Grace Miller, Head of Failure & Experimentation at Flight Story, lifts the lid on a role built for today’s pace. She’ll unpack how a failure-first mindset turns risk into learning, learning into decisions, and decisions into measurable performance.

Jamie Laing breaks down how personality and purpose aren’t fluff, they’re powerful drivers of brand performance when used authentically.

AI is now running significant amounts of media execution inside performance marketing channels. Whether its budget allocation and what products get exposure or optimisation that happens continuously, in the main its' now driven by AI systems rather than people, but even though the mechanics have changed, most operating models around performance media haven’t.

In this session, we look at what happens when leading retailer does change. Drawing on real in-housing experience with B&Q, we look at how accountability shifts when execution is automated, what work around digital media moves closer to the retailer (versus legacy approaches) and how teams must evolve from managing campaigns to setting direction, improving decisions and measurement, plus aligning media with Finance and Trading.

Its not a session about tools. It’s about accountability and ownership, the structure put around media and whether your organisation is built for how performance marketing actually works today.

Most brands talk about putting the customer first in the mission statement, they talk about personalisation and omnichannel but real personalisation that ads value is lacking. The truth? Brands and teams are stuck between meeting targets and having the freedom to think more broadly to question what their customers want and expect from them.

This keynote will show real life examples, media mistakes, future thinking, and steps you can take to start the journey.

Motion: Performance marketing should lead enterprise strategy – owning the growth P&L, budget allocation, on both short – and long-term value creation.

Performance marketing has claimed the lion’s share of budgets, the spotlight in the boardroom, and the driver’s seat in growth strategy. But can it really run the company? Or does an obsession with clicks, conversions, and short-term ROI put long-term brand, profit and customer trust at risk?

In this fiery keynote debate, CMOs, CFOs, brand leaders and performance chiefs go head-to-head on the future balance of power. Is performance marketing ready to lead the enterprise – or is it destined to stay in its lane?

This talk explores how Hookflash and TALA are using experimentation and incremental optimisation to build on the success of a recent website redesign. The session demonstrates how a structured testing approach is driving ongoing improvements in conversion performance, while also enhancing paid media results. The case study offers practical insight into how experimentation can amplify the impact of both website and media investment.

innocent break down how long-term trust and short-term performance work together. Discover how planned social, community building and consistent brand voice drive engagement, loyalty and measurable results.

A fireside with tails.com exploring how influencers are moving beyond brand awareness to become a core part of performance marketing. With better data, attribution and creator-commerce models, influencer campaigns now drive measurable outcomes—from conversions to long-term ROI. We’ll discuss why influencers deserve a permanent place in the mix and how brands can harness them for both creativity and accountability.

In 2026, winning on Meta isn’t about bold ideas or isolated tests. It’s about surviving ruthless learning phases, feeding the algorithm diversified creative at speed, and knowing which formats Andromeda will actually amplify.

In this session, Brave Bison’s creative strategy director, Isabel Villadolid is joined by Meta’s agency partner Alix Sutherland to unpack what Andromeda needs in order to learn, and why most in-house setups struggle to deliver it. 

We’ll explore why audience-led creative diversification is now non-negotiable, why doing it well is harder than it looks, and how leading brands are building creative engines that combine AI pattern recognition with human creative judgement. 

We’ll close by showing how AdStudio helps teams move faster than traditional AI tools, with real-world results from our clients.

Your marketing is actively ignoring 1.8 billion people, a population bigger than China and 96% of your competitors are making the same mistake.

This panel is your wake-up call. Inaction is costing you 25% of the global population. 

It's time to fix this... especially when every $1 spent on doing so yields a $9 return.

Performance marketing claims to know the consumer better than anyone – but what if everything we measure blinds us to what really drives behaviour? This provocative keynote exposes the messy, irrational, and often invisible forces behind how people shop, search, and decide.

When performance is under the microscope, success isn’t about endless new creative - it’s about making what you have work harder. In this fireside chat, St Pierre Groupe breaks down how measurement, analysis and disciplined media planning across TV and social can stretch impact, extend the life of campaigns and drive results without constant optimisation. A frank conversation about proving value, selling smarter investment to the board, and creating momentum when spend has to earn its place.

The wrong creator mix wastes millions. The right one builds resilience, credibility and measurable ROI. In this interactive session, you’ll work with peers to design a creator portfolio under real-world pressures: budget constraints, brand safety risks, rising talent costs and the shifting patterns of consumer trust.

You’ll stress-test your decision, see how others would play the same hand, and walk away with a framework to allocate spend across celebrity, macro, micro, and community creators – and prove performance at every tier.

Takeaways:

• How to engineer a balanced creator portfolio that maximises ROI and minimises risk
• A framework to anticipate volatility, from creator dropouts to inflated fees
• Peer-tested strategies that connect creator partnerships directly to incremental business growth

Creative workflows are collapsing under pressure. This keynote reveals why creative has become the constraint in modern marketing and how creative automation is reshaping production, optimization, and scale. Learn how to turn creative from a bottleneck into a competitive advantage.

