The Future Trends Festival: a wrap-up from the Bonded team

We opened with a clear reminder…

“Creative quality drives more than 50% of campaign effectiveness, yet it is often one of the most underinvested areas in media planning”

The focus was on what makes creative work harder. These are the three pillars of creative that actually work…

• Context
• Clarity
• Emotional impact

Audio was a big part of that conversation too, remaining one of advertising’s most underutilised superpowers.

From sonic branding to AI-powered voice commerce, the key takeaway was this…

Eyes can close, screens can scroll, but ears are always open.

Kevin unpacked the twin challenges every marketer is facing right now…

1. How to be visible inside AI-generated responses
2. How to build awareness before the point of need

With 24 million UK adults using AI tools, and 1 in 3 Google searches now triggering an AI Overview, the rules of brand discovery are being rewritten.

The data also speaks for itself. Brands that invest in both brand and performance together, in either B2B or B2C, can generate up to 90% higher ROI than performance alone.

Did you know that total viewing time of TV is just as high today as it was in 2015? It’s true.

That stat doesn’t just come for anywhere, either. At our Future Trends in Advertising Festival, three of broadcasting’s biggest players, Sky, ITV and Channel 4, made the case for TV’s enduring power.

Channel 4 announced that they became the UK’s fastest-growing streamer in 2025, a fascinating stat with so many established platforms on the market today.

It was also revealed that twice as many people trust brands advertised on TV versus YouTube.

Chiara shared some of the most compelling creative research of the day, including one stat that really stood out…

“Dull campaigns pay back 40% less.”

Here’s the takeaway… Creative that leans into showmanship, with unfolding stories, memorable characters, melodic music and moments that feel genuinely unexpected, consistently outperforms more rational, sales-led work when it comes to brand growth.

But it is not an either-or choice. The most entertaining short-form ads can still convert.

The key is early brand fluency. When distinctive brand assets appear in the first two seconds, everything else has a better chance of landing.

As the panel reinforced, click-through rates and cost-per-click only tell part of the story. Long-term emotional engagement is what really moves the needle.

Alix looked at how AI is changing the creative toolkit, with some strong numbers to back it up.

Advantage+ automation is driving 20% lower CPAs, while more than 4 million advertisers are now using generative AI tools. But the standout point was that creative contributes 56% of Meta’s auction performance, making it one of the biggest levers brands have.

The panel built on this with a clear message for marketers. Lead with video, work with UGC creators, use AI to create more creative variety, and let data shape the brief from the start, not just measure performance at the end.

As Alix put it, the goal is personalised experiences at scale. AI can help us get there, but the human instinct MUST lead.

Sarah Bell and Alex Wright from Bonded tackled one of the biggest challenges facing content teams.

Less than 1 in 10 marketers believe their content is working well, which says a lot about the gap between how much content brands are producing and how much of it is actually landing.

Their session focused on the need for better planning before anything gets made. That means starting with audience insight, building a clear content matrix, and thinking about distribution from the very beginning.

The brands that break through are usually the ones with a clear plan behind the creative. The ones that blend in are often just making more content and hoping something sticks.

At Bonded, media planning starts with people, so if you need a hand crafting the optimal media strategy for your business, we’d love to connect.