Continue networking, sharing ideas and celebrate a great day at the official drinks reception!

How Creative Teams Thrive Between Process and Possibility

The challenge:

In the space where creativity, structure, and machine intelligence collide, how do you protect creative magic while evolving the method?

The need:

Creative Operations must navigate a high-stakes balancing act: embracing technology and data without dimming the creative flame; building scalable systems that don’t smother the soul of the work. 

In a landscape where AI, automation, and hybrid working are changing how creative teams operate, what does exceptional creative leadership look like?

This panel discussion will:

Your chance to visit the exhibition and network with your fellow Creative Ops Professionals.

The art and the practice of “designed serendipity” consists of building experiences that infuse ‘brand love’ at every customer touchpoint.

Why delivering ‘brand love’ is more essential than ever.

 Covering: 

Tired of briefs that feel more like checklists than creative springboards? You’re not alone. In the rush to keep pace, the true power of a well-crafted brief often gets lost, and with it, the chance to inspire great work.

Brand and strategy consultant Mary Czarnecki believes it doesn’t have to be that way. Her approach? Treat the brief not as a form to fill out, but as a story to tell.

Film documentarian, Richard Brehm discusses the rigors of the creative process and how meeting the challenges can solve our hardest problems. 

James Cameron rewrote the paradigm for making movies on Avatar using scientific method. It was all about finding a way to breathe life into the fantastic characters in his head. Yes, Pandora was breathtaking, the story was emotional, and the 3D opened a window into an immersive wonderland, but the trick was making us believe in the 9 ft. blue Neytiri. 

Is it storytelling, or just content? People are craving authentic experiences, and storytelling is an opportunity for brands to build connection, engage with audiences and generate entertainment, but not all stories are created equal. 

In this session, Alex Blum will focus on the difference between generating content vs telling engaging stories, and he will identify the challenges and requirements of the storytelling journey. 

A Fireside Chat on AI, Creativity, and the New Content Stack

Join Misti Vogt (Orange Logic) and Sarah Iskander (gateB) for a candid conversation on the evolving role of DAM in a post-AI creative workflow. They’ll tackle what’s changed (and what hasn’t), why creative output remains the engine behind marketing impact, even when attribution tends to land elsewhere, and how orchestration — not just storage — is what today’s teams truly need.

Expect honest takes, real-world examples, and answers to questions like:

Reimagining the production cycle as a human-AI collaboration.

Covering:

• Workflow diagrams: brief → AI concept comp → proofing → production designer
• How AI shortens cycle times without compromising craft
• New roles (AI Prompt Engineers, Creative Workflow Architects) in future Creative Operations teams

The next evolution of Creative Operations is not about efficiency alone - it’s about designing systems where human creativity and AI automation reinforce one another.