Marketers were urged to rethink what brand visibility really means at this year’s Prolific North Live, as industry leaders from the likes of Wavemaker, TrunkBBI and more shared insights on how authenticity, AI-led search and creative bravery will shape marketing in 2026 and beyond.
Hosted at UA92 in Manchester on 6 November alongside headline sponsors Dotdigital, Slater Heelis, Buymedia and CTI Digital, the one-day event brought together brand leaders, agency strategists and marketers to demystify the next big thing in marketing — and what it takes to stand out.
From tackling creative bravery and the disruption from AI-led search to authentic storytelling in difficult categories, the day featured keynotes, sessions and panels across two stages — Trendsetters and Strategy Spotlight — each offering a different window into where the industry is heading next.
Challenger brands: “It’s the size of the fight in the dog”
While the Trendsetters stage saw major Northern brands and agencies lift the lid behind their campaign successes, from what made a new Pringles product go pop to why nothing beats a Jet2Holiday… catchy jingle, the Strategy Spotlight stage instead lifted the lid behind some of the industry’s latest trends and buzzwords.
Richard Midgley, founder and group strategy director at Ponderosa, wasted no time doing exactly that. In a witty, fast-paced session, he pushed back against industry slogans, taking aim at lines like “zig when others zag” and said for challenger brands, it’s “not enough just to be different”.
Large brands aren’t “sat around eating lard off a spoon watching the money roll in”, so if a challenger wants to win, it has to choose its fight with precision.
“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog,” he said.
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For Midgley, that “fight” begins with understanding exactly where a challenger brand can meaningfully compete. Drawing on examples such as how Crabbie’s owned race-day occasions to Hawkshead Beers doubling down on regionality, Midgley showed how success comes from breaking through — not trying to take on category giants.
Sparked by what he called an “obsession” with ambitious brands, he unveiled Ponderosa’s Brand Divergence Index, a survey of around 5,000 consumers across nine categories designed to uncover what separates category leaders from the rest. The study grouped brands into four types: deviant outliers, divergent challengers, convergent giants, and default brands.
For challenger brands, he urged the room that “sometimes it’s better to do something and get it wrong than do nothing at all”. He added: “Let’s not be bland, because bland just kills things. It costs you money. Be brave, do something different.”
His advice to marketers in the room was to find out where to “win”. “Let’s do the insight. Let’s do the research. Let’s find out what we have in our armoury.”
“Stop thinking about visibility and start thinking about significance”
Next up, Matt Holmes, performance and innovation strategy director at TrunkBBI, offered a sobering take on how AI is transforming search and discovery and what that means for brand strategy.
Having worked brand side at the likes of PrettyLittleThing and Card Factory until recently joining TrunkBBI, Holmes said the search landscape has “changed massively,” with tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews now acting as gatekeepers, deciding which brands appear “trustworthy” enough to recommend.
He pointed to recent figures showing Google’s market share remains at 93.1% in the UK, while ChatGPT now attracts 700 million users globally — with 8% of people saying it’s their primary search engine.
“It’s not actually replacing Google,” he said. “It’s creating a parallel search behaviour. People that use ChatGPT actually use Google more.”
As AI-generated overviews dominate the top of results pages, Holmes warned that traditional organic visibility is fading fast. Click-through rates are slipping and behaviours are shifting, making the landscape for brands trying to compete on organic search “really, really difficult”.
For marketers looking to adopt new strategies to thrive in this new AI-driven search reality, Holmes said the focus needs to shift from visibility and instead the focus should be on brand-building.
“Stop thinking about visibility and start thinking about significance,” he urged marketers in the room. “In the world of visibility it was all about can customers find us? For significance, it’s about whether you are AI’s preferred choice.”
Holmes wrapped up with three takeaways: align search strategies more closely with brand building; resist chasing “the next big thing” and maintain a solid SEO foundation; and evolve how success is measured, as traditional metrics lose meaning in an AI-shaped world.
If you’re not primed, you’re not coming in
There was an unfiltered look at how authenticity drives brand success in one of marketing’s toughest sectors with Lisa Thompson, strategy and planning partner at Wavemaker and Jonnie Norgate, head of brand and external comms at solicitors firm Irwin Mitchell.
