Digital Bites Speakers 2026

Phil Collins has seen the world of grocery from both sides of the shelf. He’s managed big-brand budgets for Cadbury, Oreo and Philadelphia at Mondelez, led retail media at WHSmith, and helped scaling challenger brands like PerfectTed build their trade marketing strategies and be retail ready. Now he leads Shopper Marketing at DASH Water, where every pound has to earn its keep and work hard.

Almost £9 in every £10 spent on groceries still goes through a physical shop, yet much of marketing’s attention is focused on the digital world.

For grocery brands, the challenge is turning online attention into offline action. That means more than driving awareness or consideration. It means giving people a reason to choose your product when they’re standing in front of the shelf, and a reason to buy it again.

This talk explores why digital marketing needs to influence shoppers before they reach the shelf, how showing people when and why they’d use a product can turn consideration into purchase, and how challenger brands can win back shoppers who bought once and disappeared.

With over ten years’ experience in digital PR and content creation, Rosa oversees Connective3’s growing Manchester team of digital marketers across SEO, paid media and PR. In her career, Rosa has worked across a variety of different projects, from stand-alone campaigns to long-term strategic roadmaps, for brands including Nike, Manchester Met University, Stena Line, and Ann Summers. She combines her analytical skills with her love of creativity to create concepts that work for many industries, including eCommerce, finance, law and travel.

Search is no longer just about rankings and clicks. Consumers now move seamlessly between Google, AI assistants, social platforms and creator content, discovering brands long before they ever visit a website. As the search journey evolves, marketers need a new way to measure success.

In this session, Rosa will explore why influence is becoming the most important SEO metric. We’ll look at how brand visibility across AI search, social media, digital PR and traditional search is shaping discovery, consideration and demand, and why relying on rankings alone no longer tells the full story.

Using real-life examples, this talk will show how marketers can measure brand influence across the modern search journey, connect activity across channels, and prove the value of SEO in a world where visibility increasingly happens without a click.

Key delegate takeaways

• Understand how the search journey has evolved across Google, AI, social and creator platforms.
• Learn why influence is emerging as a more meaningful measure of SEO success than rankings and clicks alone.
• Discover practical ways to measure brand visibility and influence across the modern search ecosystem.
• See how SEO, Digital PR and social can work together to drive demand and demonstrate business impact.

Michelle McKelvey leads Agency Partnerships for OpenAI across Europe and the UK. Previously, she held agency-partnership roles at Meta and advertising sales roles at Google. She now works with agencies to explore the opportunities in conversational AI, translating new product developments into practical strategies and campaign ideas for their clients.

Join Michelle McKelvey, Agency Lead for Europe at OpenAI, to explore how conversational AI is changing the way people discover, research and choose brands. You’ll leave with practical ideas for understanding customer intent, creating useful and relevant advertising, and building a clear test-and-learn approach to ChatGPT Ads. The session will also explore measurement beyond the click and the role of trust, privacy and user choice in shaping the future of advertising.

Molly heads up PR, Social and Influencer at Sundeals, a recently launched travel brand in the TUI network. In her 8 years spanning agency and in-house roles she’s managed everything from successful press offices, to organic social strategies, to integrated influencer campaigns. In her free time she also manages her own successful social pages, and develops UGC for the likes of Indeed, Time Out and Bumble.

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Mia is Brand & Community Manager at Tuckshop (co-founded by Jamie Laing and Edward Williams), previously at Seep (Dragons’ Den-backed). A challenger-brand marketer with 4+ years’ experience, known for bold, stand-out social content, from making a washing-up sponge famous to dating people on LinkedIn.

Want to be remembered? Build one series. Mia shares how repeatable content formats turn brands and creators into names we never forget. You’ll learn how to spot a format with legs, one that passes the one-sentence test. How to make it bold and PR-able enough to travel beyond your followers. And how to commit to the repeat, building a brand image people recognise instantly.

Ella works as Community Manager at CLIQ – the UK social app helping people build real-life connection through clubs, events, and local communities. Over the past two years, she’s run experiential campaigns with brands including La Roche-Posay, White Claw and Sephora, pairing them with grassroots communities across the UK and EU to create events people want to show up to, and walk away with real life connection.

Ella also runs The Community Insider, matching community leaders with brands for value-exchange partnerships. Before CLIQ, she built her own walking club from scratch (Girls Who Walk Manchester) the experience that first got me into community building.

Community has become the default answer to every brand question. As someone who builds brand communities for a living, not every brand needs one. Some brands are better off creating a brand moment, or showing up in communities that already exist, than launching their own and leaving it to go quiet. This talk is a practical guide to telling the difference – the questions to ask before you build, and the framework I use to test whether a community has a real reason to exist.

Key take-aways:

• The difference between a brand moment and a community – and why a one-off event is not a community, however good it is.
• Five questions to ask before you build, including when tapping into existing communities is the better move.
• The 3 R’s: reason to exist, reason to return, reason to bring others – a 30-minute audit to pressure-test a community idea or fix one that is stuck.

Nick has 10+ years experience in the digital marketing space with expertise across Strategy and Paid Media with stints at both agency and in-house. Having previously worked at Rise at Seven, m/SIX and Impression, Nick has worked with a variety of Brands including TalkTalk, Mark Hill & National Trust on all things digital.

Nick is passionate about tying together Brand and Performance for his client through measurement and media planning.

Promos look brilliant in-platform with healthy ROAS and sales but the sales spike often hides a quiet dip in the weeks that follow. How many customers would have paid have paid full price and returned better margin?

This talk shows how to measure what a promotion really adds and how to look at this yourself.

Every brand says it has a tone of voice. Fewer can say it’s checked every time someone hits publish. In this eight-minute talk, Zoe Burke shares how Bridebook built Toney, an internal AI tool that rewrites and scores copy against the brand’s voice, with hard-fail rules, a scoring rubric and a “brilliant friend” standard baked in. She’ll also share the other, less glamorous ways the team uses AI day to day to speed up work, from content and SEO to reporting. Expect practical examples, honest lessons, and ideas you can implement yourself.