In an era of AI-generated content, perfection is no longer the benchmark for success – it’s a barrier to connection. Join Vox Pops International and Cvent as they reveal why the most impactful content isn’t always the polished, perfected piece. They’ll share real-world examples and give practical insights on how teams can maximize time in production and repurpose content to make budgets go further.

This session draws on new research from across the advertising ecosystem to reveal how, often unintentionally, we’ve created walled gardens that limit our view of highly valuable audiences. Through a thought‑provoking, interactive format, we’ll unpack the impact on planning and performance and offer practical ways to broaden reach beyond the usual boundaries. We’ll also explore the commercial opportunity and actionable steps to that enable advertisers, agencies, and media owners to benefit whilst serving the needs of the audience.

Discover how optimised product feed serves as the foundational asset for all your high-performing campaigns. In this session, learn practical strategies to maximise ad visibility and profitability across key platforms, including Google, Meta, and TikTok.

We will demonstrate how leveraging smart automation and real-time intelligence ensures data accuracy and scale. 

What was once experimental is now one of the most powerful drivers of reach, trust, and growth for digital audiences. Budgets have scaled, expectations have risen, and visibility is permanent. Influence no longer switches on and off. It compounds in public, every day. Yet despite that shift, the way most organisations still run the channel hasn’t materially changed. Creators are chosen based on familiarity rather than likelihood. Markets operate in silos. Performance is explained after the fact. Spend is justified emotionally instead of structurally. This is not a creative failure. It’s what happens when a channel becomes core before the infrastructure exists to support it.

Session info coming soon.

Session info coming soon.

Digital ad spend is consolidating fast. As budgets concentrate into a handful of dominant platforms, costs are rising, competition is intensifying and incremental reach is shrinking. If this trend continues, just 17% of spend could remain on the open internet by 2027.

That’s not just an industry shift - it’s a performance risk.

The open web is the real opportunity for untapped audiences and incremental growth. It’s where brands discover new customers, achieve efficient scale, and drive measurable ROI beyond saturated platforms. Rebalancing investment isn’t ideological - it’s a smarter, more sustainable path to performance

In today’s performance-driven landscape, creative is the single biggest lever for advertising success. But winning requires more than one great idea. Brands need to launch large volumes of high-quality creatives, test and identify the top performers, and optimise quickly - all within weeks, not months. Traditional creative intuition alone can’t keep pace. The answer lies in applying data at every stage of creative production and using automation to generate insights fast.

This panel brings together leading voices from brand, performance, and technology teams to unpack how data and creativity can work together to deliver results at scale. We’ll share real campaign examples to illustrate the volume of creative needed and the performance uplift achieved. Using live audience polling, we’ll invite attendees to choose which creatives they think would have performed best - then reveal the actual winners, showing how data often challenges intuition.

We’ll also explore the tensions between brand and performance teams - from creative consistency to speed of execution - and hear how leading brands are bridging that gap to drive growth.

Key takeaways for the audience

• Why creative is now the primary driver of campaign performance.
• How to use data and automation to scale creative production effectively.
• Real examples of creative testing at volume and what “winning” creatives look like.
• Practical lessons on aligning brand and performance teams for better outcomes.

AI is now writing copy, building creative, optimising bids, and deciding what your audience sees. So what’s left for marketers? Marketing is the practice of one human talking to another human. How can marketers incorporate AI without sacrificing connection?

Amy Wright (Automated Creative) is joined by Charlotte Ford (Monzo) and Tom Fenwick Smith (Three) for an honest conversation about what AI is actually changing in marketing, and where human intelligence will be the mark of differentiation.

Expect real examples, uncomfortable questions, and practical insight into:

– Where AI genuinely adds value (and where it doesn’t)

– What marketers should never hand over to machines

– How brands can stay distinctive in increasingly algorithmic environments

– The evolving role of performance marketers in an AI-first world

This session goes beyond hype to examine how AI is changing not just what we do, but how it’s an opportunity to completely redefine marketing itself.

From helpful co-pilots to autonomous agents that brief, build, buy, test and optimise – marketing is about to run at machine speed. This panel cuts through the hype to show where agentic AI is already moving the needle.

• Where will agents add real value first?
• How should we prove agent impact?
• What guardrails keep pace without killing speed?
• What team model do we need?

What does it take for a mobile game to become a cultural force in a world where attention moves at the speed of a swipe?

Mobile gaming now accounts for nearly half of the global games market, yet very few titles endure. Candy Crush Saga is one of the rare outliers - 13 years on, it still draws millions of players every month. Its longevity and brand strength come from a player-first philosophy that builds marketing directly from the game out.

In this keynote, Luken Aragon, VP Marketing for Candy Crush Saga, takes the audience inside the strategy that keeps a global icon feeling new. He’ll show how insight-driven, impact-focused marketing fuels re-engagement, strengthens the core experience and continually reminds players why they fell in love with the game in the first place.