Personal injury and medical negligence law isn’t a category most people like to think about, let alone engage with. With a small percentage of the audience who will only ever need the service following a traumatic event, Thompson asked the audience: “Does brand-building even matter?”
Wavemaker’s answer came from data. Over ten years of research into how people move through the marketing funnel, and a recent collaboration with Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, the agency found that 84% of people choose a brand they are already biased towards — long before they’re consciously “in market”.
“This data suggests that priming is even more important. If you’ve not got that bias before you start that journey, you make it really difficult,” she said.
For Irwin Mitchell, the goal was to reposition the brand and business. Instead of corporate or polished TV spots, the firm turned to influencer collaborations. It may seem like an unlikely choice, but after digging into research, they discovered influencers, out of all media, are “brilliant” in the long term, as they have the “longest multiplier effect”.
“What’s the biggest thing people needing legal services look for? It’s a recommendation, they want to know that a brand is trusted.”
Working with disability consultancy Purple Goat to approach the influencer strategy with sensitivity, the firm paired real clients with influencers who shared similar experiences or disabilities, from paralympian Amy Conroy to Jake from The Traitors, reflecting on life with cerebral palsy.
The campaign saw an 8–10 point rise in brand preference and brand love. Thompson left the audience with three takeaways: prime early, embrace authentic stories, and collaborate with experts.
Fix the leaks before buying new tools
While some marketers may be chasing the next big platform or flashy new tool, Ben Ashcroft, head of digital at Edison Media, reminded the room that most performance issues have simpler roots.
“Marketing is, at its most basic level, a problem-solving game,” he explained, as while the focus may shift towards new AI or martech platforms, success often comes down to fixing the leaks already in your funnel.
“It’s really important that we don’t neglect the fact that advertising and marketing is only 50% of the process,” he warned.
Before those fancy new tools and platforms came along, a brand’s owned funnel was “everything”. So, if you don’t know which bucket is leaking, “you will never be able to fix it,” he said.
Highlighting the importance of going “back to basics”, Ashcroft walked through an example of a client audit process, showing how inefficiencies drain budgets more than lack of spend.
By mapping out key levers to measure success, he revealed how brands can achieve more even without spending additional budget through small, actionable avenues to increase efficiencies.
“The chances are you may not need that shiny new platform that boosts efficiencies,” he explained. Instead, the biggest gains marketers will see is from identifying their leaky bucket as their next action brings the highest ROI.
His message was simple: performance isn’t hiding in the next tool, it’s hiding in the processes brands forget to check, and brands should be spending more time fixing those to avoid leaving “time and money” on the table.
Data that tells a story
The Strategy Spotlight stage wrapped up with three&six co-founder Ben Hanley and Lindsey Sagnella exploring how to turn data into stories that sell.
They detailed how their three-stage approach — signal, story, system — helps brands filter data to get meaningful insights, craft narratives that connect and draw people in, and repurpose visual assets effectively.
In the modern world where marketers are often “drowning in dashboards and metrics”, the duo urged marketers to stop treating every data point as equal. What matters is the signal — the moments where “behaviour, emotion and commercial opportunity intersect”.
In one example, a US luxury resort discovered that multi-generational families were returning every year, creating a tradition the brand had never acknowledged.
That insight became the foundation for a milestone anniversary campaign that turned into one of the resort’s “most-viewed offers” on its website.
What began as a simple social campaign with a previously unused hashtag evolved into an evergreen campaign, inviting existing and future guests to become part of the story.
Through a refreshed visual identity, personalised guest communications and a suite of new creative assets, the campaign transformed a single data point into an emotional narrative about belonging and shared experience.
After sharing examples from photo and video shoots — and how those creative decisions translated into more effective ad campaigns — Hanley and Sagnella left the audience with four key takeaways.
Identify one to three key signals that will drive decisions; craft a compelling story that connects with your audience; establish up to three core messaging pillars that support your narrative and repeat them consistently; and finally, build one effective shot list that visualises the hook through imagery.
Hanley closed with a simple reminder: “Consistency builds memory. Memory builds revenue.”
