As part of The Drum Awards Festival’s Experiential jury, Jimmy Knowles is helping brands create experiences that connect through creativity, culture and technology in ways audiences actually remember. As global head of experiential marketing at Canva, Jimmy Knowles leads the team behind the brand’s biggest events from Cannes Lions activations to Sydney Mardi Gras and Canva Create, which drew more than 2.5m registrants in 2025. Before joining Canva he led award-winning work for Airbnb, Disney and Meta at CIVIC, building a reputation for transforming experiences into lasting emotional moments. For Knowles, technology enhances the human side of experience. “AI is the great blender,” he says. “It’s taking what we used to think of as two separate worlds, IRL and URL, and remixing them into entirely new canvases for creativity. Physical activations can have digital layers of personalization while digital-first moments can feel tactile and human. Done well, that means scaling magic in ways we couldn’t before.” Read more here

The work comes from ad agency St Luke’s and launches the brand’s new jumbo cashew nut range. KP Nuts is back on TV for the first time in over three years with a fun new campaign that turns an ordinary night into a party. St Luke’s has created a trio of rapping woodland animals to bring joy to snacking in the brand’s ‘A Handful of Happiness’ campaign. The Woodland Clan – Squirrel-D (aka P-Nut), Striiipes the badger and Smiler the Hibernator – jump into action the moment someone grabs a handful of KP Signature cashews, rapping their way through a dull evening. Read more here

In today’s relevance economy, sport is the asset that consistently outperforms. But showing up in the right kit isn’t enough to stand out. Brands need to really know how to play with timing, identity, and context to truly connect. Here’s the new hat trick for success. In a world that’s only getting noisier and busier and more fragmented, sport is one of the few modern experiences that makes audiences just…stop. Focus. Feel. And come together. The numbers speak for themselves: three-quarters of the top US telecasts were live sporting events last year. Meanwhile, three out of the five most-watched global events are sporting spectacles. Read more here

While many advertisers struggle to reach users in cookieless environments, Involved Media, in collaboration with Intent IQ and TransUnion, has helped one higher education client find a solution that’s driven a 41% performance lift. More than 200 million people today sit in the shadows of addressability, including 150 million iPhone users. But the results from a new campaign collaboration show that despite mounting challenges due to signal loss, privacy shifts and fragmented device ecosystems, there is a way to restore addressability at scale and drive meaningful business outcomes – and it comes from a combination of the right identity resolution and high-quality data. That was the case for Involved Media’s higher education client, which leveraged Intent IQ’s data enrichment capabilities and TransUnion’s audience data to engage users and drive almost 40% more conversions from previously un-targetable environments, while delivering a cost-per-lead (CPL) 44% below the advertiser’s target. Read more here

By bringing real community energy to Twitch, Elf Cosmetics built a safe space where beauty belongs and is now turning that credibility into commerce. Twitch has chewed up brands before, but Elf somehow made beauty feel native to the platform. While most non-gaming advertisers treat Twitch like another media buy, Elf treated it like a neighborhood where it needed to earn its place. When the brand launched its Twitch channel in 2020, the focus was on starting a conversation about confidence, creativity and making space for women in a culture that wasn’t always built for them, rather than simply selling mascara between Fortnite matches. That approach made Elf the rare outsider that didn’t feel out of place. The new partnership with Twitch, powered by Amazon Ads, grew out of years spent earning trust on the platform. As the first brand to bring live in-stream shopping directly into Twitch streams, Elf lets viewers buy products without leaving what they’re watching. It works because it aligns with how the community already engages with Elf through creators and organic conversation, creating a seamless extension of an existing relationship. Read more here

Mark Ritson argues that former brand auditor Philipp Navratil’s unapologetic, marketing-first leadership might finally shake Nestlé out of its corporate malaise. When Philipp Navratil walked into Nestlé’s Vevey headquarters last month as its new CEO, the air must have felt heavy. The world’s biggest food company had just burned through two chief executives in a year. Was he going to make it third time lucky? Navratil isn’t some parachuted consultant or a rebuffed senior executive from one of the company’s rivals. He’s a Nestlé lifer with 25 years across the Anglo-Swiss giant’s operations. He speaks multiple languages, holds an MBA, and has the steely look of someone who isn’t here to fuck about. More importantly, he’s done both the country GM path, successfully running Honduras, and then the HQ role, eventually leading Nespresso. He knows how the machine works. His announcement interview immediately sets the tone. Read more here

