The Future of Brands offers delegates more than 40 main stage keynotes and panels, alongside the opportunity to take part in focused workshops and masterclasses led by industry-leading companies and experts.

Below, you’ll find details of the workshops and masterclasses available at this year’s event. Each session has limited capacity to ensure a high-quality, interactive experience and must be registered for in advance.

Please register your interest, and we’ll be in touch ahead of the event to confirm whether you have secured a place.

A waitlist will be in operation, so if you are no longer able to attend, we kindly ask that you let us know at events@uk.adwanted.com so your place can be offered to someone else.

10.05 - 10.55 |  Beyond the Feed:
A Masterclass in Navigating Walled Gardens

This interactive session puts you in the feed. Through a hands-on exercise, you will see first-hand how content adjacency shapes brand perception and campaign performance. It is designed to challenge assumptions about where your ads are really showing up, reveal the gap between expectation and reality, and quantify the cost of doing nothing.

From there, you will shape a practical social verification strategy and leave equipped to:

• Verify: media quality to reduce wastage, align brand suitability standards and protect performance
• Optimise: campaigns using AI-driven signals aligned to campaign KPIs
• Prove: impact by connecting media investment to measurable outcomes

Speaker: Lyndon MacArthur, DoubleVerify

11.05 - 11.55 | Presentation Workshop
The Messenger is the Message

AI can crunch the data, draft the script and build the deck. But even the most sophisticated avatar can’t replace your credibility in the room. This is about your personal brand: how your audience perceives you determines how, or if, they engage with your message.

As every brand marketer knows, we make subconscious judgements based on myriad tiny cues - and your audience is no different. How you stand, how you gesture, how you hold eye contact. These signals and thousands of others convince the audience to listen to you. Or not.

In a world saturated with synthetic content, your humanity is your most valuable asset. And in this interactive masterclass, we’ll break down the essential elements of presence, trust, and authority - from how you prepare, to establishing yourself in the crucial first few seconds, to using slides to support (not dilute) your message.

You’ll leave with a sharper understanding of how to command the room with confidence and credibility - and a practical toolkit to ensure your brand vision isn’t just heard, but believed and acted on.

Speaker: Bill Britten, Maynard Leigh Associates

11.05 - 11.55 | ICC Briefing and Q&A:
The legal and ethical challenges of using AI in advertising

This workshop will explore the key legal and ethical questions raised by the use of AI in advertising and marketing. Drawing on International Chamber of Commerce (ICC)’s global work and the ICC Advertising and Marketing Communications Code - the gold standard for advertising self‑regulation worldwide - the session will look at how businesses can navigate emerging risks, ensure responsible use of AI, and maintain consumer trust in an evolving regulatory and technological landscape.

Speakers:
Alice Himsworth, Chair, ICC Global Marketing and Advertising Commission & Senior Counsel at Google 
Jeffrey Greenbaum, Vice-Chair, ICC Global Marketing and Advertising Commission & Managing Partner at Frankfurt Kurnit Klein and Selz PC

12.05 - 12.55 | Agentic AI and the Future of Brand Advertising:
From Concept to Campaign

AI agents are no longer a future-facing concept. They are already making decisions, moving budgets and optimising campaigns in real time, and the brands that understand how to harness them are pulling ahead fast.

But what does that mean for your team, your media plan, and your day-to-day workflow? This masterclass is designed to answer exactly that. Whether you are completely new to agentic AI or have been following its development with keen interest, this session will ground you in what it is, what it can genuinely do for advertisers, and where it is already being deployed across programmatic and beyond.

PubMatic's Alisdair Newman and Stephen Kelly will go beyond the theory with a live demonstration showing what AI-powered, automated advertising looks like in practice today, not in the abstract, but running in the real world. You will see how intelligent, adaptive tools can help brand teams of any size move faster, make smarter decisions, and get more out of every pound of media spend.

The session closes with an open, interactive discussion so you can bring your own questions, challenges, and scepticism to the table.
Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of what agentic AI is and is not; a practical picture of how it is already being used in brand advertising; and the confidence to start asking the right questions of your own agency and technology partners. 

Speakers:  Stephen Kelly, Senior Director, Advertiser Solutions, Brand Direct, PubMatic
Alisdair Newman, Director, Advertiser Solutions, Marketplaces EMEA, PubMatic 

12.05 - 12.55 | Workshop for Future Managers:
The leadership skills that will get you promoted

In this workshop, we make the business case that how you show up - in a boardroom, in a 1:1 with an apprentice, in the messages you send between meetings - directly affects revenue, talent retention, and trust.

