Leading marketers and brands gathered in Leeds for the second stop of Prolific North’s flagship Northern Marketing Festival 2026, with sessions focused on one increasingly urgent challenge for brands – how to grow in a market where audiences are fragmented, attention is shrinking and traditional digital performance tactics are becoming less reliable.
Backed by strategic partner Embryo and headline sponsor Williams Lea, the Leeds agenda on Wednesday brought together agencies, brands and creative leaders for a packed day focused on smarter growth and building deeper connections with consumers.
Opening the day, host David Prior urged delegates to leave with “a great new connection” and something practical they could take back into their businesses.
Among the themes emerging from the opening sessions were the limitations of last-click marketing, the growing importance of brand distinctiveness and the need for marketers to move beyond short-term optimisation in search of long-term customer growth.
If day one in Liverpool focused on “the moment”, day two in Leeds pushed that thinking further asking how brands can find new demand, build distinctiveness and make smarter choices when every channel is competing for attention and budget.
Embryo challenges brands to find “the unreachable”
Kicking off the agenda, Embryo chief strategy officer Dom Carter explored what he described as “the unreachable” – potential customers who sit outside the audience signals most advertising platforms prioritise.
“Clients I’ve been speaking to over the last two years has been saying to us that they want to generate more revenue, but they don’t really want to spend any more on advertising,” he said.
He argued that while platforms are effective at identifying people already in the market, many brands become trapped in a lower-funnel cycle focused purely on short-term conversion missing out on potential new customers.
“You end up being in a bit of a washing machine, always spending money on the platform,” he said.
Instead, he urged marketers to think more carefully about incrementality and attribution, arguing that too many businesses still rely heavily on last-click reporting.
“Most brands still live and die on last click,” he said.
Dom explained that awareness activity is often undervalued because another channel – particularly Google search – typically receives the credit at the point of conversion.
To combat that, Embryo works with brands to first reduce wasted lower-funnel spend, including reviewing branded PPC and removing fraudulent clicks, before reinvesting those savings into upper-funnel activity designed to reach new audiences.
The agency also uses cross-platform attribution modelling to better understand how channels work together over long customer journeys, which in some cases can take more than a year from first interaction to purchase.
The goal, hr said, is to split marketing more deliberately between immediate conversion activity and longer-term audience growth.
Harringtons rebuilds confidence around “no compromise”
The next session saw Claire Bradley, creative director at IMA; Jess Kaye, business director at CHILLI; and Sascha Macchi, head of marketing at Inspired Pet Nutrition, unpack the strategy behind Harringtons’ recent brand refresh.
Despite being bought by one in five UK dog owners, the brand had found itself squeezed between premium competitors and supermarket own-label products.
“We had a great product, but a weak brand and misunderstood category,” Sascha said.
Research uncovered what the team called the “guilt gap” – pet owners feeling forced to compromise between affordability and nutritional quality.
“Pet owners felt like they were having to compromise between quality and price,” Claire said.
That insight became the foundation for the brand platform “no compromise”, repositioning Harringtons as a product that could deliver both natural ingredients and value.
The work extended across packaging, advertising and broader brand identity, with the team stressing the importance of packaging as a key consumer touchpoint.
“Packaging is 80% of consumers’ brand experience,” Jess said. “For Harringtons, the pack is the brand.”
The agencies used focus groups, eye-tracking and social listening to identify the brand assets consumers recognised most strongly, before evolving the design system to improve clarity, consistency and shelf standout.
The resulting campaign centred on a simple emotional insight that people compromise for the pets they love, but they should not have to compromise on their food.
According to the team, the campaign helped drive share growth in a difficult category, while brand consideration increased 7% within two months.
Carrs Pasties shares a rebrand in real time
The next session turned to a live business transformation story, as Carrs Pasties owner director Matt Carr joined strategy advisor and former Yorkshire Tea marketer Dom Dwight for a candid discussion about rebranding a long-established northern food business while the process is still happening.
The Bolton-based business, founded more than 80 years ago, has grown from £2m to £10m turnover over the past 13 years and is now pursuing further expansion through franchising, convenience retail and catering.
But Carr admitted awareness beyond its home market remains a challenge. When Dom asked the room who had heard of Carrs Pasties, very few hands went up.
“We have a town that knows us intimately,” Matt said. “There probably isn’t anybody in Bolton who hasn’t heard of us. But outside of Bolton it’s a different picture.”
For Matt, protecting the company’s local identity remains central to its future growth.
“We have an intention and a responsibility to everybody in our family business to keep the Boltonian at the heart of everything we do,” he said.
