The marketing industry has never been short of conferences. What it has been short of, lately, is answers. AI has moved from novelty to necessity, platforms are quietly rewriting the rules of demand, and measurement is being interrogated in boardrooms with a rigour most marketing teams have never faced before. Against that backdrop, NDA’s Foresight, returning on 30th September 2026 at The Soho Hotel in central London, is shaping up to be the one date brands and agencies genuinely cannot afford to miss.
Foresight makes no apology for its positioning: this is not a day of recycled thinking and safe narratives. It has been designed as a strategic reset for marketing leaders under pressure to deliver in a market that is changing faster than most organisations can adapt.
That distinction matters. Most industry events are built around what’s new, such as the shiny tools, the emerging channels, the latest acronyms. Foresight is built around what’s not working: the gap between AI investment and business return, the fragmentation of data and measurement, the growing confusion over who actually owns performance inside modern marketing organisations. Our view is that the real challenge isn’t understanding what’s happening. It’s deciding what to do next : commercially, operationally and at pace.
The day is structured around three interconnected themes, each tackling a fault line running through the industry right now.
The AI Marketing Stack examines how the foundations of marketing technology and measurement are being rebuilt. Agentic systems that connect planning, activation, measurement and optimisation in continuous AI-driven workflows are no longer theoretical; they’re arriving. But AI doesn’t fix bad data; it magnifies it. As automation accelerates, questions of governance, accountability and human oversight become unavoidable. The opening keynote and panel will confront the tensions head-on: data quality versus AI scale, automation versus accountability, and measurement versus genuine business impact.
The Outcome Economy picks up where the attention debate left off. The industry’s conversation has moved beyond proxies towards incrementality, sales uplift, profitability and long-term growth but the reality lags the ambition. Measurement remains fragmented, attribution still distorts investment decisions, and short-term performance rarely aligns with long-term brand value. With CFOs and commercial leaders applying more pressure than ever, this session asks the question that matters: not “what worked?” but “what delivered real business impact?”
The Algorithmic Consumer confronts perhaps the most uncomfortable truth of all: consumer decisions are increasingly mediated by systems brands don’t control. From retail media to AI-driven search, platforms now shape what consumers see, how they evaluate their options and what they ultimately choose. Discovery is no longer linear. For brands and the agencies that serve them, staying visible and competitive in algorithmic environments is fast becoming an existential question.
Where most conferences fade out with a polite wrap-up, Foresight closes with intent. The final session distils the day into five decisions marketing leaders can’t delay until 2027: how to structure marketing for AI-driven execution, which measurement frameworks to prioritise (and which to ignore), where to invest across fragmented ecosystems, how to remain visible in algorithmic discovery, and where human judgement still creates advantage. Attendees leave not with a notebook full of trends, but with a decision framework they can take straight back to their leadership teams.
Foresight’s previous editions have attracted senior figures from an enviable roster of brands, agencies and publishers with Domino’s, Hovis, Hilton, The Guardian, LADbible, OMD, GroupM, WPP, VCCP, Publicis Media and Wunderman Thompson among them. This year’s confirmed speakers already include Bill Fisher, Principal Analyst at EMARKETER; Michelle Sarpong, Head of Activation at The7Stars; Kelaine Blades, Global Managing Director of Converged Go-To-Market Operations at Havas Media Network; Steve Ricketts, Chief Commerce Officer at Publicis Media; and Ross Appleton, GM UK at Tubi, alongside NDA Editor-in-Chief Justin Pearce and Retail Media Age’s Rebecca Sentance.
Just as valuable as the stage content is the space around it. With registration and networking from 8.30 am through to drinks at 5 pm, and the intimate, boutique setting of The Soho Hotel rather than a cavernous conference centre, Foresight is engineered for the candid, senior-level conversations that rarely happen at scale events.
If you’re accountable for growth, budget, innovation, or customer outcomes, whether brand-side or agency-side, this event was built for you. And if the challenges on the agenda feel familiar (AI that isn’t delivering consistent commercial impact, measurement that’s being challenged internally, platform dominance concentrating cost and control), then, as the organisers say, you should be in the room.
The industry’s next three years will be defined by the decisions made now. Foresight 2026 is where those decisions start.
Places are limited and applications are now open at newdigitalage.co/nda-events/foresight.
