Media Buying Briefing: Production and media squeeze lead brands to run campaigns for longer

The tendency isn’t reserved for Super Bowl work. Chip brand Lay’s is currently running a World Cup ad campaign that began in December and continues until the tournament’s end in July. While the brand might have chosen a briefer run time in the past, that would have been a “missed opportunity”, according to Alexis Porter, vp of marketing for international foods at Lay’s.

Instead, her team chose to “elevate it beyond just ‘surprise and delight’,” to encompass fans’ anticipation of the soccer tournament across eight months.

The X factor

One factor influencing CMOs to keep campaign creative running for longer seems to be their increasing reliance on star power. Almost two-thirds (63%) of this year’s Super Bowl ads featured one or more celebrity talents this year, according to TV measurement company iSpot. The ‘No Lay’s, No Game’ World Cup campaign featured David Beckham, Steve Carrell and Lionel Messi.

Neither soccer stars nor the likes of Emma Stone come cheap; XR data showed that brand spending on celebrity talent rose to $348.6 million in the first quarter of 2026, a 25% increase on the same period in 2025. And this at a time when marketers are looking to be as careful as possible with ad budgets.

But that’s because marketers yearn for celebs’ ability to command viewers’ attention. Advertisers are increasingly paying to renew their talent rights, enabling them to run ads with big names for longer. Two-fifths (40%) of Super Bowl brands chose to renew with their star talent for a full year in 2025, per XR.

Between falling movie fees and the twin domino effects of the Covid lockdown and 2023 Hollywood writer’s strike, top names are more available and more accessible to brand marketers looking to add glamour to their TV and paid social work. 

But the high fees that celeb talent commands, as well as the rising cost of top-ticket TV spots (the next Super Bowl may well breach the $10 million cost barrier), put additional pressure on production budgets, leading CMOs to try and get the most they can out of creative assets.

They’re doing so while working to find room on (all but flat) marketing budgets for AI investments and experimental channels like ChatGPT. 

At Ogilvy Chicago, managing director Lindsey Deeley told Digiday that demand for “master brand” campaigns that could bear repetition and iteration was rising. “Brands are starting to see that brand meaning actually drives true growth, and yet media budgets have never been more volatile,” she said.

“We’re trying to figure out costs across the ecosystem: media costs, tech, and fee costs,” said Brian Diamond, managing director and new business lead at Canvas Worldwide, a media agency that works with clients like Hyundai and McDonald’s. Production budgets, he said, were one area ripe for squeezing.

‘Everybody is eating out of the same budget’

Other media buyers, however, point to demands from beyond just the TV and star-making industry. Because large campaigns now cover a greater diversity of channels — from linear and streaming TV to digital display, radio and podcast, out-of-home and the wide world of paid social — they require a greater breadth of creative. In turn, CMOs need harder-working hero films and core assets.

Lay’s, for example, is running its World Cup walk-up work across TV, paid social and influencer work in 90 markets.

“It’s largely a reflection of the current budget and performance landscape, which is building towards ‘modular’ creative systems designed to flex and extend,” said Heather Freiser, partner at full service agency Lighthouse Creative.

Olamma Nzeribe-Williams, social activation manager at Media by Mother, said reps from social platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok often recommended brands use a large range of creative assets to guard against user fatigue.

She said that Meta recommends brands deploy 20 to 40 distinct assets on Advantage+ inventory, with each asset deployed for no longer than three weeks; on TikTok, it’s just a fortnight. This “hyper iteration” is required for marketers to make the most of platform audience targeting controls and is driving some brands toward AI-led production techniques. It’s also requiring those celeb-starring hero films to be diced up dozens of different ways.  

“Everybody is eating out of the same budget,” Nzeribe-Williams said.

‘The evidence has been there for a decade’

There are pull factors at play, too. Informed marketers know that long-term, consistent brand campaigns provide greater benefits than similar investments on shorter, conversion-led activity. 