The session explored how legacy regional brands can modernise without losing authenticity, with Matt describing the business as both deeply traditional and increasingly focused on technology, scalability and new marketing approaches.
“We don’t think of ourselves as a brand,” he said. “We’re a business, we’re a manufacturer, we’re a food business, we’re a family. Of course we’re a brand. But nobody thinks like that apart from you guys (marketers).”
While Matt said the business is exploring AI, digital touchpoints and new customer journeys, he argued that trust remains the most important factor in relationships between brands and agencies.
“We trust you guys implicitly,” he told the audience. “We understand that it’s a dark art and we know that it works.”
Jorvik Tricycles proves digital-only is not always enough
A fireside chat between HUB CEO Rob Shaw and Jorvik Tricycles founder James Walker explored what happens when an ecommerce-led brand reaches the limits of digital performance.
Walker said Jorvik had initially grown through familiar digital channels, including Google, Amazon and eBay, but began to see performance flatten as spend increased.
“We were spending more money, but not really getting more sales,” he said.
That prompted the York-based business to rethink its channel mix, moving beyond purely digital activity and testing direct response TV.
For Rob, the key was not abandoning digital, but understanding how different channels could work together around a highly considered product.
“This wasn’t a ‘switch PPC off, put TV on’ moment,” he said. “It was how do you make the world work harder? How do you help develop the brand?”
The campaign was built around Jorvik’s customer insight, with many buyers looking for freedom, independence and mobility rather than simply a product. Walker said some customers did not even know electric tricycles existed until they saw the TV ad.
“A lot of our customers don’t know tricycles exist until they see one,” he said.
The move into TV produced a clear uplift, with traffic spiking around broadcast slots and a halo effect continuing after the campaign came off air.
“The phone was ringing off the hook, the emails were coming in, the sales were going in,” said Walker.
The session also underlined the importance of physical experience in the buying journey. Jorvik’s York showroom and indoor test track now play a key role in conversion, with James saying the company is expanding its showroom model into Southampton and Chester.
Marketing has enough ideas – but not enough priorities
Jay Dickinson, founder of Ginger Fury, took to the stage to warn that marketing leaders are not struggling because they lack ideas, but because they are overwhelmed by too many possibilities, channels and internal opinions.
“Marketing doesn’t have an ideas problem,” she said. “We’ve got a prioritisation problem.”
She said teams often respond to that challenge in one of two ways – paralysis, where they keep doing what they have always done, or chaos, where multiple teams and agencies produce more work without anything being properly connected.
The solution, she argued, is to organise around the customer rather than the channel.
“Your customer doesn’t experience the world through nice, neat marketing channels,” she said. “They experience the world and your brand as a sum of every single touchpoint they come across along the way.”
Jay urged marketers to use customer journey mapping not as a funnel or a touchpoint map, but as a way of understanding the customer’s real-world experience, needs and emotions over time.
She said brands should identify the “moments that matter” and then focus on “must-win battles” where three things are true: there is a customer need, a market opportunity and the brand has authority to act.
“The brands that are going to win in the next five years will be those who understand their customers better,” she said.
Channel 4 Served builds a social-first brand outside London
Channel 4 Served executive producer Nyall Ray-Cook and senior producer Rachel Hagreen told the audience how the broadcaster has built a social-first food brand from Leeds, with collaboration at the heart of the model.
Nyall described Served as an almost one-year-old “social-first, vertical-first, short-form-first” food channel, created to extend Channel 4’s heritage in food programming onto social platforms. He said regionality was central to the idea.
“We noticed that a lot of other food platforms were putting their recipes behind paywalls and had a very London-centric point of view,” he said.
Served was instead designed to reflect “everything food outside of London”, with a Leeds-based studio, northern talent and a creator-led production model.
Rachel said being based in Leeds had opened up creative opportunities and allowed the team to spotlight northern food voices. “It’s really nice to give opportunities along the room here,” she said.
Brand partnerships are also central to the model, with Served already working with names including Laithwaites, Co-op and Galbani. Nyall said food content offers a natural space for brands, provided the integration feels authentic.
“It has to feel like it works on our channel first and foremost,” he said.
As it approaches its first anniversary, Served has generated just under 70m views, with year two focused on growth, further brand partnerships and potential expansion into longer-form content.
“Year two needs to be the year that the lines keep going up,” Nyall said.
IMA reflects on Leeds growth and the balance between AI and creativity
IMA global marketing director Emily Crabtree took to the stage to reflect on the agency’s growth from a Leeds start-up into an international business, while arguing that the city remains one of the UK’s most important creative hubs.
