Our Monthly Round-up of the key marketing pieces for February includes: – six articles, an AI & Media section, the Work, Greetings from Easter Island & our Back to Henley chapter. We’ve been curating these monthly reviews for the last five years now, and they seem to get great feedback – so we will keep going. The marketing landscape this month was dominated by: the rise of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), the Super Bowl LX ad wars, WPP’s restructuring, and the shift toward ‘agentic commerce’. You may have missed some of the articles – they are picked here in one place with links to provide you with the latest marketing thought leadership.

Our February highlights:

1. Our top pick is a report piece from Ciesco, on the 2025 Global M&A Review & 2026 Outlook, covering the Technology, Media & Marketing sectors. The 2025 data reflects a market moving into a more disciplined recovery phase – with deal values rebounding, private equity remaining structurally active, and large-scale strategic transactions returning at the top end. This was a session kindly hosted by Shoosmiths in London, chaired by Chris Sahota – the panel was curated by David Wheldon OBE, we attended with some of the other UK Intermediaries and Adforum’s Herve de Clerck.

Here is the link to the report: https://lnkd.in/eMBpCkMm

2. Secondly, we pick this piece from Mckinsey that appeared at the end of last year, which has attracted a fair amount of discussion titled ‘Past forward: The modern rethinking of marketing’s core’. Gen AI and agentic AI are already accelerating the impact of classic marketing approaches to driving growth, but McKinsey’s State of Marketing Europe 2026 report finds few CMOs are acting boldly.

Here is the link: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/past-forward-the-modern-rethinking-of-marketings-core

3. Thirdly, we came across this piece in Forbes magazine on the 20 Marketing Challenges Leaders are facing this year and how to solve them. Marketing leaders have entered 2026 with no shortage of new tools and opportunities, but also far less certainty about what will actually move the needle. As AI reshapes how brands are discovered, evaluated and measured, many marketers are already grappling with new challenges, from visibility and attribution gaps to decision paralysis and growing audience skepticism. Familiar tactics no longer guarantee results, forcing teams to rethink not just how they execute, but how they define effectiveness in the first place

Here is the link: https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbescommunicationscouncil/2026/02/17/20-marketing-challenges-leaders-are-facing-this-year-and-how-to-solve-them/

4. Fourthly, do you need a full guide to GEO In 2026, If your content isn’t “digestible” for a machine, it’s invisible to the human. Rob Glover has written this guide ‘The 8 Most Influential Content Marketing Trends for 2026’ and it’s most authoritative.

Here is the link: https://www.wordstream.com/blog/2026-content-marketing-trends

5. Fifthly, we have picked this piece from the Drum by Mark Ritson. Marketers are not staying put because they’re happy. They’re staying because a tightening job market, shrinking teams and AI-driven headcount cuts have made leaving riskier than ever.

Here is the link: https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/mark-ritson-the-great-stay-and-the-quiet-collapse-of-the-marketing-job-market

6. Sixthly, we like these new monthly updates from Matthew Gaunt, a fractional Marketeer based in Marlow, and our former Wickes and Majestic client, called Consumer Facing Market Review, they give a good up to date retail perspective of what’s going on.

Here is the link: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/consumer-facing-market-february-review-matthew-gaunt-2voie?

AI: Our AI pick this month is from Stefano Putoni in the Harvard Business Review (Jan-Feb edition) titled ‘AI is upending marketing on two fronts’. Artificial intelligence is driving two overlapping shifts that are reshaping marketing. First, conversational AI is displacing websites and traditional search as the way people learn about products, shrinking traffic, narrowing choice, and forcing companies to rethink visibility when answers are generated rather than clicked. This transition—from search engine optimization to generative engine optimization—favors brands whose information is structured, trusted, and easy for AI systems to synthesize. Second, AI agents are beginning to act as buyers, making purchasing decisions on behalf of humans. As algorithms increasingly evaluate options and transact, marketing must adapt to a world in which the customer may be a machine with its own decision logic, requiring leaders to redesign content, infrastructure, and strategy for both human and algorithmic audiences. https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-is-upending-marketing-on-two-fronts

Media: The marketing agency industry is not experiencing a downturn. It is undergoing a structural reset. For more than seventy years, agency economics were anchored to labour. Revenue scaled with headcount. Margin scaled with leverage. Pricing was framed in hours, retainers, and activity-based scope. That model worked because production was scarce. Strategy required research teams. Creative required studio time. Media optimisation required manual intervention. Reporting required labour-intensive compilation. Effort was visible, measurable, and defensible. In 2026, that scarcity has been materially weakened. Generative AI and automation now perform significant portions of research synthesis, draft copy production, creative expansion, media optimisation loops, reporting automation and data analysis. The constraint that protected labour-based pricing has eroded. https://piscari.com/marketing-agency-reset-2026/

Time for the Work: A bit of a special shout out to the Adforum team for their Business Creative report. The most creative campaigns, brands and agencies by business sector. https://www.adforum.com/business-creative-report

Greetings from Easter Island: We took a short break this month (to travel away for my partner’s birthday) and visited Easter Island – Rapa Nui. A chance to be away from the Middle East conflict, reflect on the start to the year and actually write this review from 41,000 feet over the Southern Pacific Ocean. If you ever get the chance, we highly recommend a visit, a stunning small island  - 4.5 hours flight from Santiago, with outstanding UNESCO archaeological heritage – we viewed the Moai/ statues. As well as being the most remote island from any continent.  It also officially has the most remote bank branch of one of our former client’s – Santander.

Back to Henley: Our fortnightly feature in the Henley Standard continues where we interview local entrepreneurs. It’s called Let’s Get Down to Business. We were delighted this month to interview Chris Goodchild of the Magic Mirror Company. https://www.henleystandard.co.uk/news/home/704333/award-winning-photo-booth-supplier-for-events.html Details at: www.thebestmagicmirrors.co.uk

If you’d like to discuss how these insights can apply to your organisation, we’d love to set a meeting in the diary. If you’re a leader thinking about the future & looking to review your agencies, we should be talking, not all our reviews – go to a pitch, we always advise on the best way forward.

Kind regards,

Will