Uncommon Thinking

From Advertising Week New York 2025:
In a time of shrinking budgets and sky-high expectations, marketers are under pressure to deliver better creative that goes the distance — breaking through with impact, clicks, and sustaining them over longer periods of time. We’ll explore real-world campaigns, categories, and brands that achieve long wear-in and lasting impact — and what they’re doing right.

From Advertising Week New York 2025:
Join us for a conversation with Allegra Krishnan, Chief Loyalty & Engagement Officer at McDonald's; Tracy-Ann Lim, Chief Media Officer at JPMorgan Chase & Co and Nora Princiotti, Staff Writer at The Ringer. Moderated by Bridget Evans, Global Head of Business Marketing at Spotify, the panel will explore how brands and creators lean into communities that drive culture. Jenny Haggard, Global Brand Strategy Lead for Thought Leadership at Spotify, will open the session, framing how loyalty, storytelling and fandom drive measurement.

From Advertising Week 2025:
Data has reshaped the way brands connect with consumers, evolving how brands personalize experiences, foster long-term loyalty, and measure business impact. This conversation will explore the strategies shaping the next frontier of relevance, attribution, and value at scale as brands and advertisers meet the demands of a complex advertising landscape.

In a landscape where everyone’s chasing cultural relevance, music remains the most immediate and emotionally resonant signal of what’s next. This fireside chat explores how brands can move beyond transactional media buys to build real equity by investing in the creators driving culture forward. With deep roots in cross-cultural music scenes and a platform built to spotlight emerging talent, SoundCloud offers advertisers a more authentic path into culture,especially with Gen Z and Gen Alpha audiences who engage with music as identity, not background noise.
 

Commerce media is at a tipping point. What started in retail is now reshaping industries from travel to financial services, creating massive new revenue streams through first-party data, purchase intent signals, and fresh monetization models. In this exclusive session, Nicholas Ward (Koddi) and Nikhil Lai (Forrester) will debut new Forrester x Koddi research that benchmarks commerce media maturity and reveals the innovations separating leaders from laggards.But this isn’t just research for research’s sake. We’ll translate the findings into a practical playbook of high-impact moves; the same kinds of strategies that have helped brands and publishers unlock billions in incremental revenue.

From Advertising Week New York 2025:
Marketers aren’t asking for more AI hype. They’re asking for strategy that shows up in every media buy. Greg Johns of Canvas Worldwide and Stephanie Landrum of Dentsu share how their clients use custom AI to connect planning to real-time buying decisions — and the outcomes that followed.
 

From Advertising Week New York 2025:
In less than a decade, Chime evolved from a scrappy fintech startup into a multibillion-dollar digital banking powerhouse. In this fireside chat, Nick Fairbairn, VP of Growth Marketing, shares the strategies behind that rise, with TV advertising driving over 9 million customers and building the brand. Learn how bypassing traditional media buying created a unified growth engine — and the methodologies and insights that fueled this level of performance and scale.
 

From Advertising Week New York 2025:
Today’s path to purchase isn’t a funnel, it’s a remix. The line between brand and commerce has vanished, and everything is shoppable. To break through, modern marketers must move beyond impressions and lean into orchestration, where every touchpoint drives connection, conversion, and cultural relevance.​Hosted by Christi Geary, EVP, and Head of AMP (Advantage Marketing Partners), this bold conversation brings together powerhouse brand leaders to share how they’re hitting all the right notes, emotionally and commercially.​This isn’t theory — it’s a behind-the-scenes look at how marketers are delivering Full Volume Impact:-Building brand love that fuels buyer behavior-Bridging upper funnel storytelling with lower funnel performance-Turning TikToks into transactions and brand equity into real-life salesFrom omnichannel innovation to retail-rooted strategies, discover what it takes to not just keep up, but break out.​Because if everything is shoppable, the smartest brands don’t just play, they go platinum.

From Advertising Week New York 2025:
SMBs face rising ad costs, shrinking reach, and cookie deprecation making customer acquisition harder. As inflation impacts spending, they need new revenue streams.Mark Grether, SVP of PayPal Ads, will explore how PayPal is reimagining advertising by turning SMBs into both ad buyers and publishers. Using transaction insights, PayPal's tools like Storefront Ads create an ecosystem where small businesses can monetize sites and acquire customers with precision.Small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) face mounting challenges: rising ad costs, shrinking organic reach, and cookie deprecation making customer acquisition harder than ever. As inflation impacts spending, SMBs need new revenue streams.

With Q4 2024 being their first billion-dollar quarter, as highlighted in their previous earnings, Pinterest has reached a new era. Their success is based on the lower-funnel performance products they launched over the last few years, which drives their users from inspiration to actually making a purchase.
In this episode of Uncommon Thinking, recorded at Advertising Week Europe 2025, we will explore how positivity impacts consumer behavior. We’ll dive into why positivity is good for business and explore the research to back it.