War does not pause for marketing plans, but it rewrites plans. For better or worse, the world continues to spend.
That’s clear from conversations with advertising executives since the US and Israel attacked Iran.
In the second week of the war, all the noise was about oil and gasoline prices. Neither seems like a marketing problem until you remember that oil affects packaging costs, logistics, and the margins of some advertisers around the world. If all three tighten, prices will follow. The whole chain ends in the same place: higher prices drive inflation, inflation drives higher interest rates, shoppers become tighter, businesses become cautious and advertising budgets are squeezed.
That’s why advertising executives are watching closely.
Oli Green, CEO of independent agency Holdco Brave Bison, summed it up when I spoke to him recently: “What’s happening in the Middle East probably won’t be good for business in the coming weeks and months, but we’ll see what happens.”
That’s about all anyone can prepare for at this point.
The region’s advertising market (digital advertising is worth about $7 billion, according to IAB MENA) has survived enough crises to know how to avoid paralysis. While messaging is being recalibrated, campaigns are being adjusted rather than canceled. But that’s only part of the picture. The more exposed category is export spending, which drains government funds, airlines and tourism advertising, and is far more sensitive to conflict developments.
Add in energy prices, supply chain pressures, softening consumer confidence, and other factors that move faster than any media plan can account for.
That doesn’t mean marketers are panicking. The nature of ad spend now being spent on online channels that can be adjusted in real time means that a wait-and-see attitude is easier to maintain than ever before.
An observer might look at this and think that the following is obvious. Exit the brand, double down on performance, and push spending to the closest thing to a sale. This is a script that marketers have run before. Whether this conflict follows the same plot is another matter entirely.
“If you look at the history of capitalism and advertising since World War II, economics has always determined politics,” said Daniel Knapp, chief economist at IAB Europe. “Now it’s the other way around. Politics determines the economy.”
In other words, the contingency plans that most marketers rely on are built for a world that no longer exists: a world where rational economics dictates the rules. The Middle East wars are the latest symptom, not the cause. And with so many variables still in flux, even those closest to the numbers are reluctant to call it out.
Take forecasters Madison and Wall, for example. They are attempting to revise their forecasts upward, but at the same time caution that the economic assumptions on which they are based predate Iranian escalation.
“The build-up of uncertainty and headwinds around geopolitics, inflation, labor and tariffs will ultimately impact growth,” said Luke Stillman, managing director at Madison & Wall.
This goes some way to explaining why the optimism that advertising executives had for 2026 is always qualified. The years since the pandemic have made it clear that the world’s relationship with advertising is no longer simple. The stage is set for a bumper year with the FIFA World Cup, Winter Olympics, and US midterm elections. The same was true of small print. The idea was that the build-up of geopolitical, inflationary and policy pressures would eventually find a market, and that trouble always begins in the second half of the year.
John Murphy, Coca-Cola’s president and chief financial officer, echoed this earlier this week at Citi’s Global Consumer and Retail Conference, saying, “This is just one example of the need for actionable strategies. And this is another example of why we continue to talk about having an all-weather approach to dealing with this world we live in.”
This is how those holding the purse strings are thinking about this moment. For them, overseas disputes boil down to a checklist of costs, currency risks, and supply chain contingencies. As always, commerce is finding ways to continue.
“The other thing is the impact on customers,” Harmit Singh, chief financial and growth officer at Levi Strauss & Company, said at the same Citi conference. “We’re still in the early stages, so we’ll keep an eye on that space. But we have the product momentum and the execution momentum, so we should be able to withstand that.”
Numbers you need to know
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37%: Percentage of young streaming subscribers who say they have canceled one or more streaming subscriptions due to subscription fatigue.
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PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.