Arrive early to get checked in and fuel up with a selection of morning treats and fresh brews before we dive into the days content

Join our Campaign leaders as they outline the day, set the goals, and officially spark the conversation.

Grace Dent holds one of the most unique vantage points in the UK media landscape. As a Guardian restaurant critic, the beloved host of the smash-hit podcast Comfort Eating, and now the new face of a massive BBC institution as a lead judge on MasterChef, she successfully navigates both the scaled power of mainstream television and the deep, hyper-engaged promise of digital audio. In this opening keynote Interview, we unpack her journey to discover what brands and media planners can learn from the talent’s perspective. How do you build genuine connections across wildly different platforms, and what is the secret to a successful brand-creator collaboration that actually delivers results?

The Value of Human Taste: Moving beyond algorithms to understand what actually moves people. Grace explores how leaning into raw nostalgia, vulnerability, and unapologetic joy (the core of Comfort Eating) creates a far deeper connection with an audience than polished, corporate perfection.

Taking on the Institution: A candid look at stepping into the spotlight as the new lead judge of MasterChef. What does it take to connect with a legacy, mass-market TV audience today, and how does the intense pressure of a prime-time broadcast compare to the intimacy of the podcast studio?

The Creator-Brand Partnership: An unfiltered conversation on how sponsors can best work with talent to achieve their objectives. Instead of demanding rigid talking points, how can brands collaborate with creators to integrate their messaging in a way that feels authentic, entertaining, and commercially effective?

AI is rewriting the rules of brand discovery. What happens to your brand equity when a consumer just asks for "the best"? This session is a practical look at the future, exploring how brands must adapt their strategies for building trust, recognition, and reputation in an algorithmic age.

• Branding in the algorithmic age: how AI will alter brand reputation and visibility.
• What "brand building" means now: exploring the new levers for building trust when discovery is automated.
• The new competitive landscape: how emerging brands can use AI to challenge legacy players.

A scheduled pause to engage with our on-site activations and connect with colleagues. Coffee and light refreshments will be served.

The shift from a broadcast-led to a networked, algorithm-driven media system is impacting audience behaviour at scale, but with the pace of change accelerating so rapidly, few marketers have stopped to step back and look at the big picture. 

This session will share the findings of brand new qualitative and quantitive research into the beliefs and behaviours of UK audiences raised on algorithmic media: where trust is shifting, how people are pushing back against passive feeds, and what this means for brands trying to build influence in fragmented environments. 

In a world where media performance shifts by the hour, sticking to a rigid media plan is leaving money on the table. This session explores how letting technology make smarter, in-flight decisions unlocks real performance gains and what that means in practice for advertisers today.

• The Case for Flexibility: Why moving away from fixed media plans and trusting in-flight optimization leads to measurable performance improvement.
• What Can Still Be Optimized Right Now: A practical look at where advertisers have the most headroom to improve, cutting through the noise on topics like MMM and attention metrics to focus on what actually moves the needle.
• From Theory to Reality: A candid conversation with a brand that has made the shift, sharing what the journey looked like and what results it delivered.

In a fragmented media landscape, growth no longer comes from reach alone. Join Formula E and Fifty to explore how challenger brands are using AI-powered audience intelligence to build fandom, reduce waste, and drive measurable business outcomes. Through a real-world case study, discover how a modern Audience Operating System helps marketers turn attention into advocacy, improve media efficiency, and create long-term commercial resilience. 

In a world of constant acceleration and fragmented attention, few opportunities hold as much potential as the collective shared experience of the big sporting events. Captivating an unparalleled scale and diversity of audiences, the TV screen becomes the center of attention. In this session, Minai Bui and Lauren Barnett from SamsungAds will explore the phenomenon and highlight how brands can leverage these crucial moments.

A global event is one of the biggest media investments a brand can make. This panel deconstructs the how-to of turning that spend into tangible business success. We'll explore the media strategies and measurement models needed to justify the investment and deliver results.

• The long-term: How to build a synonymous brand association through decades of media strategy.
• The activation: How to activate a global sponsorship across all media channels, from broadcast and digital to on-the-ground.
• Finding Your Angle: How to tailor a massive global property (like the World Cup) to your specific brand DNA to ensure you drive relevant engagement, not just generic awareness.
• Justifying the investment: The media metrics and ROI models used to prove the value of a massive cultural sponsorship.

The new map isn't just about creators; it's about how they partner with established media. This session explores how traditional media owners and new map creator-brands are moving from competition to collaboration, building integrated ad products and media strategies that brands can't build alone.

• A how-to on partnership: how are broadcasters and creators co-producing new media formats?
• The agency's new role: how to act as the strategic broker between these two worlds.
• The new media buy: what do these integrated, multi-platform ad products look like?

Out of Home is no longer just defined by how many eyes see a poster. Done right, it creates experiences people notice, talk about and remember. Few brands have championed this evolution more than PepsiCo.

In this session, PepsiCo and Talon unpack how they've transformed OOH from sideline support to centre stage, elevating it to an always-on channel with audience data at its heart and creativity that serves up the right message, in the right place, at the right time to deliver unmissable experiences.

