Advertising & PR
Where the money goes, who moves it, and what happens when a brand’s story gets away from it.
Advertising and PR follows the spend and the reputation it buys. Ad budgets and media buying, agency news, programmatic, and crisis and reputation are the beats, and the Funny lane keeps the campaigns that earned a laugh. Three stories each weekday at 11, summarised in our own words with a link to the publisher who broke them. We choose for the reader who plans, buys or defends: the head of media watching a platform change its rules, the agency lead deciding which team owns a new channel, the communications director reading someone else’s crisis for the lesson. Under the day’s lead the editor’s note explains the choice and names the thing to watch. Sponsors and advertisers on The First Click are disclosed on every story they touch and have no say in this page.
Every story we have kept in Advertising & PR, newest first. Headlines link to the publisher; the tags below narrow the list.
Ogilvy Australia Wins St John, Depicts Lottery Winner Enjoying Dream Home in 'Good Good' Campaign
Ogilvy Australia has won the St John account, launching a 'Good Good' campaign that depicts a lottery winner enjoying his dream home.
Editor's noteThe win adds a high-profile charity account to Ogilvy Australia's roster and tests whether aspirational, feel-good creative can shift St John's public image beyond emergency-service branding. Marketers should watch whether the lottery framing draws scrutiny given the charity's status, and whether ticket-sale or donation metrics follow the campaign's launch.
Princess Tells Poolside Story, Narrated By Deborah Mailman, to Show Off ABC iview
Agency Princess launched a multichannel campaign for ABC iview, narrated by actor Deborah Mailman, filmed at a public pool to position the streamer as a hub for Australian stories.
Rory McKechnie Joins TBWA\NZ as ECD
Rory McKechnie has joined TBWA\New Zealand as executive creative director, the agency announced.
Uber CEO cites need for ‘simpler’ company in layoff memo; Tim Cook says goodbye to Apple employees
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi announced a workforce reduction despite strong results, Apple's Tim Cook wrote a farewell memo ahead of John Ternus's succession, and Meta dropped AI-usage metrics from engineer performance reviews.
Be prepared for unexpected reactions when sending change messages
Brooke Wilson of CVS Health told Ragan's Employee Experience Conference that internal teams must anticipate employee anxiety and personalize messaging when announcing organizational changes, rather than treating updates as routine.
Marketers say usage rights are driving up the price to work with creators
Marketers and creator-marketing agencies say undefined usage-rights terms and inconsistent pricing structures are inflating costs of creator partnerships, prompting calls for standardized contracts and clearer scope definitions before deals close.
Editor's notePrice disputes usually trail a market that has scaled past its contracts. Creator deals reaching that point says less about any one negotiation than about how fast informal arrangements became load-bearing infrastructure for brand budgets. Whoever drafts the next agreement is now writing rules a market has already outgrown.
Rapid AI changes mean GEO is a weekly job now
MarTech reported AI search summaries cut click-through to results to 8% from 15%, prompting SEO, PR and content teams to treat generative engine optimization as continuous weekly monitoring.
PR's earned media moment: Why AI is fuelling optimism, not fear
UK PR leaders report growing demand for earned media as AI-generated content proliferates, arguing agility, authenticity, and human storytelling now differentiate brands more than social metrics.
Editor's noteOptimism in a trade survey is usually noise. This one has a mechanism behind it: if generated content is abundant, the scarce thing becomes third-party credibility, and earned media is the only channel that supplies it. Whether agencies can price that is the open question.
How to find the weak point stalling AI adoption
Ragan's 2026 survey found 98% of communications teams use AI, yet fewer than 20% have integrated it strategically; an advisor outlines methods to diagnose the specific readiness gap stalling adoption.
Why your thought leadership keeps failing
PR Daily's Allison Carter argued genuine thought leadership requires executives to risk being wrong, citing Mark Zuckerberg's AI-optimism op-ed and Jamie Dimon's shareholder letters as debatable positions.
The clock is ticking on major green claims reform
The EU's Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition directive takes effect September 27, banning unsubstantiated eco-friendly and offset-based carbon-neutral claims, with fines up to 4% of turnover.
Editor's noteA deadline with a penalty attached outranks everything else in the section. From the twenty-seventh, unsubstantiated green wording and offset-based carbon-neutral claims stop being a reputational risk and start being a four-percent-of-turnover one, which moves the review out of marketing and into legal.
PR Stunt Watch: Low-flying planes, flirting billboards and a very expensive bar of soap
PRmoment's stunt roundup covered a million-dollar Dr Squatch scavenger hunt with streamer IShowSpeed, Airlink's disputed rugby-match flypast in Cape Town, and billboard sparring between two drinks brands.
Media Briefing: What to expect at the Digiday Publishing Summit, September 2026 edition
Digiday's September Publishing Summit in Key Biscayne convenes executives from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Reuters and Axios on AI licensing revenue and search referral declines.
System1 & Advertising Association’s August Ads of the Month
System1 and the UK Advertising Association highlighted Dolmio, Kopparberg, and Dairylea as August’s most effective ads, citing humor, distinctive brand assets, and emotional engagement as key drivers of long-term advertising effectiveness.
Performance Agency Chief Media Acquires 2 Firms to Beef up Amazon and TikTok Expertise
Chief Media, an independent performance agency, purchased Amazon consultancy AMZ Advisers and social specialist Reach Social, expanding e-commerce and TikTok capabilities for cross-selling to existing agency clients.
