The research
Every marketing team makes hundreds of creative and media choices: what its ads emphasize, how many messages each one carries, how many versions to make, and where they run. MMA and MediaRadar analyzed five years of advertising, from Q1 2021 to Q4 2025, across 10 industries and 6 channels to benchmark those choices, with attention data from Adelaide. The biggest differences are not between channels or years. They are between categories.
Join us to see where your category sits, and which of your choices are deliberate and which are inherited.
The session
Jay Nielsen of MediaRadar, Marc Guldimann of Adelaide, and Vassilis Bakopoulos of MMA will present the findings. Then Dena Weatherhead of Workday and fellow marketers join them to take on the questions the data raises for every marketer:
- Which of your creative and media choices are deliberate, and which did your category make for you?
- When does following your category’s conventions help, and when does it hold you back?
- What does it take inside a marketing team to break from category habit?
What you will take away
- How your category advertises. Industries differ 9x in how many distinct ads they make per dollar of spend. Where does yours sit, and what does that say about its approach?
- How crowded your ads have become. Ads carry more messages than they did in 2021, on every channel but one. Which categories pack in the most?
- What the brands that last do differently. Food & Beverage brands that held their brand strength for 20 years advertise differently from the ones that faded. Do they follow their category, or break from it?
- Whether premium media buys attention. We pay more for “premium” placements. Does the extra cost buy more attention?
- How media and creative quality compound. Strong creative and high-attention media each lift results. What happens when you get both right?
