Marketing is being rewritten in real time. Search is shifting towards AI assistants and social discovery. Retail media is exploding, putting power in the hands of those who own the data. The click is disappearing, replaced by signals like attention, watch-time, and sales lift. Algorithms are optimising spend inside black boxes, while brand, ecommerce and performance teams are converging into new structures.

This keynote rips open the future of marketing: the forces that are reshaping everything, the uncomfortable truths leaders must face, and the bold moves already being made to stay ahead.

What changes when a company is led by someone who has lived and breathed marketing? Hear a CEO who rose from CMO share why customer obsession, creativity and performance thinking are the ultimate leadership edge.

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

A real brand, a real problem, three real options. You vote on the fix at half time  -  then the brand reveals what they actually did and what moved the numbers. It’s fast, honest and packed with takeaways you can steal.

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.

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.

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.

Budgets are flat, targets aren’t. This leaders-only session turns that tension into an operating system for growth. In a candid, peer-led discussion, we’ll decide what to stop, what to double down on, and how to hard-wire evidence, accountability, and speed into the team – without burning people or cash.

Could your channel mix  survive tomorrow’s shocks?

In this high-energy roundtable challenge, you’ll be hit with the short-term ‘shock scenarios’ that could land in the next 12-36 months. Working in teams, you’ll engineer your channel mix to keep performance alive then pitch your performance in a two-minute showdown. The audience votes on the smartest plan.

Attribution Blackout: Privacy updates kill click IDs/view-through; platform MTA goes fuzzy.

Creator Cost Spike: Top creators double rates; whitelisting tightens—do you shift to UGC/affiliates/paid social?

Email Gatekeepers Tighten: Inbox rules change; deliverability dips—how do you hit targets without burning lists?

CTV Dedupe Fail: Cross-app frequency caps break; CAC rises—what’s your CTV + BVOD plan now?

Affiliate Reset: Networks cut last-click windows and ban coupon extensions; where does incremental acquisition come from?

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?

Session info coming soon.

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.

Session info coming soon.

Session info coming soon.

AI, retail search and social discovery are changing the rules: This session shows how to design a channel mix that thrives when search queries vanish and clicks become scarce.

Takeaway: A signal-to-revenue framework to help you connect new signals to growth

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..

Fireside chat: Creator to cart: Inside the ROI Engine

A candid sit-down with a top creator who reliably moves product. We’ll dissect how posts become purchases – offer framing, the first 3 seconds, trust riggers, CTAs and landing-page fit -plus the money mechanics that performance marketers care about. Walk away knowing how to brief, how to position your product and how to prove ROI – so creator spend drives real revenue, not vanity views.

Followed by closing remarks and announcements

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.