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.

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?

Three brands open their playbooks with before/after snapshots: team shape, agency footprint, automation rate, test cadence, creative throughout and CAC/LTV shifts. See exactly what they cut, what they kept, and what they automated to speed up learning and drive down costs – without stalling growth. No hype, just measurable changes and the rituals that made them stick.  

Takeaway: copy-and-paste KPIs, a sequenced transformation plan that avoids capability gaps and an action list to boost velocity, creative output, and profitable growth.

Motion: Advertisers should embrace agency principal media deals as a core buying route

Large agencies are pushing principal media. Advocates say it unlocks sharper pricing, guaranteed access and scaled reach; critics see conflicted incentives, reduced transparency and “mystery network” risk. In this debate, two sides present evidence, face cross-examination, and you vote

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.

Procurement is the new climate battleground in marketing -  and profit lever. This masterclass shows performance leaders how to turn sustainability into results: bake it into supplier and quarterly reviews, clean up your media supply (fewer junk impressions, right frequency, lighter ads), and track carbon per extra sales alongside ROI to expose waste you can cut.

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.

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

Take a seat, grab a bite, and sharpen your edge. In these fast-paced 10-15 minute sessions, our sponsors cut through the noise to share fresh insights, practical strategies, and real-world case studies that will help you think differently about performance marketing. No sales pitches – just concentrated learning you can take back to your team.

Bring your plate. Bring your problem. One topic, one hour, one facilitator – intense peer problem-solving with clear, do-it-now next steps.

Roundtable 1:

Build the Model or Prove the Lift?

When to trust open-source MMM vs private experiments; agree the evidence bar, calibration rules, and who owns the budget call.

Roundtable 2:

Inbox, Same Sends, More Revenue

Trade tactics to double revenue per subscriber via deliverability, segmentation, lifecycle flows and offers—plus the holdouts that prove it.

Roundtable 3:

Walled Gardens vs Open Web: Spend the Next £

Compare reach, cost, data rights, risk and incrementality; leave with simple allocation rules and a split-test plan.

Roundtable 4

DOOH That Pays: 30-Day Proof 

Design a fast, clean DOOH test and agree the killer metric and what would earn a budget bump.

Session info coming soon.

Session info coming soon.

Session info coming soon.

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.

A practical, hands-on session on building experiments that actually move the number. 

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.

Session info coming soon.

Session info coming soon.

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.

Motion: Retail media should be treated as a primary brand-building channel – earning a meaningful share of upper-funnel budgets alongside TV and online video. 

Advocates of retail media  argue that by the end of 2025, it  will surpass TV in ad spend. But should it?

Proponents argue retail media promises the “triple-win”: brand lift, closed-loop proof, and proximity to purchase - making it worthy of upper-funnel budgets alongside TV and online video. Detractors counter that it lacks unduplicated reach, throttles storytelling, locks budgets into walled gardens and risks being more of a profit illusion than a profit engine.

In this fast-paced debate, two sides go head-to-head. Presenting hard evidence on whether retail media deserves its meteoric rise. Expect sharp cross-examination, live audience polling and a CFO-ready checklist for validating ROI before you sign off spend..

This discussion explores how creator content actually drives conversions. We’ll break down the mechanics behind turning posts into purchases — from offer framing and the crucial first three seconds to trust signals, CTAs and landing-page fit. The panel will also lift the lid on the mechanics that matter: what creators need to perform, what brands need to measure, and how both sides work together to deliver real, repeatable ROI.

What happens when innovation moves from buzzword to business impact? In this case study, discover how one brand harnessed emerging technology to reimagine the way campaigns are built, delivered and measured.

Join us to find out what happens when marketing gets smarter through innovation: the breakthroughs, the surprises and the practical lessons you can take back to transform your next campaign.

Session info coming soon.