As Sarah Larson, CMO at consumer electronics brand Hisense, put it: “It takes a consumer seven times to hear a message before it sinks in. Why would I ever spend all this money for one moment in time?”

A 2025 Comcast study found that among viewers exposed to an ad twice, rather than just once, unaided brand recall rose 16%, suggesting a clear link between exposure to an ad and brand awareness.

“The evidence has been there for more than a decade,” said Reza Rostampisheh, group strategy director at Pereira O’Dell. “The work of Peter Field and Les Binet and many others has proved that consistency and long-term brand building, in addition to product marketing, delivers the highest business results. Even creative wear-out was challenged by System 1 research and Kantar.” 

In theory, a modular creative approach paired with careful targeting enables marketers to draw from the same creative well without exhausting audiences.

“With algorithms, audience targeting, and the sheer volume of content competing for attention, many consumers may only encounter a campaign intermittently over time,” said Jackie Luchsinger, senior strategist at brand consultancy Redscout. “What feels repetitive internally can still feel fresh externally.”

The evolving economics of media have led marketers to the same point strategists and data scientists have made for years: that marketers should ignore their own fickle taste and be more willing to repeat themselves. Consistency is now cheaper than novelty.

Rostampisheh concluded: “Even if this is coming from a budgetary place, it gives us a great opportunity to build stronger brands.”

Color by numbers

For all the talk of making outcomes the criterion by which marketers and their media agencies invest in media, there’s still a long way to go before it becomes truly workable. A recent study by the Affinity Solutions Outcomes Marketing Council (whose membership includes DoubleVerify, Circana and Lexitas) of 210 marketers and agency execs, found that four-fifths of respondents said they primarily optimize campaigns in-flight using signals other than verified purchase data, and when those decisions are later compared against actual sales outcomes, about 35% don’t match. Some other stats:

• More than two-thirds estimate at least 11% of media budgets are wasted due to optimization lag
• More than one-third believe the waste exceeds 26%
• 91% say platform-reported results are overstated to some degree.

Takeoff & landing

• Havas may not be buying companies as large as its French holdco rival Publicis is, but it’s been no less prolific in the number of purchases it’s made in the last year. The latest example: Havas purchased French corporate influence communications firm Format, which sits at the crossroads of social media, media relations, creators and content.
• WPP Media had quite the week, starting with EssenceMediacom landing Honda‘s European media, encompassing automobile, motorcycle, marine, power products and corporate communications divisions across 16 European markets. WPP Media also brought back veteran Dave Gaines to be global head of planning, coming over from Media by Mother, where he built a media agency from scratch. Finally, Comvergence’s Q1 2026 stats on wins, losses and retentions came out, and WPP Media ranked tops of all the holdcos with $1.5 billion in wins (not including the Honda win above), and $1.3 billion in retentions (although it also lost more business than any holdco, at $819 million).
• Other account moves: Omnicom’s PHD landed coffee and appliance firm DeLonghi‘s media AOR assignment in China … Publicis Media landed media planning and buying duties for Suntory Beverage & Food across Southeast Asia after a review … Independent Collective Measures won media agency duties for fellow Minneapolis-based firm Caribou Coffee.

Direct quote

“[Agencies are] going to have to decide what parts of the stack they own, but I think their technology architecture is going to be a critical component of how they succeed in this new environment.”

—Bob Walczak, MadConnect CEO (and formerly a vp at WPP-owned Xaxis) on fallout from the Publicis/LiveRamp deal, as said to Ronan Shields in an interview.

Speed reading

• Seb Joseph attended the IAB U.K.’s AI summit and heard how WPP’s AI boss Daniel Hulme described the agentic revolution as being in the “teenage sex phase” of development — an innovative way of describing this period of agency growth.
• With Publicis’ surprise purchase of LiveRamp a week ago, Seb Joseph and Ronan Shields covered its ramifications from a few angles, including the reaction by rival holdco Omnicom.
• Sam Bradley chronicled the rise of brand spending on social video, partly due to the practice of amplifying influencer video content on platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.