Digital Bites November 2025 wrap up

On Thursday 20th November 2025, we wrapped up our final Digital Bites event of the year and what a fantastic way to close out Connective3’s 2025 event season. The Everyman was looking wonderfully festive, decked out in Christmas decorations, and we welcomed guests with a fully stocked bar and a very popular pizza lunch.

The afternoon brought together a brilliant mix of 8×8-minute talks from brands including Hip Pop, Cox Automotive, Connective3, GIFTA and more. Topics ranged from influencer gifting and data, to brand building, personal development, and unsurprisingly, AI.

We have been running Digital Bites for the past five years and we’re incredibly proud of where it is today. The event has grown in size and scale but what remains the same is our commitment to bringing a fun, friendly and informative event to the Manchester marketing community.

Digital Bites continues to sell out each time, with a growing waitlist of marketers hoping to grab a spot. This is a testament to the hard work our team put into delivering the event, the short and snappy content our speakers deliver and the thriving digital scene here in Manchester.

A huge thank you to our event sponsor, GIFTA, to our brilliant speakers, and to everyone who joined us on the day. Digital Bites wouldn’t be what it is without your support.

You can view the event photography here.

Catch up on each session below, including talk summaries and speaker slides.

Kirsty Perkins – Director of Training, Dale Carnegie
Talk: Brand soundbites – Connection is the new currency

Next up was Kirsty Perkins from Dale Carnegie who delivered an interactive session that had the whole room up on their feet. The premise of the talk was that delegates were given eight prompts to discuss with someone they had never met before in the room, and each prompt had to be discussed with a new person.  The prompts got the audience discussing why it’s important to:

– Skip the blame game
– Remember names
– Ask good questions
– Give real recognition and more

Tom Higgins – Co-Founder & CEO, GIFTA
Talk: From gifting to genuine trust: Redefining the influencer-brand relationship

Tom Higgins from GIFTA took us through the evolving world of influencer gifting, emphasising that while AI has its place, it is people and their honest reaction that truly shape a brand’s credibility. He explained the importance of treating influencers as consumers first and not just content creation machines and accepting that not everyone will love your product and that’s ok. His recommended approach was simple, if the influencers your gifting products to love it then they should feel free to post about it and if they don’t, the brand should want to hear why. Tom highlighted that viral moments can’t be engineered by brands but they happen when creators are trusted to tell the story in their own way. He also underlined the need to track all content in real time to feed insights back to stakeholders and noted that as the influencer landscape evolves rapidly, brands should be leveraging creators of all sizes to ensure their marketing remains effective.

Eve Rodway – Brand Manager, Hip Pop
Talk: From noise to noticed: Marketing that actually cuts through

Eve Rodway, Brand Manager at Hip Pop, delivered the next session on how challenger-brand thinking can help any business cut through an increasingly noisy online world. She explained that consumers don’t always want polished perfection but instead they want to feel something and this is what gives challenger brands the freedom to take risks, use their personality and show up as real humans. Eve shared fun, low-budget and experimental examples from Hip Pop, from a Mr T–inspired outfit to a pumpkin drink stunt. Her core message was that the work that feels spontaneous and a bit experimental sticks ten times longer than the work that feels safe. In a digital landscape that can feel increasingly fake, she encouraged brands to embrace realness, lean into their quirks and create moments that genuinely resonate.

Brittany Deller – Senior Marketing Analytics Manager, Connective3
Talk: Swipes, clicks & cart ghosters: Insights are the matchmaker for all channels

Connective3’s very own, Brittany Deller, took to the stage next to deliver a clever, dating-themed session exploring why marketers focus too much on the “first date” — the click — and not enough on what happens next. She reminded the audience that clicks aren’t commitment, and vanity metrics don’t tell the full story, especially when the ad is brilliant but the website experience falls flat. Instead of ignoring the users who ghost, Brit explained that we should be looking at why they drop off. She explained that your insights are key to effective marketing as they act as the matchmaker that connects your channel. By leaning into first-party data and understanding how users behave on your website and across your campaigns, we can build experiences that attract customers and more importantly keep them around.

Jim Ker – Digital Marketing Lead, Cox Automotive

Talk: The infinite AI marketing muddle

Jim Ker opened with a relatable confession that: “AI is doing my head in” – capturing the pressure many marketers feel as the landscape shifts faster than anyone can track. With stakeholders asking for proof of how teams are adapting, Jim shared the areas that he’s focused on. First up is reporting which he stated is still the way to a stakeholder’s heart, but AI has changed things. Impressions are rising, clicks are falling, and marketers need to explain why the quality of traffic now matters more than the volume. He urged the industry to diagnose problems before prescribing solutions and to evolve traditional skillsets to include AI search and prompting, and find trustworthy sources amidst the noise. SEO, he joked, has “died” seven times – “she’s not dead, she’s having a glow-up.” His closing message was simple: value your copywriters, embrace frameworks like RISE, and don’t be scared of AI – “just get on the damn bus.”

Will Brittain – Head of Brand Media and Tash Carlisle, Senior Brand Media Manager, Connective3
Talk: Stop wasting brand budgets: A new playbook for creating measurable attention

C3’s Will Brittain and Tash Carlisle delivered a practical session on how to stop wasting brand budgets and build campaigns that genuinely earn attention. They stated that brand campaigns are long-term by nature, making them harder to justify to stakeholders, especially when quarterly reports demand immediate results and true uplift often only appears when ads with strong creative are seen at higher frequencies. They walked through measurement approaches like GEO-testing and creative analytics, stressing that creativity is what gives media its impact. Their creative motive framework helps brands identify audience motivators and barriers and translate these into emotionally resonant creative that clearly communicates benefits. Using examples from clients (including how different emotional drivers can reshape positioning), they showed how great storytelling and influencer content can bring these motivations to life authentically. Their takeaway was simple: if you want brand media to work, you need emotionally grounded ideas, clear measurement baked in from the start and creative that resonates far beyond narrow, transactional messaging.

Jennifer Livesey – Founder & CEO, Bizzy Humans
Talk: Chaos can’t sit with us: The secret to a calmer, more productive work week

Jennifer Livesey from Bizzy Humans closed the day with a fast, funny and brilliantly relatable session on why so many of us feel busy but not productive and why the problem isn’t us, it’s the systems we work in. Drawing on her experience managing mission-critical projects, she explained the three forces that silently sabotage our workdays: ourselves (overthinking, multitasking and people-pleasing), each other (constant pings, group chats and chaotic collaboration) and our systems (messy processes and unclear expectations). Jen showed how small fixes like reducing low-value tasks, setting boundaries, simplifying workflows and ditching or muting group chats can unlock huge gains in calm and clarity. Her biggest takeaway was for the audience to start noticing friction, write it down, and commit to fixing one thing each week. By engineering chaos out of your workday, you free up the time, focus and energy to actually thrive.

Check out all the event photos here and make sure you’re following us on social to kept in the loop with our latest updates!