Top Marketing News You Need To Know About In June 2025

👋 Mark Read To Step Down From WPP CEO In December👋

The Impact He Had On The Advertising Industry

Mark Read wasn’t a great CEO; declining share price, mandatory RTO policies, rebrand losing ground to Publicis, Omnicom, and IPG. Most recently losing Coca-Cola and Groupm rebrand / restructure was not handled correctly. The announcement came yesterday right before Mars announced moving its media business to Publicis.

However, i’m not in the business of using this platform you all have given to me to tear someone down to shreds as there were a few things he did that helped WPP during his tenure:

• Selling Kantar for $3.1B to Bain Capital: Not selling the entire stake allowed WPP to still leverage Kantar without entirely offloading Kantar in the short-term.

• Reducing Debt: WPP had a ton of debt and selling Kantar (above) and efficiencies helped lower the debt by $1B. Yes that included layoffs and negative implications, but the layoffs and problems could have gotten a lot worse today because of how high interest rates are on debt.

• Winning Coca-Cola’s global account in 2021: While it was short lived and eventually gobbled up by Publicis in March 2025 any large account like this is notable.

Was Mark Read’s tenor as CEO successful? No, but right now there is so much M&A on the agency side like Publicis buying Lotame and on the brand side like Rhode getting aquired by e.l.f Cosmetics. The consolidation, M&A and fragmentation in the industry has stretched many companies thin with clients hopping to agencies with lower fees and claims on better inventory with a race to the bottom approach. AI is gunning for marketing more than any other industry in part because there is less regulation on its use compared to financial services, legal, or medical industries. Which leads to most of the “Big six” below with the exception of Publicis having limited or flat to down growth since the pandemic. This trend will likely continue in 2025.

Hopefully the next WPP CEO will be the right person to maintain headcount and drive growth, two things that don’t look great for advertising in 2025.

The “Big Six” Stock Performance Since 2020":

🦄 Roku Is Becoming A Connected TV Giant

In 2025 Roku’s total addressable audience totals 125 million daily users. For context earlier in May Amazon announced they have 300 million users. This highlights how large of an audience Roku reaches, and the value many media networks see in partnering with them. Quietly without anyone noticing Roku has built a partnership empire that is slowly becoming a critical channel as linear TV buys decline and brands move media dollars into digital budgets. Most of their partnerships came two years ago but the Dick’s Sporting Goods announcement highlights the continued push for linear TV dollars.

• 01/2020 Roku & Kroger Partnership: Roku partnered with Kroger Precision Marketing to feed shopper data from Kroger’s 60 million households and 2,700+ grocery store locations into our platform.

• 03/2023 Roku & Best Buy Partnership: Securing its positioning in the retail format via TV’s in-store and subsequent targeting with rich first-party customer data.

• 04/2023 Roku & Instacart: Instacart’s first TV streaming measurement partnership and offers advertisers consumer purchase insights from its Marketplace, which includes more than 1,100 retail banners and more than 80,000 stores in North America.

• 09/2023 Roku & Spotify: As consumers stream Spotify on Roku devices they will be able to be served video ads. For context Spotify’s engaged global audience of 500 million+ users as of 2023.

• 06/2025 Roku & Dicks Sporting Goods: 45 Million Dicks Sporting Goods user data is addressable in CTV advertising format for sporting goods brands.

🔥 Apple’s WWDC 2025 Event Recap

• Call Screening and Hold Assist: FINALLY! Apple is introduced a new feature that will answer the call for you and if it’s determined not to be a telemarketer it will provide you with a notification- This is awesome, too many telemarketing calls exist so shout out to Apple for coming up with this idea.

• Encryption for Location Data: For geo-location targeting for retailers or events this might impact you. Routes and location history might make it more difficult to geo-target IOS users but TBD on impact.

• Visual Intelligence "Tap to Search": The adoption rate of visual search by consumers is still low, so this new feature seems like a basic machine learning program to identify brands but until consumer adoption increases doubt this will have a massive impact on behaviors.

• Apple Intelligence: Honestly I haven’t played around with this much on IOS devices but the lack of coverage here but if Apple wants its fair share of ad dollars for the app store this capability will likely increase allowing for more shoppable moments in the app.

• Liquid Glass: Apple is creating a single universal interface and font style for their devices. Here is the video explaining it, not sure what to make of this yet. Watch for the social media reaction from consumers it always happens when a big cosmetic change happens and then it dies down because we’re all addicted to phones and get used to it lol.

🔥 Google’s Marketing Live 2025 Recap

This will be more in-depth than Apple because I actually attended the event and also is more relevant than the Apple event for us marketers:

• Search - Google is reimagining search with expanded AI overviews and AI mode quickly rolling out to users. Google is full speed ahead on this and brands need to prepare.

  • On the organic side, brands should expect organic site traffic to decrease, but the quality of the traffic to improve. Google hinted at this without fully saying that traffic is going to decline. A couple of members of the Google team privately told us to expect more guidance on organic in 3-6 months.

  • For right now, the mantra is still to focus on providing helpful, reliable, “people first” content. Go hyper deep on content. Be more granular.

Leverage multi-modal content: images and videos that are understood now by search.  Images and videos can help unearth a user’s unanticipated search intention.

• YouTube had a ton of exciting announcements at Brandcast and Google Marketing Live. The YouTube Creator Partnerships Hub helps YouTube compete with Amazon, Meta, and TikTok for brands’ growing content creator partnership budgets. New ad placements include shoppable CTV and mastheads. Plus there is a new accelerated checkout option for Demand Gen. It simplifies the shopping experience and lets customers check out from your ad.

• Performance Max finally has channel reporting. I’m excited that Google is rolling out a number of new reporting tools across their AI-powered products to provide more transparency. Easier and faster incrementality testing with only a $5,000 minimum.

• Google VEO 3 was announced at I/O, but also showcased throughout Google Marketing Live. VEO 3 is a gamechanger and going to have a major impact on content creation. This can democratize creative development for SME marketers & advertisers who learn how to use it.  Two amazing examples shown: a Moncler video produced by R/GA using Veo and the Superbowl ad side by side comparison --- which is AI and which is not? stumped the audience.

•  Agentic AI capabilities shown for shopping B2C: “try it on” for clothes shopping and “buy this for me” being two applications. “Buy this for me” being agentic in that once the user finds a product they like/want, the user can set a price target for the item to be acquired automatically, with the agent hunting for the right/best deal. 

• Agentic AI capabilities discussed for Ads and Analytics.  For “AI Max” in search, the solution learns from landing pages, keyword lists, and brand assets then makes suggestions for improving performance on the main website and ads. For Analytics, get insights in real-time, by boosting measurement also boost performance. This is a continuation of the platform: get creative feedback more rapidly.

Did You Know? Google Marketing Live was first held in 2013, marking the start of what would become Google's flagship annual event for advertisers and marketers.