The Marketing Week Podcast

In the latest episode of The Marketing Week Podcast, we’re looking back on the stories, moments and quotes that shaped marketing in 2025. From it being another 12 months of “more with less” for many brands and a summer of women’s sport, to our reporting on the reality of a career in marketing for working parents and the industry’s burnout crisis, it’s been a busy year. Host Charlotte Rogers, deputy managing editor and head of insight, is joined by managing editor Lucy Tesseras, editor-in-chief Russell Parsons and senior reporter Molly Innes to dig into what 2025 meant for marketers. We also hear from our columnists Helen Edwards, Jonathan Knowles and Laura Chamberlain, who share their marketing moments of the year. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of The Marketing Week Podcast, recorded at Marketing Week’s Festival of Marketing with podcast agency 18Sixty, Sadler shares how the charity pulled off its biggest fundraising year to date and how she's built the team for growth.The British Heart Foundation's most recent financial results showed the charity generated £108.4m from legacies, while its other fundraising efforts raised £58.2m, a 22% increase on the previous year. Current president of Women in Advertising Communications Leadership (WACL), Sadler also shares her priorities for the year and how the industry can do better on equality.Extra reading: WACL 50% CEO PlaybookBritish Heart Foundation's 2024/25 financial results Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Specsavers scooped the win of Marketing Week’s brand of the year for 2025, pipping Adidas, EE, Monzo, ServiceNow and Warburtons to the prize, off the back of its success in the October 2024 IPA Effectiveness Awards, where it won gold for its for its ‘I don’t go’ campaign. Founded by Doug and Mary Perkins in 1983, Specsavers has seen strengths in the business, as group revenue grew by 7.5% in the 2023/24 financial year to £4.18bn.In this episode of The Marketing Week Podcast, editor-in-chief Russell Parsons is joined by CMO Peter Wright and global brand director Spencer McHugh to delve into how the brand has evolved and grown into new territories but kept its purpose core to its heart and maintained “enviable awareness consideration and trust” in a competitive category. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

"Great leadership is great leadership. Poor leadership is poor leadership, irrespective of what discipline or function that leadership is in," Becky Moffat, chief customer officer for retail banking and wealth at HSBC UK, tells Marketing Week. In this episode of The Marketing Week Podcast, recorded at Marketing Week’s Festival of Marketing with podcast agency 18Sixty, she shares her lessons for leaders, and how leadership is "fundamentally" about building trust and joining dots. ‘We’ve put marketing in context’: Inside HSBC’s team evolution She also explains how her remit has widened with her promotion from CMO to CCO earlier this year and how HSBC's team structure has evolved as a result. Marketing at HSBC sits within the 'customer' function, alongside disciplines including data and analytics, advertising and partnerships. She describes her team as working in "communities of practice" and explains how the business got to this setup and how, at the heart of it, the customer is being put first. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Adidas has been on a transformation journey in the last few years, following a period of turbulence as it grappled with the discontinuation of its popular Yeezy line, waning investor confidence and an overreliance on performance marketing. Today, the sportswear brand is back on track. Earlier this year, CEO Bjørn Gulden told investors the business had succeeded in building back “brand heat” - thanks to an increase in brand marketing and its new brand platform ‘You Got This’, a clearer brand identity and effective partnerships, to name a few. In this edition of The Marketing Week Podcast, recorded at Marketing Week’s Festival of Marketing with podcast agency 18Sixty, we get an inside look at Adidas’s brand revival. Roy Gardner, vice president of brand activation, shares how reinstating marketing fundamentals and getting to the core of what the brand is – and isn’t - created a full marketing solution, “not a brand comms-led, marcomms-led" answer to turning the business around. “It was about coming together and going, what is it that we can do in marketing to essentially reset and regrow this business?” he says. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.