The Media Leader Podcast

This week, The Media Leader is running a week in focus centred on talent and leadership.
For years, industry leaders have warned media and marketing is facing a talent crisis. Mental health struggles and burn out was common especially during and after the Covid-19 pandemic, and rounds of consolidation and layoffs have taken a toll on everyone from senior leaders to junior hires.
Rachel Forde and Marco Bertozzi are co-founders of TheZoo.London, a talent solutions agency that operates a consultant collective and executive search function for individuals with strong experience in the industry seeking to offer their services in an independent or fractional capacity.
Both Forde and Bertozzi are veterans of the media industry themselves, with Forde previously working as CEO of Spark Foundry and later UM, and Bertozzi a former EMEA president at Whalar, former EMEA sales VP at Spotify, and former global CEO of performance marketing at Starcom.
The pair returned to The Media Leader Podcast to speak with host Jack Benjamin about how agency consolidation and AI has impacted talent this year and offer advice to leaders navigating job loss and uncertainty.
While they argued it's not "all doom and gloom" in the media industry right now, they acknowledged pickings are slim for junior talent while senior talent "are not being treated well by companies, by headhunters, by processes on LinkedIn."
Highlights:
5:21: Why Forde and Bertozzi founded TheZoo.London and how they manage self-employment
8:37: Agency restrctures, 'deep cuts', and AI efficiencies
14:03: Advice for senior leaders versus junior staff
21:26: How changing agency remuneration models will impact talent
28:24: Is the industry socialising enough? Advice for networking and meeting face-to-face 'with no agenda'
36:41: Takeaways from interviews with senior industry leaders
Related articles:
Strategic thinking is biggest skills gap in marketing, WFA-Mediasense report finds
The media industry needs to open doors, not just talk about inspiring talent
Why is marketing and media’s talent problem following us into the AI era?
Why talent needs mentors, not machines

Earlier this month at our Future of Media Manchester event, The Media Leader's content director, James Longhurst, sat down with four leading sports journalists to peek behind the scenes of covering this year's biggest shared cultural moment: the 2026 World Cup.
John Cross is the chief football writer for the Mirror. Nikhita Chulani is the executive producer for Sport at The Guardian. Dean Scoggins is head of sport at The Sun. And Henry Williams is a sports presenter at the Daily Mail.
As they explained, with the World Cup being truly "24-7" this year, publishers embraced a multi-platform, multimedia strategy in which volume was less important than engagement with audiences, be it on publisher websites or third-party platforms.
The group spoke about the tournament's controveries, celebrations and disappointments, and how journalism can bring a global community together around one moment.
Highlights:
3:16: Reminisces on this year's tournament
10:12: How to cover a 24-7 World Cup across all channels, digital and print
16:46: The mindset shift required to embrace platforms and move from volume to engagement
22:12: What worked this year and the importance of community
Related articles:
Culture is everywhere. So why is it rarely planned for?
Why mass cultural moments still matter (and the World Cup proved it)
‘The division between church and state isn’t sustainable’: Journalists weigh-up life as a creator
The scoop that stopped FIFA’s secret World Cup selloff
News brands: The beating heart of the FIFA World Cup
Open goals: how The Guardian brought the World Cup to life

This week on The Media Leader we will be taking a deep dive into the future of media planning and strategy.
So, what better way to start than with unpacking a new planning paradigm.
This summer, independent media agency Craft Media London launched a new planning “Cookbook”. Titled Anti-Ultra-Processed Planning, the book argues that “planning has become fast food; mass-produced, pre-packaged and dangerously addictive”.
Agencies, it continues, are increasingly outsourcing strategic thinking to automated platforms, producing similar plans and dull work.
It is time, the book reads, to stop microwaving briefs and start cooking again.
Sally Weavers and Jen Jones are co-founders of Craft Media London and co-authors of Anti-Ultra-Processed Planning. They joined host Jack Benjamin to discuss its arguments and takeaways, and why they believe good planning has become harder and harder to come by.
Highlights:
7:05: What is anti-ultra-processed planning?
11:34: How to incentivise better planning practices
18:20: People not audiences
23:14: Notice over reach: the importance of attention
29:37: How brands can 'get out of the middle lane' and become more distinctive
40:29: Planning through culture, not channels
46:15: Measuring what matters and moving beyond social media
Related articles:
Beyond the black box: The case for anti-ultra-processed planning
Media for planners who give a shit
Templatisation and automation: Is planning losing its edge?

One of the fastest moving parts of the marketing industry is GEO, or generative engine optimisation.
As AI search proliferates on Google, on ChatGPT, on Claude, brands are wanting to influence how results related to them are shown to users. For Google and ChatGPT, that could include through paid advertising, but the organic effort is seemingly just as important, much in the same way that search engine optimisation (SEO) has been.
GEO presents a unique challenge, however. There is currently a relative lack of data flowing from AI companies to brands and agencies; it’s not always clear why and how a large language model decides to reference or pull in information about brands; meanwhile, AI search has led to a decline in clickthrough rates not only to publishers, but also to brand websites, vastly changing the online consumer journey and making it harder to prove exactly how GEO is working.
Amy Banks was recently promoted at Havas Media Network UK to become head of both SEO and GEO.
She spoke to host Jack Benjamin about how she’s developing strategies in GEO for clients and whether or not consumers can really trust what they see in AI search if marketing teams are constantly trying to influence it.
Highlights:
4:02: The evolution of GEO and why data is a limiting factor
9:00: Who is winning the AI search market?
19:25: How GEO is linking with paid search, social and PR
21:38: The impact of declining referral traffic to brand websites
24:47: Does GEO undermine consumer trust in AI search?
Related articles:
AI search is reducing traffic to brand websites — but not sales
Who owns GEO? That’s the wrong question
GEO is an e-bike, not a spaceship

Publishers are not sitting idle as AI companies scrape their websites and cite their content in response to queries without permission. As their business models are turned upside down by sharply declining referral traffic from search, they are fighting back. That starts with understanding precisely how AI companies are scraping their content.
In February, a coalition of leading UK news publishers founded the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights, or SPUR, an effort to develop and formalize a way for AI companies to make use of journalism in a way that protects publishers’ intellectual property.
Dubbed “NATO for news” by FT CEO Jon Slade, the coalition has since rapidly expanded beyond its original founding members, and in June it released what’s known as a draft telemetry standard, an effort aimed at providing the technical foundation and shared language necessary to understand how AI systems use publisher content. With this knowledge, publishers can then start to create informed licensing deals with AI companies.
Alex Springer is the technical lead at the SPUR Coalition.
He spoke with The Media Leader about SPUR’s work, and whether publishers have finally developed the leverage needed to get AI companies to pay fair value for the work they’ve been allegedly stealing.
Highlights:
4:10: Redefining publisher value in the AI era
11:11: The SPUR Coalition: Goals, technical developments, and building co-equal relationships with AI companies
20:01: Can the long tail of the web be protected from AI copyright theft?
26:41: Is the publishing industry being incentivised to improve quality?
35:22: SPUR's draft telemetry standard: what it is and how it works
43:04: What a new marketplace between publishers and AI companies could look like
51:44: Government interventions and development timeline
Related articles:
Telemetry: the key to solving AI’s valuation and measurement crisis
‘The first tremors in an earthquake’: Digital publisher revenues decline 4.6% amid falling referral traffic
How publishers are fighting to protect their copyright from AI companies