The charity has partnered with The Dad Shift to campaign for an increase in the current two-week statutory paternity leave in the UK. An eye-catching new campaign from Pregnant Then Screwed and The Dad Shift has branded UK paternity leave a “mother f**ker” and for good reason. The work shines a harsh light on the UK’s parental leave policy, which offers just two weeks of statutory paternity leave – a stark contrast to the six weeks doctors recommend for C-section recovery. The impact is that thousands of new mothers are left recovering from major surgery while caring for newborns, largely on their own. Read more here

The Drum’s commerce media columnist, Kiri Masters, explains how Sam’s Club is turning in-store retail media from a testbed into a performance engine. While most retail media networks remain stuck testing endless pilots for in-store advertising, Sam’s Club Member Access Platform is rolling out programs at scale and leaving breadcrumbs for the industry to follow. I spent an afternoon touring a Sam’s Club in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, with Harvey Ma, who leads the retailer’s Member Access Platform. What I saw wasn’t a cautious experiment. It was a coordinated deployment of in-store retail media technology backed by serious investment in measurement and organizational alignment. Read more here

Forget big reveals, decks and endless rounds of polish. The future of agency creativity might just look a lot more uncomfortable, unfiltered – and fast. If the old agency playbook was written in pitch decks, the new one is being sketched in prototypes. VibeSprint – a 48-hour creative experiment first staged at The Drum Live – set out to prove it. With the pressure off, The Drum reunited with key voices from the sprint during Advertising Week New York – including Laurel Burton, chief executive officer at Instrument; Skylar Jessen, senior strategist at Instrument; and Kevin Croxton, vice-president of sales at Lightricks – to reflect on what happens when you embrace discomfort, work at speed, and let AI into the creative process. Read more here

Early work with a drinks client taught the agency the value of engagement, trust, and honesty. Founder Richard Midgley explains how that distilled into the agency’s ‘Secret Sauce.’ This year marks Ponderosa’s 15th birthday and I suppose it is as good a time as any to reflect on what makes Ponderosa a great agency. Obviously, I would say that, as I am the founder and still the MD, but you will have to forgive my bias. When we set out on our own, it was on the back of creating Crabbie’s Alcoholic Ginger Beer with John Halewood, the owner and founder of Halewood International, of Lambrini and Red Square fame. He was the first person to back us to go out on our own and supported us with our subsequent work. I often reflect on what he saw in us: firstly, he liked us; secondly, he trusted us; thirdly, he appreciated an honest answer and us challenging him even though he was a self-made multi-millionaire. Read more here

Today, fan culture revolves around Discord servers, watch parties, and other emergent channels. Owen Laverty of Ear to the Ground explains how new research into this ‘third space’ can help brands reach these audiences. In the race for cultural relevance, the rules are shifting fast. For brands in sports, gaming, and entertainment, visibility is no longer enough. According to Ear to the Ground’s Fan Index 25/26, culture now thrives in what we call the ‘third space,’ the fan-led environments that exist outside traditional media plans. These are not polished platforms created for brands. They are Discord servers, watch parties, TikTok edits, meme accounts, fan podcasts, and creator channels. Messy, vibrant, and owned by fans, these spaces are where culture is continually created and reimagined every day. For marketers, this presents both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is simple: fans don’t need brands here. Push too hard, and you risk being ignored or rejected. The opportunity? For those who earn their place, the ‘third space’ offers a level of intimacy and influence that traditional sponsorships cannot match. Read more here

Brands are experimenting with humor, honesty, and just enough weirdness to keep us watching. From supermarket fashion on the runway to gaming with a moral twist, this week’s ads find personality in unexpected places. Clash Royale calls on gamers to ‘Join the Skeleton Army Evolution’ Uncommon Stockholm marries in-game lore and real-world stakes by recruiting William H. Macy in a Halloween campaign that links the game’s Skeleton Army to organ donation via the UK’s NHS. Why it works: Read more here

