This year’s Media360 Challenge invites five industry Rising Stars to compete in the ultimate contest of ideas and creativity. 

Each Challenger will have just five minutes to deliver a persuasive pitch, making a compelling case for why their chosen medium is the greatest at fostering collaboration. 

Prepare to cast your vote for the champion at the end!

This high-level session transforms the stage into an interactive War Room.  We present our panel, a brand, an agency, and a media owner with a live Budget Crisis scenario: the CFO has demanded a 15% cut effective immediately. But they aren't the only decision-makers. You are.

Using live polling, the entire room will vote on what to cut and what to protect. The moderator will challenge audience members to justify their choices, before asking our panel to debate the results. 

Can the industry reach a consensus on how to survive the storm?

• The Defense: How to make the bulletproof C-suite case for protecting brand investment when the board, and the room, is demanding short-term savings.
• The Trade-Off: Navigating the Panic Pivot if the audience votes to shift 20% to performance media, what is the specific long-term cost to brand health?
• The Supply Chain: If we chase cheap efficiency on social platforms, are we inadvertently defunding the quality environments (TV, News) that give us legitimacy?
• The Service Squeeze: A frank look at the human cost and how slashing fees and media spend impact the agency talent and service levels required to actually drive growth?
• The Counter-Attack: Does a pullback in competitor spending create a rare window of media deflation, allowing us to buy premium inventory and market share at a discount?

In a world of marginal gains, where should you focus? We turn the room into a live decision engine to find out. We will present 10 common industry tasks on the big screen, and ask you to vote live: Keep (Human), Automate (AI), or Kill (Waste).

But the vote is just the start. The panel will debate the results, and we will roam the room to ask you to defend your choice. Why did you vote to kill a task that the person next to you voted to keep?

• The Consensus: Can a room of hundreds of experts actually agree on what matters, or will the voting reveal a deep divide in how we work?
• The Good Enough Revolution: A debate on when to embrace efficiency (Automate) and when to push for the extra magic (Keep).
• Driving Disproportionate Results: We won't finish until we have whittled the list down to the final Magic 30% of work that truly drives growth.

In an inflationary world, the hardest job in business isn't just driving volume; it's protecting margin. This data-driven session challenges the race to the bottom. We explore how smart media investment creates the pricing power necessary to raise prices without losing customers.

• The Pricing Power Formula: The data that proves how brand-building media lowers price sensitivity and creates inelastic demand.
• Media as a Margin Protector: Moving the conversation with the CFO from media as a cost to media as the reason we can hold our price point.
• The Premium Media Mix: Which channels (e.g., TV, Cinema, High-Impact Digital) are most effective at driving quality perception and justifying a price premium?

Gaming is one of the largest and most engaged media frontiers, yet many brands still get it wrong. This session explores the creative and commercial potential of gaming partnerships, focusing on authentic integration and long-term community building.

• Beyond the banner ad: exploring the unique, deep storytelling opportunities within gaming ecosystems.
• Authenticity is everything: best practices for engaging the gaming audience (and what not to do).
• Case studies for success: real examples of brand activations that won over a sceptical community.

TV is under pressure, but video consumption is at an all-time high. This session brings together a Broadcaster, a Streamer, and a Media Buyer to discuss how to "join up" linear and on-demand video into a single, high-growth media strategy.

• The Total Video Plan: How to build a media plan that unifies incremental reach across Linear, BVOD, and SVOD without wasting budget on frequency.
• The Streamer's Perspective: How platforms like Netflix are integrating into the wider media ecosystem and what they offer beyond just premium inventory.
• Buying the Living Room: How to navigate the fragmentation of CTV and use it to drive both brand fame and performance.

Marketers are caught in a crossfire between two opposing philosophies: the proven, scaled power of reach and the emerging, nuanced promise of attention. This session deconstructs the media planning debate.

• Measuring what matters: exploring how attention metrics actually correlate with business outcomes.
• The great trade-off: balancing the proven scale of reach with the promise of deep engagement.
• Building the media plan: how to (and whether to) integrate attention metrics into your planning and buying.
• Pricing the Intangible: How can media owners use attention (or reach) to better price and prove the value of their inventory in 2026?

The role of the CCO is expanding, bridging the gap between marketing, sales, and service. This in-depth 1-2-1 interview explores how the CCO views media strategy not just as acquisition, but as the connective tissue of the entire customer lifecycle.

• The Expansive Remit: How the CCO is breaking down silos to align media spend with customer lifetime value, not just short-term sales.
• Media Beyond Acquisition: How to use paid media channels to drive retention, loyalty, and customer service in a fragmented landscape.
• The Unified View: How to build a media plan that serves the customer, not just the campaign.