As Australia’s entertainment and media industry undergoes a profound digital transformation, the shift towards digital revenues will reshape the market landscape, with projections indicating that by 2028, digital will account for 79% of the industry. This state of the nation will explore the critical role of media team structure and business model reinvention in navigating this period of intense transformation, highlighting how organisations can leverage this shift to secure more sustainable growth.

Drawing on insights and themes from PwC’s Entertainment and Media Outlook report, the discussion will focus on the importance of adopting new technologies, such as AI and cloud computing, and forming strategic partnerships to create digitally enabled products and services that meet evolving consumer demands. As traditional broadcasters face challenges in offsetting declining revenue streams, the session will offer insights into how they can innovate and pivot to remain competitive.

You’ll walk away with the top five takeaways to go back your organisations with about business model challenges you need to think about for the future.

In the era of digital transformation, marketing seems more complex than ever—yet it’s paradoxically becoming simpler at the surface level. This presentation explores the collision of three transformative forces reshaping our industry: AI-powered automation, growing privacy demands, and market consolidation. We’ll examine how these forces are fundamentally changing the way we create, execute, and measure media campaigns, while challenging marketers to find the right balance between automation and human insight in this new landscape.

In the rapidly evolving marketing landscape, the role of delineating spend in brand and performance media has become increasingly critical. This session will explore how agencies (and clients) can effectively structure their teams so that performance activation better serves brand goals and client deliverables.

We’ll focus on how to day-to-day enhance cross-skilled teams that can operate across the full funnel, ensuring a cohesive strategy that balances short-term performance with long-term brand building.

You’ll learn practical and tactical strategies to restructure their teams, enabling them to deliver campaigns that are both impactful and measurable, ensuring success in the future teams.

In this session, we’ll be having a special head-to-head debate with plenty of competing views on whether increased in-housing is the inevitable way of the future.

People want ownership, there’s not one set way of in-housing. Some clients want ownership of technology, but don’t want to in-house a team, others want their own contract with DSPs and Ad servers, so when they change agencies, they can take their data with them. Often this is leading to increased transparency on agency fees too.

Clients are looking to take complex recommendations to their boards for buy-in, something that made this easier 15 years ago was that things were more simplistic. The rapid pace of technology is changing what the agency role means. Join as we get stuck into:

• As in-housing increases, are agencies reducing complexity helping to sign their own death warrant?
• You can in-house a whole agency team and do it all yourself, you can outsource strategy to the agency, or you can leave everything to the agency and own your own technology; do you think there will be increasing fragmentation of models or a convergence around a certain formula?
• Is it a case of accepting the in-housing of technology ownership, whilst moving further towards education, consultation, and strategy?
• Should agencies being working to reduce complexity, so clients have more success selling media plans internally?
• In the programmatic world is simplification possible? Or will publishers rightly push back, stating a need for specificity?

There is so much more happening in TV than broadcast and this panel is the place if you’re looking for a forward-thinking chat on the future of the device and its further potential.

Everything from sponsored formats on launched app screens, to ads in content, our panellists will be talking to the actual future of TV and not just linear bashing. At a tactical level we’ll be looking at the nuances of these media buys and how your teams can take advantage of them. Join as we discuss:

• What is the power of TV beyond traditional broadcast?
• How do you navigate the fragmentation of viewing experiences?
• What is the potential of advertising in unique formats such as audiobooks?
• Does gaming inevitably dominate the future?
• How, as a marketer and trader do you make new opportunities accessible to the broader media buying teams?

AI has emerged as both an opportunity and a challenge for clients and agencies alike. In this session, you’ll hear from the Lottery Office and Nunn Media on how they are integrating AI in their media campaigns.

Media is the shopfront for the Lottery Office, and they needed a system to gather data, turn it into actionable, customer facing messaging and get the largest jackpot into market quickly. This needed to be done across multiple touchpoints, platforms, sizes and formats.

In this session you’re going to hear how they built it themselves, and then turned it into a machine for driving success.

In our closing keynote we’ll explore the future of Retail Media as a tool for driving brand growth, focusing on how clients and brands are leveraging this channel to optimise advertising spend and enhance customer engagement. Hear how, by integrating Retail Media with traditional advertising methods, you can gain valuable insights into consumer behaviour, enabling more precise targeting and personalisation.

We’ll explore how the rise of e-commerce platforms has accelerated the adoption of Retail Media, allowing brands to place ads directly on retail websites, apps, and digital marketplaces. This creates a seamless shopping experience where advertising and commerce converge. As Retail Media continues to expand, this session will examine a case study of a brand successfully navigating this landscape. We’ll highlight the growing importance of collaboration between publishers & media owners with clients because the developing possibilities of Retail Media is the future of media.