Observed Signal · Nov 10, 2026 · Business Update · Source: Adweek · Impact: 1/5 · Sentiment: Positive
Who What Wear Leverages Future Optic for Growth
Who What Wear, a fashion publisher under UK-based parent Future plc, reported double-digit revenue growth in fiscal 2026, in part by selling AI visibility to brands. The company launched Future Optic in 2025, which helps brands appear in AI answer engines. Roughly half of Future's 40+ campaigns through this product ran on Who What Wear. The publisher also bundles editorial across newsletters, podcasts, events, and social video into single partnerships. Cofounder Hillary Kerr and SVP Elizabeth Bagdasarian emphasized the importance of AI visibility, with Kerr noting the company's ability to win in AI as a significant opportunity.
Highlights a publisher finding growth through AI visibility, indicating a new revenue stream for media companies, but limited direct impact on adtech industry.
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Key Takeaways & Evidence Grounding
- Who What Wear reported double-digit revenue growth in fiscal 2026.
- Parent company Future plc launched AI visibility product Future Optic in 2025.
- Approximately half of Future's 40+ AI product campaigns ran on Who What Wear.
- Publisher bundles newsletters, podcasts, events, and social video into single partnerships.
Connected Companies & Entities
“Parent company of Who What Wear; launched AI visibility product Future Optic in 2025.”
Ontology Mapping & Concepts
Related Market Signals & Shifts
Recent verified developments and strategic activity across this market segment.
Future and InfoSum partner to scale privacy-first predictive audience targeting
Future, the global media company behind brands like Tom's Guide, TechRadar, PC Gamer, and Who What Wear, has partnered with InfoSum, a WPP company and leading data collaboration platform, to provide advertisers and agency planners with privacy-first, real-time access to high-intent publisher audiences within their existing workflows. The integration connects Future's predictive audience intelligence engine, Aperture, with InfoSum's privacy-first infrastructure, making Future's first-party audience capabilities available within WPP Open Intelligence, WPP's shared intelligence layer inside WPP Open. Planners can securely match client and Future first-party data to target existing and prospective customers, expand reach to similar audiences, and apply insights to broader campaign planning, including experiential and offline activations. The partnership supports Future's strategy to scale its first-party audience intelligence across major agency and advertiser workflows as demand grows for privacy-first, high-intent publisher data.
Future's Jamie Samuel on AI Disruption, Attribution, and Agentic Buying
In an interview with Mark Challinor, Future's VP of Commercial Product and Go-to-Market, Jamie Samuel, discusses the challenges and opportunities publishers face as AI reshapes discovery, attribution, and media buying. Future prioritizes human-written content and leverages its editorial authority through products like Future Optic, which helps brands improve visibility in AI search. The company also invests in Aperture, a first-party data platform for predictive audience modeling, to move beyond last-click attribution. Samuel predicts that agentic media buying will transform negotiations, and that publishers must adapt by focusing on outcomes, brand differentiation, and consolidation. He emphasizes the need for publishers to disrupt themselves before AI does.
Future Unleashes AI-Powered Helix for Enhanced Ad Campaigns
Future, the publisher with more than 170 specialist media brands, launched Helix — an AI-powered data science and predictive modeling layer on top of its in-house audience platform. Helix replaces the legacy Aperture branding in the U.S. and integrates prior tools (including Advisor) to enable real-time first-party audience segmentation, predictive audience selection and programmatic activation via direct deals and private marketplaces using deal IDs. Future tested Helix across 20 campaigns and reported double-digit increases in click-through rates and improved return on ad spend. The product is aimed at outcome-driven advertisers and integrates brand-lift and third-party measurement vendors; Future will offer tailored performance guarantees and expects Helix to increase adoption of its audience targeting and data-fee revenue.
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