Farhann Cachra, Commercial Strategy Director, Global, explores how, despite increasingly fragmented and personalised media consumption, audiences continue to seek shared experiences, trusted media and meaningful human connection.
2026 will go down as the year when AI sat inside most of our workflows, doing in seconds what used to take a team a week. But a faster answer isn’t necessarily a better one, and knowing which question was worth asking in the first place is still down to us. That’s the lens I want to bring to Making Sense’s 8th edition. It’s easy, as a media owner, to just scan the charts for who’s climbed and who’s slipped. But I’ve come to see them less as a ranking of winners and losers, and more as an invitation to understand the people, behaviours and needs sitting behind the numbers.
Together apart
The other side of the changing media consumption leaderboard is an audience fragmenting across lots of places. Media has become more personalised and more likely to be consumed alone. TouchPoints shows the share of commercial media consumed alone has climbed from 40% to 44% since 2015, up 21% among 16-34s. Personalisation risks becoming isolation, and with it an atomised society and a propensity to feed an individualised culture.
The human need for collective experience hasn’t shrunk. It’s just been squeezed into fewer moments.
At the same time, the human need for collective experience hasn’t shrunk. It’s just been squeezed into fewer moments. That scarcity is precisely what makes them so valuable. Audio understands this instinctively. Whether it’s a breakfast show, a podcast, or the soundtrack to a car journey, it still gathers us, entertains us and connects us. In an age engineered for the individual, audio remains stubbornly, quietly communal.
Tightly held rituals
The report shows we are splitting our media time across more platforms and devices than ever. Concurrent media use continues to rise, and smartphones now take an equal 34% share of commercial media time to the TV set. Even our downtime is overloaded. Living in the modern world with all its economic uncertainty, demands on our time and pressure to make the most of everything can sometimes feel like a full-time job. Audiences are overwhelmed, overstimulated and under pressure. What is emerging is the importance of rituals to help us navigate this mental fatigue. These rituals, moments of service to ourselves, are more tightly held than ever. Whether that’s finding some solace on the school run playing the Bong Game on Capital Breakfast, getting legs day done with your favourite dance mix or catching up with a daily events podcast whilst cooking dinner, rituals are nourishing moments of daily reinvigoration. Audio is a big part of that.
Shared experiences
Sometimes this industry talks itself into a radical new future ecosystem, one where power has moved wholesale from institutions to individuals, curators to creators, mass culture to monoculture. It’s not that simple. Commercial media still accounts for the majority of all curated media consumption in Britain, even as new ad-funded formats continue to grow rapidly alongside it. Outdoor remains the only medium consistently exceeding 90% weekly reach, further proof that genuine mass reach hasn’t disappeared. The reality is closer to what this report itself calls a layering effect: new ideas built on top of existing ones, not replacing them. Everything still has its place.
We see this constantly at Global. Millions turned to LBC to watch and listen to the first speech from the UK’s newest Prime Minister. Around the same time, Heart, Britain’s biggest commercial radio brand, made Joy Haythorne the country’s newest millionaire, with more than four million people tuning in for the reveal and celebrating live on air. People continue to come together en masse for a shared experience with quality media they trust.
So don’t just read the charts. Dig into them, internalise them and make them meaningful to your challenges. The data might suggest platform churn. Human judgement tells us about the stories underneath and the opportunities to connect. Some of them may have always been there hiding in plain sight. This is where true progress lies and something only we humans can bring to the game.
Farhann Cachra is Commercial Strategy Director at Global
This article was first published in "Making Sense - The commercial media landscape (8th edition)" - download the free report
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Last updated 17 September 2026