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
23 Feb 2026
AI is reshaping how brands are discovered, ranked and recommended. If agencies design for algorithms before audiences, they risk diminishing the very influence they claim to sell.
09 Feb 2026
Quibi failed because it sought to launch a mobile-first premium product while remaining anchored to an ad-funded media logic that was already fracturing. The future of short-form won't make the same mistake.
As YouTube blurs the line between platform and broadcaster, Google’s real priority becomes easier to spot.
The real danger of AI isn’t job loss. It’s what disappears when judgment, dissent and cultural texture are treated as inefficiencies to be engineered away.
Omar Oakes assesses what 2025 actually revealed about media agencies and why the usual scorecards are lying to us.
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.
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