Spring Digital Marketing Summit 14 May 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.

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? Expect top level insight and takeaway actions that you can apply to your Brand Straight away.

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Many organisations declare themselves “app-first” as mobile usage grows, yet still treat the app as a side project owned by a small central team. Vladimir shares lessons learned from leading an app-first transformation inside a large omnichannel organisation, where a single mobile team evolved into a scalable platform supporting 10 product squads delivering to mobile in parallel.

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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.

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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.

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How to handle reporting when the traditional numbers keep going down

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The next era of commerce is moving beyond simple search queries toward an ecosystem of automated shopping assistants that act on behalf of the customer. This session explores the shift toward agentic commerce, where high-quality, structured data replaces keywords as the primary driver of brand visibility. We will examine how a unified technical foundation—led by the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)—allows systems to compare products and execute transactions in real time.

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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.

For decades, marketing has been obsessed with volume—more clicks, more impressions, more leads. But the smartest firms, the ones outpacing their competition, are doing the opposite. They’re leveraging first-party data to stop chasing noise and start attracting high-value clients—the ones who convert faster, stay longer, and drive real business impact.

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CRM and email have evolved, but most marketing teams haven't caught up. Beth breaks down exactly where CRM is heading, what it really means for marketers, and why the businesses winning in 2026 are the ones treating CRM as a core business function, not just a tool. Using real examples, proven frameworks and the 3 pillars of modern CRM - systems, strategy and data, Beth will tell you how to build a CRM and email approach that drives predictable, scalable growth.

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In a world of infinite AI content, volume is easy - but connection isn’t. As GEO reshapes discovery, the question is: if everything is optimised, what actually stands out? This session shows why human creativity still wins, with both people and machines.

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Whilst sustainability and responsible business conduct have receded from the cultural foreground eclipsed by economic turbulence and geopolitical upheaval, their long-term strategic relevance remains wholly undiminished. Drawing on longitudinal evidence of how ethical and less ethical business conduct has shaped company and brand value over time, this session examines the commercial case for principled leadership, and explores the demands and disciplines of building a coherent, omnichannel ethical reputation in the modern business landscape.

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

Katie will talk about the shift from automation to true intelligence, where AI doesn’t just support execution, but actively shapes how campaigns are built, launched and optimised. Exploring how emerging agentic capabilities are helping teams move at pace, connect fragmented systems and turn creative and data into real performance across channels.

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Direct-to-consumer sounds simple, sell direct, own the customer, cut out the middleman, make more margin. But most DTC operations fail quietly, not because the website is wrong or the ads aren't optimised, but because the wider business model was never built to support it. This session challenges the assumptions that sink DTC. Why unit economics have to work in addition to growth. Why technology is never the answer on its own. Why organisational design kills DTC before it even starts.

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Yenni explores how Google Business Profile (GBP) has become one of the most influential, yet most underused digital touchpoints for brands. Drawing from recent optimisation work at Island House LVM, Yenni shares practical insights on how small updates to GBP can help improve digital visibility, trust, and customer decision‑making.

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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.

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In a world where output is a hop, skip, and a prompt away, clear-headed decision-making is often the difference between blazing success or a whimpering slow death. Dave will look at some of the major systemic biases - from the Clubhouse scramble to the Quibi hunch - that cause perfectly sensible people to make questionable decisions, and what we can do about them.

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AI is rapidly changing the shape of digital marketing and this is only accelerating in 2026. From ad automation & ‘enhancements’ to AI overviews, Justin will outline some quick wins to future proof your paid and organic strategy and make sure you are in a position to leverage AI rather than fight it.

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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.

Most transformations fail quietly. Not because the technology didn't work, or the data wasn't there — but because the culture wasn't ready to use either. In this session, Clare unpacks what genuinely separates high-performing organisations from the rest — the role of psychological safety, the difference between "data-driven" and "data-acting", and why the approval bottleneck is quietly the biggest tax on marketing ROI. Practical, practitioner-led, and deliberately light on buzzwords.

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Julie will unveil, a strategy designed to align Sales and Marketing for business success. This session explores how collaboration between these teams creates buyer-centric campaigns, enhances lead nurturing, and drives revenue growth. Attendees will learn how a clear roadmap, experienced teams, and a willingness to embrace change can transform business development into a powerful, cohesive unit.

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If you could only run a handful of automated campaigns and track a few key reports, what should they be? In this practical session, Simon will outline the most effective automated email programmes for B2B organisations and the CRM reports that help marketing and sales teams focus on what actually drives pipeline and revenue.

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AI-generated answers are increasingly relying on user-generated content from platforms like Reddit. This talk will explore why Reddit has become a critical source of truth in the AI-driven search landscape and what that means for PR professionals. We’ll then move from theory to practice, demonstrating how PR teams can use Reddit's authentic and unfiltered conversation to unlock stronger and more relevant ideas.

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Inbox providers like Gmail, Apple Mail, and Yahoo are using AI to filter, summarise, and rank email before it reaches the reader. This session reveals what that means for marketers and how to create emails that earn attention from both people and machines.

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What makes someone brilliant? When Jonathan Griffiths asked 105 people that question, the answers were surprising. Kindness and empathy came first. Creativity and innovation came last. The research wasn't about marketing but the implications are hard to ignore. In this session, Jonathan shares what the data reveals about human connection, and asks whether the gap between what people value and what marketing delivers might be the most commercially significant insight you hear all day.

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When activity is high but conversion is low, most teams default to more testing, more content, more automation, more anything. But the real problem is much more often upstream: unclear positioning, no way of telling you apart from everyone else who sells what you sell, minimal differentiation and a proposition that gives buyers no real reason to buy you. This session shows how to tell the difference between a funnel problem and a relevance problem.

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