Autumn Digital Marketing Summit 15 Oct 2026

Choose between two presentations tracks. Hear from expert speakers delivering insighful, practical and real world digital marketing solutions. In sync with the talks pre-arranged face to face meetings will be happening in the meeting zone. Talk to agencies and marketing solution companies to discuss your digital projects and requirements.

Marketing measurement is broken, not because marketers lack data, but because most organisations aren’t set up to turn measurement into better decisions. In this session, Beth shares the journey of building a dedicated marketing effectiveness function and rewiring how a large, established brand thinks about marketing performance including the lessons learned, the challenges encountered and what she’d do differently starting again.

As AI reshapes how brands create and communicate, marketers face a critical question: does AI make a brand more authentic, or less? Drawing on academic research and frontline experience - including approaches from Channel 4, Nike, and AVK - this keynote unpacks why some AI-driven campaigns land as innovative, while others fall flat. The session closes with a practical framework marketers can apply immediately, whatever their AI maturity.

There are many things which marketers take as set in stone, from the power of organic social to the need to be different and the importance of quarterly results. At yes, these things are indeed important ... But, maybe... In an ever changing world, some of the things we take for granted are not what they see anymore. Jon takes five key tenants of modern marketing and asks if they really are as important as they once were ….and if not what has changed?

Every vendor, brand and agency is under pressure to bolt on, use and sell AI as we move at pace toward an agentic world. And each week brings a new model, with lofty promises, and another batch of videos claiming that "this changes everything". But how do you make strategic decisions under this pressure? This session lays out six areas to focus your thinking, without hype or (much) pessimism.

This talk explores how Hookflash is using experimentation to drive ongoing improvements in conversion performance, while also enhancing paid media results. The talk offers practical insight into how experimentation can amplify the impact of both website and media investment.

This session will examine how AI is reshaping client acquisition across professional services. It will explore why traditional search visibility alone is no longer enough and what influences whether AI recommends your firm, one of your competitors or neither.

Search is changing fast. As AI transforms how people discover products, services and brands, visibility is no longer just about rankings, it's about recommendations. This session explores the shift from keywords to customer situations, why search is becoming increasingly personal, and what marketers can do to ensure their brand is understood, trusted and recommended by AI.

CRM is not a system, and it is not an email send. It is a function: strategy, systems, data and the touchpoints your audience experiences. Most businesses have bought the software and stopped there. This session gives you a five-level maturity model to score against. You'll find out which level you're on, why the level above costs decisions rather than budget, and what to fix first in 2027.

Cutting through the noise and using the latest data from Similarweb, Gareth will explain the difference between SEO and GEO in practical terms. Attend this talk if you want to understand the main things an in-house marketer needs to be on top of to appear more within ChatGPT and Claude results.

In a world shaped by AI summaries, zero-click search, and content overload, brands should stop focusing on producing more content and instead create content that is genuinely useful. The brands that stand out are the ones that help people solve real problems, build trust, and become memorable through value rather than volume.

Our speakers power through their points against the clock. 21 slides, 21 seconds per slide. Hold onto your hats.

Matt unpacks the three pillars for a successful brand transformation, drawn from his experience building global brands at places like Skyscanner, VICE, MLB, WarnerBros Discovery, Paramount (and others).

Traditional SEO strategy will get you so far but the real key to building visibility across generative search now relies on building a successful brand. Justin will demonstrate how social proof is now critical not only to advertising but why incorporating social proof is the most important investment you can make to be more visible in generative search.

Gary will share 10 practical lessons from building modern travel content in a market where every brand is making more video. How to create content people actually want to watch, how to keep commercial storytelling human, and how AI agents are beginning to remove low-value production work so creative teams can focus on stronger ideas, sharper testing and better customer experiences.

This session challenges the long-standing misconception that CRM is simply the engine behind email automation. Instead, it reframes CRM as the critical connector between a brand’s promise and its customers, grounded in real human behaviour, organisational readiness, and value-led technology choices.

Davina will introduce a unified "Brandformance" strategy designed to maximise media budgets by blending long-term brand building with immediate sales tactics. She will demonstrate how to deploy a dual-purpose channel strategy, ensuring every pound spent drives both brand equity and measurable conversions.

Your customer isn't the first to read your email any more — an AI assistant is. As the agentic inbox screens and summarises before a human ever opens a message, Kristian shows how to earn attention when a machine is the gatekeeper.

For years, marketers have relied on open rates, generic nurture campaigns and arbitrary rules to decide when a contact is no longer engaged. The problem is that many of these practices no longer reflect how people buy, how inboxes work or how email performance should be measured.

Every marketing team is now wrestling with the same decision: which capabilities to build and own, which to rent or borrow from an outside product, and which to leave alone until the time is right. It sounds straightforward. In practice, most get it wrong in both directions — rebuilding at cost what they could simply have rented, while handing away the very things that ought to set them apart.

What’s in our Event Budget and what’s out. How BCB Group’s event-led strategy has evolved to be cheaper, smarter, innovative and set to deliver ROI

Four senior marketers. Four very different businesses. One shared reality: limited resources, multiple stakeholders, and constant pressure to prove ROI. In this panel, marketing leaders share what actually works when you're trying to deliver effective creative across functions, geographies, and competing priorities.