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!

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.

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 even 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 media 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 challenge 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.

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.

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. The challenge isn’t about ranking anymore – you need to make sure your brand appears in the answers users see.

This transformation is forcing a complete rethink of SEO and SEM strategies. Traditional approaches don’t work when you’re optimising for large language models rather than algorithms. There’s also the wider implication of your brand and consumer trust when you’re no longer in control of the context in which your brand appears. This session will explore practical steps brands are taking to ensure they show up responsibly in AI search results, and how the evolution from libraries to AI assistants is changing what consumers expect from information access.