On 3–4 November 2026, The Future of Media London brings together planners, buyers, strategists and leaders from across the full media mix — agencies, brands, media owners and adtech — for two days of rigorous, evidence-led debate about the forces reshaping how advertising investment gets planned, allocated and justified. You can expect real debate, real evidence, and real disagreement.

As the flagship event in the The Future of Media series, London goes deeper and wider — drawing together threads from across the year and the world. Here’s what’s on the agenda.

There are more places to put a media budget than ever, and fewer clear rules for how to choose between them. This theme is about how planners make decisions in this environment — and whether the industry’s instincts are keeping pace with how audiences behave.

• How do planners decide where to spend a media budget? Has the industry focused too heavily on performance metrics — and how does this distort business outcomes?
• Are agencies over-investing in younger demos at the expense of audiences with more spending power?
• What new media channels and environments are working for clients, and what do these channels need to do to earn a meaningful share of budget?
• As AI and zero-click search change how consumers find and buy, what does that mean for how planners work — and is there anything constraining their freedom to respond creatively?

More channels, more data, more tools - but “brand” is still a harder argument to land than it should be. This theme is about proving what good looks like, and what it takes to make the evidence land with the people who own the budget line.

• Is there a gap between what media planners know about effectiveness and what they can demonstrate to the people who control the budget?
• How much is CFO-led financial discipline shaping media decisions in ways that were never intended — and how do agencies push back without losing the client?
• Attribution, incrementality, MMM: which approaches are earning real trust with clients, and where does the science still fall short?
• How do you make a credible argument for long-term brand building when every client conversation defaults to short-term performance?
• Is the industry measuring the impact of creative quality on media performance? And how do planners make the case for it when creative costs are the first thing to get cut?
• How are the data signals planners rely on changing — and is the industry any closer to a measurement standard everyone can agree on?

Global tech platforms made themselves easy to buy - building ad infrastructure that made performance spend frictionless - self-serve, measurable, scalable down to the smallest advertiser. It worked so well that most performance spend has consolidated around a handful of players. This theme asks whether that consolidation is working for clients, and whether the dominance of the global platforms over performance budgets is as permanent as it currently looks.

• What share of performance budgets is structurally locked into global platforms - and is that share growing or has it reached a ceiling?
• SMBs have been the fastest-growing segment of platform ad revenue. How are media owners aiming to compete for them, and with what? Are the developments good enough to compete, or does it just make the gap with GAFA more visible?
• What would it take for a brand to shift meaningful performance spend away from the global platforms, and who has done it?

Media owners are signing creators as talent, building creator studios, and creators are launching media businesses of their own. This theme explores the new dynamics between creators and media businesses and asks how such developments provide new opportunities for planners of creative and effective media plans.

 

• Media companies are getting into creator partnerships. What possibilities does this open for those planning and buying media? 
• A gaming creator, a science communicator and a lifestyle influencer serve very different functions. How should that shape how we plan and buy? 
• What makes a creator brief genuinely work — and how much creative latitude do brands need to give up to get the best out of it? 
• What does a mature creator strategy look like — and which brands are already there? 

Three quarters of multinational brands say they want to change how they pay their agencies within three years. AI is compressing the operational work that used to justify headcount. The business of media is changing faster than the industry is comfortable admitting — and the honest conversations about what that means are still rare.

• Is outcome-based remuneration a fairer model for clients and agencies — and what happens to the relationships and incentives that the current model quietly depends on?
• Agencies are reorganising around AI. What can AI planning tools do today, versus what is promised? 
• As AI automates the work that used to justify agency fees, how does the value conversation with clients change?
• If AI removes the operational load, does it create space for more creative planning, or will it just automate the existing disconnect between creative ambition and media reality?

Some of the decisions UK media buyers are about to face have already been made elsewhere. Other markets have run the experiments, lived with the results, and moved on. This theme brings those lessons into the room — not as benchmarking, but as genuinely useful intelligence for buyers navigating decisions the UK hasn’t yet had to make.

• What lessons can we learn from Australia’s own u16 social media ban – what does the evidence show about how it worked in practice, and how did it meaningfully impact the media plan?
• US agencies are further along on outcome-based remuneration than their UK counterparts. What’s the honest take from someone who’s been through it?
• We’re looking to find the markets that have figured something out that London hasn’t - so get in touch if you have a story to tell that crosses borders.

 

 

 

This isn’t the full story.

You can expect even more across the two days, and we are continuing to look for new stories, market-leading case studies and exciting speakers that will make this the very best Future of Media London you’ve seen yet. If you have something you’d like to share with our audience, please do get in touch with us at: sam.tidmarsh@uk.adwanted.com and linda.eckefeldt@uk.adwanted.com