Conference program preview

Let Jes take you on a thought experiment: What if every brand website disappeared tomorrow? Customers would still discover and convert, through AI chatbots, social feeds, digital PR and ad platforms. In her opening keynote, Jes goes beyond the click to shows what impacts consideration and ultimately conversion. She covers which of these you can influence, where paid budget still buys you a place, and why your website will matter more to machines than to people.

As bidding becomes increasingly automated, advertisers have fewer levers to pull directly. The challenge is knowing which decisions still matter, which inputs the machine needs, and when to intervene. In this session, Navah provides a practical “if this, then that” framework for Conversion-Based Bidding: how to set realistic CPA and ROAS targets based on budget and campaign economics, when manual controls still make sense versus conversion-based bidding, and how conversion tracking and cross-channel signals influence the results you get. It is a platform-agnostic approach to deciding what to automate, what to control, and what to change when performance isn’t where you need it to be.

Every few months, another headline claims that AI will replace marketers. It will not. But AI will transform nearly every aspect of all marketing jobs, and will fundamentally evolve how we work. There is no reason for denial or panic. In fact, this is exciting news. Search marketers have been reinventing themselves and their processes for more than 20 years. SEO became technical, PPC automated, and Analytics more about cohorts than empirical data.

AI is the next, massive evolution, larger and faster than previous. Marketers who thrive will combine deep marketing expertise (yes, that still matters) with a baked in ability to work inside AI. They understand audiences, strategy and business, hybrid analysts who create workspaces that encompass APIs and MCPs for nearly all platforms, channels, tools that smash silos and put previously insights in. Most importantly, marketers with no previous coding knowledge are merging processes previously reserved for dev teams- and vice versa, with all roles converting into a hybrid.

In this keynote, Marty further defines the Hybrid Marketing Engineer: a new kind of practitioner for a market shaped by AI processing melded data from hundreds or thousands of channels. He will explore skills that will matter over the next five years, explain why human judgment is becoming more valuable, not less, and show how marketers can make themselves more useful, more adaptable and impossible to replace.

The next PPC advantage won’t be “Ask an AI”. It will be about giving your own AI Agents the right tools and context for their job.

This session explores how you can use LLM harnesses like Claude Code, Skills, MCPs, APIs and to turn PPC workflows into autonomous systems, while keeping humans in control of strategy, spend and risk.  Expect architectures, anecdotes, guardrails and failures.

Generating content with AI is easy. Generating useful content reliably across millions of products is not. Most automated content fails: it becomes generic, lacks differentiation, and gradually erodes trust, impacting both SEO performance and user value. In this session, Stefano will show how he and his team built and evolved AI-assisted content workflows at idealo, including what went wrong in production. From poor product data leading to irrelevant web retrieval, to LLMs making unsupported product claims and FAQs answering questions they weren’t asked. He will walk through how these problems were addressed using better data, retrieval validation, task-specific models, automated evaluation, quality gates and human QA — and share a practical framework for deciding what to automate, what to validate and where humans still matter.