We’re living through one of the most dramatic economic reconfigurations in modern history, and it’s creating massive opportunities and serious challenges for the advertising industry. PwC’s Value in Motion research reveals that businesses across 17 out of 22 global sectors are under unprecedented pressure to reconfigure how they operate, with over $7 trillion in global value set to shift between companies in 2025 alone. This economic reconfiguration is creating massive implications for advertisers and consumers alike.

As traditional industry boundaries disappear and new cross-sector ‘domains’ emerge, brands must completely rethink how they connect with audiences whose behaviours and preferences are rapidly evolving. In our opening keynote, Louise will unpack how these global macro trends are playing out specifically in advertising, the precipice our economy is facing, and what this means for consumer behaviour and the way in which companies will be able to reach and serve their customers. Not only that but you’ll get some demos of cutting-edge technology that can bring these opportunities to life!

We have entered the era of the “super-empowered” consumer. One whose curiosity is met instantly and whose path from discovery to decision is more fluid than ever before. While this journey has evolved into a complex web of searching, streaming, scrolling, and shopping, many brands still see only fragments of the picture.

Join Adrian Vallelonga, Head of Performance Solutions at Google, as he explores how businesses can bridge this gap. He will demonstrate how Google acts as the “one thread” connecting these behaviours into a reliable ecosystem of intent and action. Adrian will discuss the fundamental shift from AI that simply “suggests” to “Agentic” AI that “acts”, is collapsing the gap between discovery and decision.

Moving beyond theory, Adrian will showcase how Australian first movers are already pioneering this shift. He will share essential takeaways for brands looking to move from information to action, providing the roadmap for marketers to stay ahead in a world where AI doesn’t just suggest, it delivers.

Is the Ark of the Covenant open? Are our faces going to melt? Hopefully not, but it can feel like that as we approach a fundamental shift where AI agents won’t just recommend products – they’re going to be doing the shopping, selecting, and event buying of the products. It’s a transformation that will rewrite how brands approach everything from product discoverability to media planning.

In a world where your AI agent negotiates with a retailer’s recommendation system, what is left for the brand love between agency and customer, and how do you build that relationship? This session will explore what a fully agentic shopping ecosystem might look like, and how brands can prepare for AI-to-AI communication in commerce, the balance between business efficiency and ethical oversight, and practical steps for ensuring your brand remains discoverable when humans aren’t doing the shopping.

AI-driven content promises unprecedented efficiency and scale but threatens to undermine the authenticity that drives brand connection and advocacy. Whilst brands can now produce creative assets at minimal cost, the risk is creating a “junkyard of AI content”. The challenging isn’t about efficiency, it’s about maintaining brand authenticity and emotional connection.

Leading brands are discovering that authentic experiences and community building rather than undermining it. This session will examine how to leverage AI for creative production without sacrificing authenticity, the evolving skillsets needed across creative and media teams, and practical frameworks for maintaining brand integrity whilst capturing the efficiency benefits of automated content creation.

OOH is the world’s oldest advertising medium… and sometimes that legacy shows in how it’s planned, sold, and bought. As every other channel races ahead with smarter, faster, more connected ways of trading, OOH risks being left behind if it doesn’t evolve. The days of drawn-out deals spanning multiple weeks, endless email chains, phone tag, and constantly shifting availability sheets are no longer fit for purpose.

The next era of OOH demands something better: a more automated, flexible, and transparent buying experience that puts it on equal footing with the growth channels it competes alongside. The technology is here. The opportunity is now. It’s time for OOH to catch up and catch on.

AI is no longer just influencing how people search and shop. It is becoming the interface itself. As conversational agents and intelligent systems increasingly sit between consumers and brands, websites, clicks, and even traditional funnels start to disappear from view.

In this session, Ryan Miles explores the rise of Zero UI: a future where decisions are made inside AI driven systems, not on screens. Drawing on the latest Microsoft Advertising research, we will unpack why consumer readiness is accelerating faster than expected, how trust becomes the critical gatekeeper when decisions are delegated to machines, and what this shift means for marketing visibility and growth.

You’ll learn how the funnel is being rewritten, what brands must do to remain discoverable and chosen in an agent mediated world, and how to prepare for a future where usefulness, context, and trust matter more than attention. If you want to understand what’s coming next – and how to stay ahead of it – this session is unmissable.

The importance of data privacy in marketing is keeping everyone awake at night. Australia’s privacy laws are getting their biggest overhaul ever, with major changes already hitting and more coming in 2026. There’s a real divide happening between agency approaches – some are moving away from IDs and others are leaning into them. Meanwhile, new rules around automated decision-making, the teenage social media ban, and consequences for privacy breaches are reshaping how the industry operates.

The role of media agencies in this new landscape is shifting, particularly around how to take data and activate it compliantly. This session will explore what these regulatory changes actually mean for day-to-day media planning, practical approaches to staying compliant without killing performance, and how to ensure data usage builds rather than erodes consumer trust.

Gen Z is no longer discovering brands through traditional media channels; trust and attention now live within culture, communities and the creator ecosystems of diverse social platforms. In this new attention economy, earned media has evolved beyond press coverage into something far more fluid: brands must be culturally relevant and present in the spaces where audiences are already consuming content, rather than interrupting them with brand-led messaging.

