March 16, 2026
The Financial Services category winner at last year’s World Media Awards didn’t get there by chasing impressions. Benish Mahmood, Business Director, Global Partnerships, Publicis Media, whose team led UBS’s ‘Banking is Our Craft’ campaign, joined our Brand Advisory Board meeting to talk about creating a content strategy that cuts through, in one of the most competitive and compliance-heavy sectors in media.
WMG’s Brand Advisory Board (BAB) is an invitation-only group of 20 senior clients that meet regularly to tackle some of the biggest challenges around content-driven international marketing.
As one of our BAB members pointed out, when budgets and resources are stretched, getting a content partnership over the line can be challenging. Clients want reach and numbers; they want to know how many people will see their campaign. Mahmood’s job is to explain, carefully and convincingly, why that’s not always the right approach. Her first challenge is “convincing them that quality content is better than eyeballs.”
Winning that argument isn’t just about presenting the right data. It requires trust. And in the world of content partnerships, that trust has to flow in three directions: between the agency and the client; between the agency and the media partner; and ultimately, between the content and the audience it’s trying to reach. Getting this balance right is what separates a good campaign from an award-winning one.
The agency buffer
“The main thing to understand is that the agency is trying to help both parties – the client and the publisher,” Mahmood said. This involves both project management and crisis management – providing a buffer between the two parties. The agency must juggle the client’s commercial objectives on one side with the practicalities of what media partners can actually deliver on the other.
For clients, that relationship provides confidence. “As a client, it gives me the licence for my decision on why I’m working with a certain media outlet,” said Ebru Ozguc, Group Strategic Marketing Director at Babcock International. “I think agencies play a critical role.”
A three-way partnership
This is particularly important in sectors like financial services, which are heavily regulated. A client needs to be able to justify every media decision internally. The agency’s expertise and track record means the client doesn’t have to become an expert in content partnerships themselves. They can trust that the framework being recommended is the right one; that the partners have been properly vetted; and that the measurement approach will hold up to scrutiny.
On the other side of that triangle, the agency is often managing relationships with multiple media partners, running several partnerships in parallel across different publishers: “We worked with multiple international media outlets , running campaigns simultaneously,” Mahmood said, delivering a coordinated omnipresence that aligns every channel to work in concert, amplifying impact rather than competing for attention.
Keeping those plates spinning – aligning timelines, negotiating terms, maintaining quality across different editorial environments – is work that happens largely out of sight of the client. The agency takes care of the details, so the client doesn’t have to.
Building trust and transparency
None of this works without a willingness on all sides to share information openly, and the group was candid about the fact that this isn’t always easy to achieve. Measurement is as much a relationship challenge as a technical one. Agencies can only deliver against business objectives as far as the data clients are willing to share, and not every client makes that straightforward.
This is one of the places where long-term relationships pay off. A client who trusts their agency will share more. An agency that has proven itself over time will ask the right questions and know how to use the answers. The UBS ‘Banking is Our Craft’ campaign has been running in its current form for roughly a year, with individual partnerships typically lasting four to eight weeks, and some extending to six months – long enough for genuine optimisation to take place.
That said, there is a limit to what any single party can measure in isolation. The most robust picture of campaign performance tends to come from combining agency data with third-party validation and brand perception research.
The 25/75 rule
While measuring high quality content campaigns is more complicated than display advertising, Mahmood explained that Publicis has developed a practical framework that keeps the commercial conversation grounded. For every pound invested in a content campaign, they aim to keep a balance of roughly 25% into production vs 75% into amplification.
“You are roughly investing 25% on production,” Mahmood explained. “The remaining amount is put towards amplification. So that in itself sets up a winning strategy, in that you will get your ROI.”
The ratio also shapes how negotiations with partners are structured. Added value typically comes back as display inventory.
Display and content run simultaneously rather than sequentially, providing the impression numbers that stakeholders need to see, alongside the deeper engagement data that tells the more nuanced story. “It’s not a choice of one or the other,” Mahmood says. “What we try to do is keep a balance.”
Why the story matters
For a wealth management brand like UBS, the objective isn’t to sell a product in the conventional sense. The goal is to deepen relationships, increase their existing assets under management and attract capital from clients who may hold assets elsewhere, people who are not going to be moved by a banner ad, however well-targeted.
“A content partnership like this will likely resonate, especially in the private banking and wealth management space, because the product isn’t transactional based. The service is built on trust and relationships,” said Jamila Saidi, Global Head of Digital Commerce, Culture & Lifestyle at the UK Department for Business and Trade. “This type of content partnership lets you tell the human story, a client’s goals for passing on wealth to the next generation or their philanthropy ambitions, for example. It captures the emotional depth that other channels can’t always do.”
That’s why the three-way relationship matters so much in this sector. The media partner brings the trusted editorial environment and the right audience. The agency brings the strategic and creative framework. The client brings the authentic story. If you take one element away, the whole thing collapses, but together, they create something that none of them could produce alone.
AI and the future of content
The conversation turned to the inevitable question of how content partnerships evolve in a world where audiences are increasingly turning to AI for information. Mahmood explained that Publicis is already using AI to build a proper benchmarking tool based on years of historical campaign data across UK and international partnerships. The goal is to give clients better negotiating power, clearer ROI benchmarking and, ultimately, help them to make better content decisions.
There’s also active work with partners to feed brand-relevant content into LLMs at scale, finding new ways to maintain presence in an environment where the traditional search result is no longer always the first port of call. “We just need to be smart about it,” Mahmood said.
What came through from the discussion is that achieving an award-winning campaign for financial services content is not the work of one party alone. What AI can’t replace is the strong personal relationships created between agency, client and media partners – the bond that comes from knowing who you’re working with, what everyone’s trying to achieve and that you’re all pulling together in the same direction to succeed.
You can find out more about entering the 2026 World Media Awards here.