They'll also reveal how effectiveness is built in from day one, connecting audience insight, creative testing and robust measurement to prove OOH's true impact. Including Pepsi MAX's best-ever UK ROI.

Packed with practical examples and honest learnings, this is the story of what happens when OOH steps out of the shadows and into the spotlight as a leading engine for impact and growth.

Join us for lunch and a chance to build on the morning’s conversations. This extended break offers a dedicated space for informal networking and professional exchange.

Paid media alone can’t buy relevance anymore. The brands growing fastest are building smarter ecosystems, where creators, communities, content and commerce work together to drive momentum. This session explores how brand growth is shifting from campaigns to connected systems, and what it takes to build relevance that lasts. 

Beyond Paid Media: Why reach and frequency are no longer enough, and how influence, participation and platform native behaviours are reshaping growth.

The New Growth Engine: How creator ecosystems, social commerce and community advocacy are accelerating brands from obscurity to relevance in months, not years.

From Campaigns to Systems: What it takes to build a connected ecosystem across content, identity, trust and commerce and how paid media amplifies that system rather than leading it.

Proving Long-Term Value: How to design for sustained growth, not just short-term spikes, and what success looks like in an ecosystem driven model

The pertinent topic of trust in advertising is a debate that rumbles on… until now. Join us for an interactive session exploring the value advertisers really place on trust and how significant a factor it should be when building a media plan in increasingly artificial times.

The session will feature a range of view points, with panellists from media agencies, media owners and brands, as they compete in series of challenges and questions.

After every round of challenges and key talking points, the audience will vote on who they believe ‘won’ the round, with their arguments. At the end, one of the panellists will be crowned the Big Trust Debate champion.

Netball is entering a defining new era — with rising fandom, a newly professional league, and growing demand across broadcast and digital platforms.

In this fireside, Sky Media, American Express and UM unpack how they’ve built a partnership designed to go beyond traditional sponsorship — turning a brand platform; ‘Powerful Backing’ into something tangible through the Amex Super Shot Fund, which connects live in-game moments to real investment in grassroots communities.

Together, they explore how a collaboration between media owner, agency and brand can deliver:

• A clear partnership framework (fans, athletes, the game)
• Integrated storytelling across broadcast, digital and social
• A model for authentic, long-term growth in women’s sport.

In an industry currently drowning in AI slop and passive automated feeds, advertisers need to chart a different course. Innovation should serve people, not the other way around. Join Kate Mellett, Head of Creative Strategy EMEA at Snap, to explore the philosophy of Authentic Intelligence; AI that doesn’t just make machines smarter, but makes technology more personal, social, and fun.

This session explores the fundamental shift from traditional storytelling to storyliving. Discover how Augmented Reality and AI are moving beyond the screen to become a participant-led creative language. Learn how to leverage a platform built for conversation, not just content, to ensure your brand fuels the chat.

As brands push harder on performance marketing, many are hitting a ceiling with rising costs and flattening returns. So, what’s going wrong?

In this practical session, brand strategist and marketing effectiveness expert Tom Roach will explore the Performance Plateau - when growth stalls when brands focus too heavily on capturing existing demand and underinvest in creating it — and what it takes to unlock it again.

With fresh perspective informed by recently launched Performance Multiplier research, this session will also show how growth can multiply when channels work together.

Join the Financial Times for a fireside conversation with Sean Kearns, Director of Strategy & Innovation and Graham MacFadyen, Director of Consumer Marketing, as they unpack new research into the sources, signals and voices shaping leadership decision-making today.

Drawing on insights from senior business leaders, the discussion will explore what credibility means in 2026, how decision-makers navigate trust amid the rise of AI and misinformation, and which information sources genuinely influence high-stakes boardroom decisions.

The session will also examine the implications for brands and marketers: how to build enduring audience trust, become a valued source of credible insight, and ultimately earn influence where it matters most.

Somewhere along the way, AI became synonymous with cutting costs and cutting people. That’s a mistake.

In this session, we’re starting a different conversation. One that reframes AI as a tool for growth, not reduction. One that challenges marketers to take responsibility for the future they’re building.

Join us if you believe AI should make things better, not just cheaper.

In a volatile political era, the role of the Political Editor has never been more critical or complex. We bring together the UK’s leading political journalists to discuss how the media landscape has fundamentally shifted. From the rise of TikTok politics to the battle for trust in an AI age, this session explores the vital importance of a robust, funded press and what it means for the wider media ecosystem.

• The Changing Media Map: How political reporting has evolved from the 10 o'clock news to a multi-platform battleground of social feeds, podcasts, and live streams.
• The Trust Premium: Why high-quality journalism remains the most effective and essential context for brand media investment in a world of misinformation.
• The Algorithm vs. The Editor: How political journalism is fighting for visibility in an algorithm-driven world, and why human curation is the ultimate premium media product.

Open bar serving beer, wine, prosecco, soft drinks and mocktails. We will be serving a mix of food styles and street food from across Shelter Hall's iconic 7 kitchens. Including Pizza, Japanese, Mexican, Thai, Barbecue grill and more. An excellent networking opportunity in a relaxed, enjoyable setting, perfectly capping off a productive day at the conference, complete with a DJ.