“What started as a small Leeds agency with two people in a room has grown into a global business with more than 300 people, 11 offices worldwide and still growing,” she said.
“But Leeds remains our home, our headquarters and a huge part of who we are.”
Emily said the themes running through the festival strongly reflected the wider challenges facing the industry, particularly around AI, creativity and long-term brand building.
“Balancing the role of humans and machines is something we are all navigating our way through,” she said.
She argued that agencies are increasingly trying to find “a creative mix between human creativity and AI”, while warning against an overreliance on short-term thinking.
“In a world obsessed with speed and short-term gain, the value of patience, consistency and building ideas that can compound over time is more important than ever,” she said.
Emily also highlighted the importance of collaboration across disciplines, pointing to IMA and CHILLI’s joint work on Harringtons as an example of connected creativity across brand, packaging and advertising.
Uber reframes marketing for the “now economy”
One of the sessions of the afternoon came from Uber Advertising, where regional team lead Bill Dennett set out what he described as a major shift in consumer behaviour.
Opening with an interactive audience exercise around Uber ratings, Dennett used the moment to make a broader point about how people increasingly make decisions in real time.
“The app and the rating in your hand represent far more than just a ride or a delivery,” he said. “We are living through a structural shift in how people decide, not just how people buy.”
At the centre of that shift, he argued, is the rise of what Uber calls the “now economy” – where traditional customer journeys have collapsed into immediate moments of need.
“Most of us don’t start with ‘I fancy ordering from this brand’,” he said. “We start with ‘I need food now’.”
Bill suggested this is making traditional marketing funnels increasingly outdated, with discovery, evaluation and purchase often happening simultaneously within platforms.
“The brands that win today aren’t just front of mind – they are present at that point of decision,” he said.
Using Uber’s real-time behavioural signals – from journeys and commuting patterns to food delivery orders – Bill showed how brands can target consumers at highly specific moments of intent.
Definition urges marketers to “stop the slop”
One of the sharpest sessions of the day came from Definition’s AI director Luke Budka and head of language Nick Padmore, who challenged marketers to resist the flood of technically polished but forgettable AI-generated content.
Their argument was not that AI is the problem, but that it can scale mediocrity if marketers remove too much thinking from the process.
“Slop is not the preserve of AI,” said Padmore. “Humans have been generating slop for millennia.”
The pair argued that the solution is “frictionmaxxing” – deliberately adding thought, craft and challenge back into the process before prompting, during drafting and at the edit stage.
They said marketers need to stop treating all AI models as interchangeable and instead evaluate them against the tasks that actually matter.
“Measure the models against things that matter to you, not things that matter to the AI companies,” Luke said.
Nick added that better AI outputs depend on better inputs, warning marketers not to expect meaningful work from vague prompts.
“The prompt is your product,” he said. “You will get a better output if you give it a better input.”
They also urged marketers to use prompt chaining, breaking complex tasks into stages rather than asking AI to complete everything in one go.
The takeaway was clear: in a world where anyone can produce polished content quickly, the advantage will sit with marketers who add judgment, taste and human thinking back into the process.
Tiger Sheds makes the case for slow-grown growth
The final brand keynote came from Sam Jenkinson, head of marketing at Woodlands Group, trading as Tiger Sheds, who explored how brand and performance can work together to drive real-world revenue.
He said Tiger faced a highly commodified post-Covid market, with a crowded competitor set, heavy discounting and strong seasonal pressures. “The problem for us was seeing the wood in the trees,” he said.
Rather than playing the same game as larger competitors, Tiger focused on becoming easier to notice and “worth a closer look”.
“We developed a plan to prioritise building a brand,” he said. “Yes, we still work on the day-to-day digital goals, with a clear, simple focus on the future.”
That meant investing in distinctive products, a clearer brand proposition and media beyond digital. The brand shifted from technical product messaging towards the more aspirational platform “Find your perfect space”.
Tiger also invested in TV, print brochures, its website, virtual showroom and product configurators, with Jenkinson arguing that brand investment should include the operational infrastructure needed to deliver the promise.
“Your whole business builds your brand,” he said. “Everybody is in marketing, whether they know it or not.”
The results, he said, included doubled revenue, awareness rising from 2% to 9%, and brochures playing a role in 18% of sales journeys.
For Jenkinson, the lesson was that brand and performance do not need to compete.
“Brand and performance don’t have to compete,” he said. “They succeed when they grow and work together.”
Northern Marketing Festival continues in Manchester tomorrow. Stay tuned to Prolific North for further coverage, insight and key takeaways from across the festival.
