OMAR OAKES
Omar Oakes is a senior journalist, editor, columnist and event moderator with over a decade of expertise in the advertising and media industry. He was founding editor of The Media Leader, led its launch and US expansion, and built it into a leading industry publication. His TML column was nominated for the prestigious BSME B2B Columnist of the Year 2024 award. He is now a freelance writer and commentator and founder of oomph., a marketing consultancy for advertising and media businesses.
LATEST ARTICLES
30 Nov 2025
By absorbing Interpublic, Omnicom becomes the world’s biggest agency group but also its biggest target. In a market where scale forces prices down and clients have the upper hand, this acquisition won’t fix the problem. It accelerates it.
Disney quietly announced something radical: letting fans create their own short-form IP on Disney+. But it exposes just how defensively the rest of the industry has been playing.
03 Nov 2025
On the eve of The Future of Media London, the 'present' of media is a mess of fake video, AI slop and endless content. Can we build a future where trust is not only measured, but traded?
20 Oct 2025
The UK advertising industry continues to measure the wrong market. It’s time to stop ignoring the long tail and start helping it thrive.
Perverse agency-client incentives write media plans; evidence only gets to annotate, says Omar Oakes.
One side of the Atlantic is hollowing out what makes its media culture special; the other is fighting to preserve it.
Advertisers should be dismayed. Instead, Google’s victory in court proves how deeply our industry has normalised monopoly.
Social platforms promised reach. What they delivered was dependence, collapse and lost audiences. Media owners, advertisers and agencies now face the same trap with AI.
11 Aug 2025
What does it say about confidence in our industry that we still have to give marketers guidance about how to run fair pitch processes?
28 Jul 2025
TV has earned trust because its numbers are verified, scrutinised and benchmarked. Social media? Not so much. Google needs to decide where YouTube stands.
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