Creative Operations Summit London 2026 Past Sessions

First Sessions Confirmed

We are busy developing an exciting agenda for Creative Operations Summit London 2026 so keep your eyes peeled for details.

If you are interested in speaking at the event, please contact Victoria Rose at VictoriaR@henrystewart.co.uk

In the meantime, check out the first confirmed sessions below...

The Quest for Real Stories
Daring to be Different

Audiences are becoming increasingly discerning, seeking authenticity and transparency

Our time is shaped by digital media -authentic storytelling has never been more powerful. Audiences crave content that resonates emotionally and feels real.

Covering:

How the BBC crafts impactful, memorable stories. Applying insights from BBC.com audience data and the key tools and techniques that help content creators connect meaningfully with audiences.

Know Your Audience: What BBC.com audience data tells us about what viewers want. Using BBC.com data to map themes and narratives that people care about.
Make Me Feel: Casting characters with lasting emotional impact that create ‘that’s me’ identification. Emotional buy-in that binds people to brands.
Visual Language: To see is to believe. The moving image is a powerful medium for implanting enduring messages.
Keep It Simple: Challenges, solutions, innovations. Authenticity and transparency win both hearts and minds. Strip out the noise and create honest, compelling narratives.

Create content that doesn’t just inform—but resonates, inspires and endures.

Claire Small, Global Head of Creative, BBC Studios

Agencies to Agents

Fact:

After years of AI hype, marketing leaders are now focused on what's real: practical, large-scale application.

Consequence:

This pivot presents a new operational reality that forces us to rethink everything from strategy to workflow.

Response:

The fundamental shift from traditional agencies to agents.
The ‘agentification’ of everything.
The new model in which AI agents, for insights, strategy, and creative, are integrated to:
Collapse the content supply chain
Create hero content in minutes (not months)
Deliver hyper-personalization at a scale previously impossible.

This new approach moves beyond automating old workflows and enables brands to truly operate at the speed of culture.

Wesley Ter Haar, Co-Founder and Chief AI Officer, Monks

The Big Leap

In a time when the World Economic Forum has declared that every single risk (economic, technological, climatic, political) is now a verifiable fact, leaders are facing unprecedented pressure, with nearly half of CEOs doubting their company’s viability within a decade.

This urgency demands continuous reinvention in all organisations, but staff willingness to support enterprise change is collapsing, and business cultures aren’t fit for purpose to address this need.*

My name is Ivan Pols, and my talk, 'The Big Leap: The Need for Reinvention,' is not a theory session; it’s a call to action.

Drawing on my experiences as Chief Creative Officer at what3words, as a global creative director at Ogilvy and adam&eveDDB, and as a creative coach at Truth & Spectacle, I offer a way for organisations to build reinvention into their cultures.

I explain a four-step, structured process that shows that by combining our inherent creativity with a questioning mindset, we can make spectacular and relevant leaps of logic.

This session demonstrates how to leverage the power of better questions to foster team alignment, break down silos, shift culture, and build sustainable collective energy to achieve goals.

It’s a guide for in-house creative practitioners to step up and build influence.

It’s a wake-up call for leaders to harness their people’s creativity as their most capital-efficient fuel for growth and adaptation.

Ivan Pols, Chief Creative Officer, what3words

Events Creative Operations Summit London 2026 First Sessions

First Sessions Confirmed