Join Helena Stylman and the iMedia team for a warm welcome. Helena will guide you through the top industry topics identified by our Advisory Board. This is a great chance to catch up on the latest trends and insights in the field.

In the era of machine-mediated commerce, "watching and waiting" is a death sentence. We have entered a landscape where LLMs dictate discovery, creating both a critical measurement blind spot (AI visibility that feels invisible to the CFO) and stagnation amidst the relentless pace of evolution.

The mandate has shifted. The modern marketer is no longer just a content creator or a brand strategist. This new era demands a professional who challenges the status quo and makes bold moves to align with the category-leading vendors defining the future.

In this keynote, Profound and Partnerize move beyond vanity metrics to show you how to engineer your brand for the machine, monetise your AI-driven influence, and report on business impact against the backdrop of the AI paradigm.

During times of disruption, fortune favours the brave.

The official Welcome Dinner & networking reception held on the first night is the perfect way to build relationships with key conference delegates, speakers, and sponsors in a more relaxed atmosphere.

Marketing Rewired: Growth, Experience, and AI in a Destination Economy

Marketing is no longer just about demand generation — it's about driving sustainable growth, shaping global perception, and delivering end-to-end experiences in real time. Drawing on leading a globally competitive destination, Kim McConnie shares how macro pressures are redefining the CMO role, why the CMO must increasingly operate as a hybrid CMO–CTO, and how agentic AI and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) are changing how brands are discovered and chosen. Critically: how to combine brand and performance as a multiplier — and build the evidence boards actually act on.

Most brands chase customers. Pop Mart creates believers — and someone had to build the machine that does it, market by market. As AI homogenises creative output and attention becomes marketing's scarcest resource, Pop Mart has engineered one of the world's fastest-growing cultural phenomena through scarcity, community, and obsession — not media spend. Jeremy Lee, who built Pop Mart's presence from zero across 6 Southeast Asian markets and the Middle East, unpacks the operating mechanics behind the hype: how deliberate product drops, app-first experiences, and omnichannel rituals turn passive consumers into active evangelists — and how that playbook bends (or breaks) across radically different cultures and regulatory environments. The question for every CMO in the room: what would it take to make your brand this hard to ignore

Chinese diaspora and Chinese tourists are one of Australia's most valuable audiences, yet most marketers have low visibility into how they actually discover and decide on brands. Enter rednote—a powerhouse platform boasting over 300 million monthly active users. For these consumers, rednote isn't just a social feed; it’s an essential discovery engine and validation hub for real reviews before every purchase decision.

In this exclusive session invited by EternityX, Winnie Lau (Regional Manager, Xiaohongshu Commercial Cross-Border) pulls back the curtain on authentic brand conversations shaping Chinese consumer choices. Using live examples from brands and categories in the room, discover what’s already being said about your industry and why organic recommendations hold so much sway.

Delegates will walk away with a clear picture of their brand’s current standing on rednote—and actionable insights on how to join the conversation on their own terms.

Marketing is facing two generational shifts at the same time: how customers search, and how marketing teams operate. AI is no longer just a tool that helps marketers work faster; it is becoming an intelligent teammate capable of making decisions, taking action, and delivering outcomes. In this fast-paced session, Tony Van-Eyk, Managing Director APAC at Birdeye, shares new research across 16,240 locations on the gap between what a brand's AI visibility dashboard shows and what customers actually see. From the AI search blind spot to agentic execution, discover what every marketing leader needs to know, and what to actually do about it.

Its time to explore loyalty programs and how we as marketers must evolve from reactive tracking to predictive, value-driven engagement that fosters genuine customer loyalty. This shift emphasizes anticipating customer needs over merely rewarding past transactions.

This approach moves loyalty programs from margin-eroding discounts to influencing behaviour and creating seamless omnichannel experiences, while future loyalty strategies will leverage customer trust in spending data to serve value beyond transactions, preparing for innovations like tokens and passkeys.

Every brand has a loyalty program. Few have loyalty. With attention spread thinner than ever, building meaningful relationships with customers has never been harder. We assessed 60 loyalty programs to uncover the Human Truths that drive real loyalty. This reveals what the brands breaking through are doing differently. The latest chapter in Honeycomb Strategy's Digital Insights Series shares these findings and explores how integrated and paid programs are reshaping the landscape. Leave with the framework and tools you need to move your customer engagement forward.

The biggest misconception in media planning is that OOH stops at the top of the funnel. The reality? It can do a lot more. In this session, we'll unpack how the right mix of traditional and programmatic OOH can influence every stage of the funnel - from awareness through to action, backed by a real world case study.