Creative veteran Julie Seal’s Diary of an Agency Founder continues peeling back the layers of Republic of Imagination, challenging assumptions about indies, creativity and the future of social. Now, a few months in, Julie’s starting to get momentum. But the business is already evolving from what she originally had in mind. September 26, 2025: We’re not what you think we are... Read more here

One message when it’s rainy, another when the sun shines, and yet another when the local team wins the league. Joy Hines of Broadsign explains the endless possibilities of DCO. Dynamic creative optimization (DCO) may be an out-of-home (OOH) buzzword, but it’s often underutilized. Though its definitions vary across contexts, DCO is essentially the practice of optimizing OOH creative for real-world contexts and environments. With it, real-time triggers – such as weather, live sports scores, and financial market performance – are often employed to deliver more personalized, engaging creative. But these only scratch the surface of what’s possible. Agencies and brands can similarly leverage other first-party data signals, such as lottery odds, contest prize winners, and commute times, to customize creative. Layering in day and time targeting on the creative itself, or tailoring the creative messaging to the actual physical location of the screens and their proximity to major attractions, can also enhance the dynamic nature of a campaign. Read more here

As personal AIs and chatbots transform search behavior, WPP’s chief AI officer, Dr Daniel Hulme, explains why marketers must now optimize for what AI “knows” – not just what people type. “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” Mark Twain famously wrote to a newspaper that had (rather prematurely) published his obituary. The same could be said of SEO. Read more here

As part of The Drum Awards Festival’s Social Purpose jury, Danisha Lomax is challenging brands to move beyond slogans and treat purpose as something lived, measured and built into the core of business itself. At Digitas Publicis Groupe, where she serves as chief connected community officer, Lomax has spent her career weaving together creativity, inclusion and accountability. Named to the 2024 Advertising Hall of Achievement, she’s known for work that amplifies unheard voices and for her belief that disruption can be a creative force. Her mantra “lean into the glitch” has become a shorthand for embracing imperfections that lead to real progress. She believes the growing influence of AI will raise the stakes for authenticity rather than replace it. “AI won’t change the fact that audiences reward consistency, transparency and real commitment,” she says. “What it will change is the signal-to-noise ratio. Purpose-driven communication that is truly lived out by a company will stand out even more because people will crave rare authenticity amidst a flood of optimized narratives.” Read more here

The Drum is in the process of compiling the definitive list of the World’s Best Ever Out-of-Home Ads. Here, Meanwhile’s chief creative officer and founder, Tim Jones, selects his favorite out-of-home ads of all time, which was no easy feat. Paired with a packet of prawn cocktail crisps, he invites you to pore over his picks. When The Drum asked me to pick my five favorite posters, I thought: ‘Great, I love posters, this’ll be easy.’ Then I realized that choosing my five favorite posters is like choosing my five favorite prawn cocktail crisps in any given bag of prawn cocktail crisps. Which, by the way, is really hard. Especially if, like me, you love prawn cocktail crisps almost as much as you love posters. I mean, I could pick my five favorite Volkswagen posters. My five favorite PlayStation posters. My five favorite Dave Dye posters. My five favorite Paul Belford posters. My five favorite posters from any individual year since I started poring over D&AD annuals at college *cough* 20 *cough* years *cough* ago. Maybe. Read more here

DOOH allows you to get your ads in front of as many eyes as possible. Emma Labrador at Displayce explains how to get the most from new optimization tools. For decades, ‘primetime’ has been a familiar concept to advertisers: the moment when audiences gather, attention peaks, and impact follows. Yet in digital out-of-home (DOOH), the idea of prime time is still a new and unexplored concept. Traditional DOOH planning relied on fixed schedules and average audience estimates, assuming exposure was relatively constant. But the real world doesn’t work like that. People move in rhythms, not averages. Today, data finally allows us to map those rhythms. We can identify when and where audiences actually concentrate, whether that’s an industry conference, a football final, or the opening weekend of a cultural festival. The question is no longer just where to advertise, but when the audience is truly there. Read more here