This session explores how a hybrid influencer model; combining organic creator engagement with paid partnerships; is redefining what effective collaboration looks like. Drawing on case studies including Peters Ice Cream and THE ICONIC, it unpacks how authentic co-creation with creators drives awareness, credibility and real-time cultural conversation.

It’s the session no advertiser can afford to miss. StackAdapt’s Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Yang Han unveils key findings from their recently released State of Programmatic Advertising Report, outlining what the world’s best marketers are doing right now.

Join us as Yang dives into five key trends to put you on the path to success in 2026: how to consolidate your stack to cut down on complexity and overheads; which are the best AI tools on the market and how they can help you save time and money; how to unify channels to reduce silos and create major efficiencies; what’s needed to make your own dynamic ad creatives to turn good campaigns into unforgettable ones; and how to get the most out of omnichannel orchestration and master emerging channels like DOOH, in-game and CTV.

The story of Milklab is one of transforming community into a powerful media engine. By unlocking the potential of the brand’s advocates and surrounding community, Milklab created a multiplier effect that significantly amplified its media reach. This session explores how that community was discovered, nurtured, and mobilised to drive authentic engagement and brand momentum.

With that foundation in place, Milklab’s paid media strategy became even more effective—programmatic activity grew more efficient, media spend delivered stronger returns, and CRM efforts operated from a position of strength. Throughout the session, we’ll share practical examples, tips, and advice on finding and cultivating a brand community, transforming it into compelling content, and converting that into impactful media investment.

Marketing budgets are under serious scrutiny, and proving ROI has never been more challenging. You can see the individual pieces but can’t connect them into the complete picture. Many organisations can track attribution to customers but can’t clearly link it to sales, especially when customers move through assisted channels. Meanwhile, there’s growing interest in Marketing Mix Modelling, but plenty of scepticism about trusting modelling over direct attribution.

It doesn’t help that brands often don’t know what the right questions are to ask their measurement partners, leading to ineffective spending and eroded trust between brands and agencies. This session will explore practical approaches to building measurement frameworks that boards can understand and trust, how leading brands are combining MMM with attribution for complete insights, and developing internal capability to better evaluate measurement recommendations.

The Australian AdTech landscape is at a critical juncture. While we boast one of the world’s most advanced programmatic ecosystems, particularly in CTV, this technical reliance has come with a hidden tax. Local media companies are losing ownership of their most valuable asset – premium audience data – to global AdTech partners, using our local insights to build their own empires.

This panel will confront a vital question: Can advertising remain effective and transparent without exposing personal data to the entire open internet? We will showcase a new path forward through publisher-controlled decisioning. By shifting the power back to those with direct customer relationships, we can prove that privacy and profit aren’t at odds.

We will explore a new roadmap for targeting and measurement that keeps Australian data in Australian hands, ensuring our market remains effective, ethical and independent. You’ll learn why the ‘open internet’ model may be compromising your audience insights and how to keep data within trusted local environments; discover how publisher-side decisioning allows for precision targeting and measurement without ‘handing over the keys’ to personal user data; and understand the shifts in bidding and attribution that will allow agencies to deliver.

The brand-agency dynamic is under an extraordinary amount of pressure as marketing budgets tighten, and accountability demands intensify. With clients struggling to know what questions to ask whilst agencies face margin pressures that can lead to complacency, many brands are questioning whether they’re getting value from their media spend, particularly when increased investment doesn’t correlate with improved outcomes.

The most successful partnerships are emerging where agencies can build trust through transparency. This session will explore how to foster that relationship for the modern world where both sides need to level up their capabilities, practical approaches to agency evaluation and accountability, and how the integration of AI tools is redefining what agencies need to deliver to justify their role in an increasingly complex media landscape.

The media ecosystem has become so fragmented that centralising planning and budget control feels nearly impossible. When you plan campaigns, you’re often planning in isolation across different walled gardens, CTV platforms, retail media networks, and emerging channels. Even when you execute all the right actions, the fragmented ecosystem makes it difficult to find a unified way forward.

Consumer journeys span multiple touchpoints and platforms, making frequency management, audience duplication, and budget optimisation a nightmare. This session will examine practical solutions for unified campaign management, emerging tools that are helping teams regain control over fragmented ecosystems, and the organisational changes needed to support truly integrated media planning.

Search is changing beyond imagining thanks to AI. No topic could be bigger for 2026. Brands need to know how to show up in search, and publishers are having to deal with budget moving away from them. We’re moving from keyword-led to answer-led experiences, and it’s happening faster than most of us are prepared for. We all know that AI is going to be giving consumers direct answers, and we’re already seeing the decline in web traffic as a result.

For our closing keynote, you’ll hear from Aleyda Solis, award-winning International and AI Search Optimisation global thought leader on how AI is shifting search as a digital marketing channel, the latest AI organic and paid search trends, and expected growth, the brands already winning and what they’re doing, as well as key questions to establish an ROI positive AI search optimisation strategy, along with a roadmap with steps to take, with examples and resources.