Gerry opens with The ROI of Actually Giving a Sh*t a data-driven look at what disengaged manager culture is quietly costing your organisation and what high-performing cultures do differently. The statistics are stark: 64% of UK employees are checked out. 75% of departures are manager-related, not pay-related. Disengagement runs to £400–600K annually per 50-person team. We’ll show you how to identify the problem and fix it.

Shelley follows with a masterclass in communication as a leadership responsibility. Before every meeting, she runs the same preparation framework: who they are, what they need, what she needs, and how to show up in a way that builds trust. It takes five minutes, but most leaders never do it.

You'll leave with:

• A manager audit - 5 diagnostic questions that reveal where engagement is breaking down on your team, and how you can fix it.

• A communication framework - a repeatable framework for business interactions to help you show up with intention every time.

Speakers:
Gerry Anyanwu, Founder at Fully Human
Shelley Bishton, Senior Commercial and Culture Leader

14.05 - 14.55 | Driving effectiveness:
Are you on the same page as your finance team?

Marketing effectiveness can get lost in translation between marketing and finance teams. This masterclass strips away the jargon to reveal what actually moves the needle for a business – and makes sure we’re all on the same page.

You’ll hear from our experts as they dissect real-world campaigns, separating the vanity projects from the value-creators, before you hear from a CFO about how marketing and finance teams can come together to build successful cross functional relationships.

What we’ll cover:

• The effectiveness audit: A "no-filter" look at campaigns that soared versus those that stalled. Our experts analyse the specific levers built brand equity – or didn’t.

• The finance translation: How to convert marketing metrics into business outcomes that CFOs actually care about. We move beyond "likes" to discuss incremental revenue and long-term asset value.

• The "performance vs. brand" Trap: Why the industry’s favourite debate is often the biggest barrier to getting budget. We’ll discuss why framing it as a binary choice is unhelpful in a boardroom and how to pitch a unified growth strategy instead.

Key takeaways:

• Frameworks for success: Learn the principles of long-term effectiveness.

• Boardroom credibility: Strategies to align marketing spend with corporate financial goals.

• Unified strategy: How to stop the "brand vs. performance" infighting and build a cohesive investment case.

The goal: To equip you with the evidence and the language needed to turn marketing from a "cost centre" into a recognised "growth engine."

Speakers:
Olya Dyachuk, Global Media & Data Director, Heineken
Simon Frazier, Associate Director - Head of Marketing, Data Innovation & The Making Sense Unit, The IPA

14.05 - 14.55 | Leadership Workshop: Leading through change

In the ten years since 2016 every business leader has had to navigate extraordinary change - Trump 1, Brexit, Covid, BLM, Time’s Up, Ukraine, Trump 2, Artificial Intelligence, the rise of influencers and the emergence of Gen Z, to name a few.

This panel will use their first-hand experiences of leading through change to explore key themes such as internal culture, imperfect decision making, conflict resolution and competitive threats.

Key Takeaways:
Practical tips to getting the most of your teams, your bosses and your peers
Simple ways of framing difficult decisions to get the best results
Prioritisation tactics that help your business stay ahead of the competition
Ways of figuring out what needs to change and what needs to stay the same

Speakers:
Chris Doe, UK Marketing & Innovation Director, Pilgrims Europe
Michelle Andrews, Managing Director, Quilter
Richard Exon, Founder, Joint

15.05 - 15.55 | How to be More Creative
(by being more creative)

Dr. Lee Bofkin has had an enviably creative career. Dancer, scientist, agency founder, calligrapher and all round ledge, he's bringing his signature toolkit to you (well, you'll have to meet him in the room). In this hands-on workshop, he'll guide you step-wise through four stages: generating a wide range of ideas using random object ideation, learning the rules of creative pair-work so you build on each other's ideas, using creative nudges to push ideas somewhere new, and applying constraints to make your ideas more actionable. These techniques work solo or in a group, on any brief, in any industry. You'll apply them live in the room and walk out knowing exactly how to use them again, for the rest of your life. You lucky sausage!

Speaker: Dr, Lee Bofkin, CEO & Janitor, Global Street Art

Reset Lounge

A guided 360° audio session designed to reset attention, restore energy and support calm, focused presence. Led by Sarah C, experience a soundscape that blends deep rhythms, layered frequencies and ambient sound delivered through individual headphones, helping delegates step out of mental overload and re-engage with greater clarity.

The reset lounge will run at 11am, 12pm, 2pm and 3pm. Please select your preferred time on the request form.