Expert anthropologists Abi Posner and Tom Maschio argue that Outdoor Boys’ down-to-earth adventures hold the blueprint for brands looking to cut through the noise. The secret is flow. What if the secret to captivating millions and igniting creativity lies in the sheer immersion and genuine connection captured by YouTube’s the Outdoor Boys? The channel became a legend thanks to Luke Nichols’ rare ability to harness the energy of family adventure, skill-building and that elusive, turbocharged hit of flow. Read more here

The Drum sits down with the gambling brand and its agency, BBH, to hear what went into its surreal new campaign, which features the English actor in a bathtub. Paddy Power has once more teamed up with its cheeky brand ambassador, Danny Dyer, and this time he’s in the role of a casino king. To spotlight its online games, the brand enlisted the English actor and ad agency BBH to create a surreal setting, described by the team as “Vegas meets the Queen Vic.” The campaign, ‘Come Out and Play,’ started because the brand felt it wasn’t as synonymous with games as it was with football and racing. “We’re historically a sports brand,” explains Leah Spears, its head of brand strategy and games. “We really wanted to bring our gaming credentials into the ether. We needed something iconic that talks games, but never loses that Paddy style, wit, charm, and humor.” Read more here

From Annie Leibovitz shoots to Manhattan makeovers, Corcoran’s Christina Panos has spent two decades proving that bold ideas – and good taste – never go out of style. We’re spending a second week in the US for 10 Questions. More specifically, we’re heading to the heart of New York, to question Christina Panos, CMO of The Corcoran Group. No one knows NYC and the East Coast like Corcoran. Founded by the legendary Barbara Corcoran, it’s now one of the US’s most iconic real estate firms, and the number one in Manhattan. I lost a day lusting after apartments in the Flatiron Building, Central Park and the Hamptons (they also cover homes beyond the US – there’s a lovely one on the market in London that I’m only $8.7m away from buying). Read more here

Creative veteran Julie Seal’s Diary of an Agency Founder continues peeling back the layers of Republic of Imagination, challenging assumptions about indies, creativity and the future of social. Now, a few months in, Julie’s starting to get momentum. But the business is already evolving from what she originally had in mind. September 26, 2025: We’re not what you think we are... Read more here

Fluency’s Andy MacLeay calls on marketers to embrace operational change – building bridges between walled gardens and the open web, and putting AI to work to scale new channels faster, smarter and with more clarity. “Being able to be the bridge between the walled gardens and the open web, that’s really important,” says Andy MacLeay, VP of engagement and channels at Fluency, speaking with The Drum as part of our Media that Moves video series at Advertising Week New York. It set the tone for a conversation focused on operational clarity in a rapidly changing digital landscape. As media moves faster than ever, marketers face a growing challenge: fragmented ecosystems, each playing by their own rules. Read more here

Beyond “instant checkout,” the retail giant’s new partnership with the ChatGPT owner hints at a reordering of who controls data, trust and the moment of purchase itself. When Walmart announced that customers would soon be able to buy directly through ChatGPT, it sounded like a logical step in the company’s long march toward digital dominance. A single tap, one conversation and the order is on its way. But behind that clean interface sits a deeper purpose – one that could quietly reshape the balance of power between retailers, platforms and consumers. Doug McMillon, Walmart’s chief executive, calls it a generational leap: “There is a native AI experience coming that is multimedia, personalized and contextual. We are running towards that more enjoyable and convenient future with [AI shopping assistant] Sparky and through partnerships including this important step with OpenAI.” Translation: the world’s largest retailer wants to live inside the next interface people use to decide what to buy. Read more here

One message when it’s rainy, another when the sun shines, and yet another when the local team wins the league. Joy Hines of Broadsign explains the endless possibilities of DCO. Dynamic creative optimization (DCO) may be an out-of-home (OOH) buzzword, but it’s often underutilized. Though its definitions vary across contexts, DCO is essentially the practice of optimizing OOH creative for real-world contexts and environments. With it, real-time triggers – such as weather, live sports scores, and financial market performance – are often employed to deliver more personalized, engaging creative. But these only scratch the surface of what’s possible. Agencies and brands can similarly leverage other first-party data signals, such as lottery odds, contest prize winners, and commute times, to customize creative. Layering in day and time targeting on the creative itself, or tailoring the creative messaging to the actual physical location of the screens and their proximity to major attractions, can also enhance the dynamic nature of a campaign. Read more here