British and European marketers trim ad spend in the face of Trump’s tariffs

After just over 100 days in office, Donald Trump’s presidency has left U.S. advertisers’ heads spinning. The impact of his tariff policies, however, are being felt far beyond the 50 states.

Global research outfit WARC and the Advertising Association today (April 30) cut their U.K. ad spend forecast in the face of stagnant economic growth and — you guessed it — tariffs.

Ad spend is expected to rise by 6.3% in 2025 to reach £45.2 billion ($60 billion), 0.6% less than January predictions had suggested. According to James McDonald, director of data, intelligence and forecasting at WARC, it’s a consequence of low economic confidence, businesses reacting to tax rises, which kicked in at the start of the month, and the tariffs.

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As AI lawsuits mount, publishers still struggle to block the bots

Another publisher is taking OpenAI to court.

Ziff Davis is the latest media company to sue the tech company over copyright infringement, but the lawsuit highlights a broader reality: Publishers still have no reliable way to stop AI companies from scraping their content for free.

Despite growing legal pressure, the web has already been mined. Large language models like ChatGPT were trained on vast amounts of internet data, much of it scraped before publishers began pushing back. And while tools like robots.txt files, paywalls and AI-blocking tags have since emerged, many publishers admit it’s very difficult to enforce control across every bot — especially as some ignore standard protocols or mask their identities.

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