-2-1 interviews, as well as a comprehensive literature review, to bring in as broad a dataset as possible.

We have also built our own proprietary analytical frameworks to ensure that we approach research and analysis in a methodical way. One example is the GEISTE framework that WARC has developed, which looks at global, macro level trends to ensure we aren’t trapped within the marketing bubble. This framework underpins our trends analysis, so we can be sure we are approaching our reporting from an objective, research-based and structured foundation.

How is the global media landscape evolving in 2025, especially with the rise of AI-driven content and retail media networks?

WARC tracks advertising spend with partners in 100 markets worldwide, and broadly we’re seeing the same trends across all of these markets, namely increasing investment in search, retail and social media formats. These three sectors draw almost two-thirds of all advertising spend – around $723bn – up from just 40% before the pandemic.

Retail is the smallest of the three but is growing fastest and has great potential to place brands with clients close to the point of purchase by drawing from rich first party data. Amazon’s recent repositioning as a full funnel solution is interesting in this context, too.

The main companies in this space are doubling down on AI as a tool for not just ad placement but also creative generation; this is likely to draw more revenue for an ever-widening pool of small- and medium-sized advertisers (SMEs) but may also cause large brands to have similar expectations of their agencies, particularly around optimisation of ad placement.

What shifts are you seeing in the balance between traditional media (TV, radio, print) and digital platforms?

Almost four in every five dollars spent on advertising are for a digital ad placement, with legacy media taking a diminishing share each year. In many cases, digital offerings from legacy media owners (online editions of newspapers and magazines, for example) have struggled to compete with digital endemics, too.

TV is a slightly different case, and while it's true linear viewing is in decline as younger audiences in particularly favour streaming services, CTV may offer something of a renaissance for the sector as it allows for smarter targeting and evolving formats like shoppable ads, all in a brand safe environment on the biggest screen in the home.

Which sectors or geographies are showing the most resilience or growth in ad spend despite economic uncertainty?

The US is holding up well at the moment considering all of the uncertainty around the impact of new trade tariffs – we think the US market will grow by around 5% this year which is solid as it compares to an election year in 2024, when spend rose 13.5%. Sectors like travel and leisure are performing particularly well. Globally, the B2B sector – sometimes overlooked – is doing well and likely to be among the fastest-growing of the 19 product verticals WARC monitors internationally.

The UK’s ad market is likely to grow by close to 7% this year which is remarkable as its economy is faltering – this perhaps demonstrates the impact of globalisation on domestic ad markets, with international brands (particularly from China) and online platforms that operate cross-border driving the majority of growth.

How is AI being adopted in the marketing and media sectors, and what does WARC data suggest about its real value vs hype?

AI is transformative – it’s being used for a variety of tasks already, such as versioning of content, prototyping campaign creatives and synthetic data. All of these are resulting in significant time efficiencies. However, being able to rely on AI outputs continues to be a concern. And the growth of AI slop is a concern against the backdrop of an already highly fragmented media landscape.

If you had to summarize one key takeaway for CMOs in 2025, based on WARC’s global research, what would it be?

One of the most powerful findings from WARC this year was that brand advertising is a force multiplier for performance spend -- as discussed in our Multiplier Effect report. Rather than construct a false dichotomy between brand investment and performance investment, integrating brand and performance efforts leads to substantially higher returns than either strategy alone. Using data from Analytic Partners’ ROI Genome platform, we saw a median increase of 90% in overall revenue ROI.

So a critical takeaway for CMOs would be to stop thinking of brand vs. performance, and instead focus on how to integrate both objectives effectively – and boost marketing impact.

What does WARC see as the biggest opportunity, and the biggest risk, for marketers in the coming 12 months?

Well, we have a new report coming out in November that addresses the five biggest issues that we think marketers will face in 2026. It’s called the Marketer’s Toolkit, and it’s been an annual study that we have been running for fourteen years. So watch this space!

Obviously, we need to research and analyze the big drivers in our space as part of the process, but I think the three really big issues that are likely to affect marketers next year are AI, the shift of ad spend towards online creators and influencers, and macroeconomic uncertainty.

www.warc.com

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