Candy Crush Saga stays relevant by showing up in the cultural worlds that players are already passionate about. From Candy Crush All Stars, its global player tournament, to music collaborations with artists like the Jonas Brothers, Kimbra and Thundercat, and a first-of-its-kind live sports partnership with the LA Clippers and the Intuit Dome - each activation brings the joy of play into culture, and brings players right back in.

Attendees will learn how creativity and community - anchored in product - can sustain long-term relevance, turn a casual game into a cultural phenomenon and keep millions of players coming back for more.

The “TikTok made me buy it” meme may feel old – but the platform has moved from hype to closed-loop commerce and repeatable playbooks. In this high-octane debate, brand leaders and performance chiefs test whether TikTok truly creates lasting demand and LTV or just short-lived bumps. Expect real cases, tough cross examination and a live vote.

Paid media teams are optimising faster than ever, but are they optimising for the right thing? As platforms push EPC, conversion value and automated bidding, performance leaders are being forced to make strategic choices about what success really looks like.

This panel brings together senior digital media leaders to debate how metrics shape budget decisions, where platform optimisation helps or hinders true performance, and how to balance short-term efficiency with long-term growth.

Your audience doesn’t move through a neat, traditional marketing funnel anymore; they jump between multiple channels, such as TikTok, Amazon, group chats and AI search, often to make the same decision. Today, sustainable brand growth won't come from spend alone, but from a commitment to being discoverable when it matters. Join Esme, Head of Marketing at Silver Cross, and Lydia, VP, Strategy at Journey Further, for a conversation about how this iconic brand evolved from a retailer to an essential helping hand for parents, resulting in a two-fold outcome of distinct commercial results and improved brand discovery. And most importantly, how you can do the same for your brand in a world where the gatekeepers to growth have changed.

We are entering the “Click-Less Era” — a digital environment where consumers increasingly make decisions without ever clicking a traditional link. AI search overviews, generative engines (ChatGPT, Gemini), voice assistants, social commerce, in-app checkout, retail media networks, CTV, and walled gardens are compressing the customer journey into closed ecosystems.

Discovery, consideration, and conversion are happening inside platforms. The traditional affiliate model — built on last-click attribution, trackable URLs, and browser-based cookies — is being disrupted.

For affiliate and partnership marketing, this shift creates a fundamental tension:

• Affiliate marketing was built for the open web

• Commerce is moving into AI interfaces and closed environments

The Core Challenge

When users don’t click, there is no referral link, no cookie, no deterministic attribution and no clear partner reward mechanism.  This creates measurement gaps, incentive misalignment, and revenue leakage for brands and publishers.

This session will discuss the challenges and methods to overcome them.

Content demands are exploding, and fragmented systems are draining budgets, slowing workflows, and eroding brand consistency. This session explores how leading teams are turning chaos into clarity by centralising assets, integrating product content, and leveraging AI across the content lifecycle. Attendees will learn why operational maturity, not just more tools, is the key to scaling effectively. We’ll share practical strategies for building connected environments that reduce friction, accelerate production, and deliver measurable ROI. Walk away with a roadmap for transforming your content operations into a growth engine.

• See how you stack up against Canto’s latest State of Digital Content findings

• Hear real-world insight + join the conversation on improving productivity & content ROI 

• Workshop - Walk away with a starting point to move beyond hype and deliver real business impact

WaterWipes has seen the growing complexity of media, channels and fragmentation lead to dashboards, data paralysis and getting lost in the detail. This became a blocker in conversations with the c-suite - not speaking their language or viewing the enterprise through their eyes.

Through internal efforts and collaboration with agency partners, WaterWipes has moved from a performance dashboard to more meaningful metrics at a c-suite level - recognising the need for both, but acknowledging that the latter drives greater business impact. This shift has brought media into the boardroom, creating ripple effects across the business.

- Audience Intelligence: Instead of just looking at follower counts, AI analyses demographic and psychographic data to ensure a creator's audience actually matches the brand's target.

- Historical Performance: AI can predict how a creator might perform based on their previous campaign data.

- Content Screening: AI can scan an influencer's entire history for risky or inappropriate themes to ensure they align with a brand's corporate values. 

- Workflow Automation: Tools can draft personalised outreach pitches, generate content briefs, and suggest optimal posting times for maximum engagement. 

But if all brands and agencies use AI for this, are they in danger of going back to the same creators time and time again. Does that prejudice DEI creators? Does all content start to look the same because that style worked in the past? How far do you trawl back through past content looking for offence? How large does the offence have to be to matter? If you automate messaging inc. content briefs does that risk removing the human - to human element between brand and creator?

As brands scale, the risk isn’t slowing down, it is blending in. This fireside chat looks at how modern brands protect their identity, build culture into growth strategy, and stay distinctive while operating in highly performance-led environments.

This exciting session will delve into the innovative strategies and techniques we’ve been leveraging to thrive in the AI-driven landscape.

What’s the biggest marketing risk you’ve ever taken? What went wrong, and what saved it? This interactive after-party panel invites delegates to confess their marketing sins and successes, with our panellists offering perspective, advice and commiseration in equal measure.