Up North

Save the date: 19 June 2025

Up North is a SOLD-OUT one day Manchester marketing festival by Connective3.

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Speaker line-up

Event FAQ’s

Speakers from the biggest and best brands…

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Not your average marketing event.

Up North is Connective3’s annual Manchester marketing festival that brings together leading marketers, inspirational thinkers, and entrepreneurs for a one-of-a-kind event.

Across two stages, there are over 30 sessions, providing content on all things digital marketing, business strategy and personal development. Talks that will help you think bigger, work smarter and inspire you to get more from your marketing strategies.

We’ll be joined by some of the brightest minds in the industry with speakers from Expedia Group, The Sidemen, Thursday, Indeed, F*ck Being Humble, Google, TikTok and more.

You can view the full agenda here, if you want full talk details please view the speaker page.

📍 Victoria Warehouse, Trafford Wharf Rd, Manchester, M17 1AB
🗓️ Thursday 19 June
✅ One day, two stages, 30+ speakers
🕖 Full day conference from 8.30 am – 5 pm
🎉 5-7 pm official after-party sponsored by Print.com

Meet our sponsors

print.com

We’re so excited to have the print.com team joining us as Up North 2025 sponsors. They’ll be exhibiting and sponsoring the after-party, so expect lots of goodies and give-aways.

About Print.com
Print.com is an online print platform crafted by and exclusively for creatives, agencies and graphics professionals.

Endless printspiration.
Unleash your creativity with print.com’s extensive range of over 1000 premium printed products and finishes. Explore options in print, signage, packaging, textiles, promotional gifts, clothing, and beyond.

Co-creation is the wind beneath our wings.
Print.com take pride in offering a first-class service, providing local, print-savvy customer support. Think of them as your print procurement team—your go-to experts, advisors, and inspiration for everything related to print, promotions, and branding.

You can use the code: C3UPNORTH for 10% off anything you purchase from their site.

Find out more about print.com

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is sponsoring this year’s Up North and will be providing you all with a much needed caffeine fix during the morning of the event with tea and coffee.

About Ahrefs:
Ahrefs is a Singapore-based SEO software company that helps optimise websites of any scale — from giants like Netflix, Facebook, Uber, and Forbes to small businesses looking to build their presence on Google’s top page. According to The Straits Times, Ahrefs is one of Singapore’s fastest-growing companies in 2024. TechRadar also named Ahrefs one of the top five best online marketing services in 2024, along with Google Ads, Facebook, Hubspot, and Mailchimp.

Find out more about Ahrefs

GIFTA

GIFTA is the UK’s largest influencer gifting agency, specialising in authentic product gifting to micro and nano content creators. Founded in August 2020, the company has disrupted the influencer marketing industry. GIFTA’s unique approach focuses on creating genuine, unsponsored content by gifting products to creators who have a genuine interest in the brand. The company works with global brands across various sectors, including Tesco, Unilever, Adidas, Nike, and HelloFresh, offering end-to-end services including an influencerdatabase, influencer selection, full fulfilment and distribution, tracking, reporting.

Find out more about GIFTA

Powerhouse

Powerhouse is a leading content production agency based in Leeds with over 25 years’ experience in the industry. Their 14,000 sqft headquarters is designed to allow for the creation of photography and film at all scales under one roof, and includes seven studios, viewing rooms, post-production suites, virtual production, and remote shooting technology. The team offers a full-service approach delivering production strategies, creative development and execution for clients such as Arla, Birds Eye, Haribo, M&S, and Majestic Wine. In addition to its expertise in the food and drink sector, the agency has also worked with leading boiler, kitchen, beauty, and baby brands as well as delivering content for the likes of Center Parcs and the London Eye.

Find out more about Powerhouse

Generation Digital

Generation Digital is a workplace consultancy helping marketing and creative teams work faster, collaborate better, and enjoy the tools they use.

We’re a Platinum Asana Partner and proud to support teams across the UK in transforming how work gets done. From managing campaigns and content calendars to streamlining approvals and reporting, we help agencies and in-house teams get the most out of Asana at scale.

We also support Miro and Glean for visual collaboration and AI-powered search, but when it comes to workflow, clarity, and campaign execution, Asana is where the magic happens.

Whether you’re looking to fix messy processes, onboard your team, or roll out Asana across your entire organisation, we’ve got you.

Trusted by teams at: Beauty Pie, The FA, Bupa, NHS, Grenade and more

Find out more about Generation Digital

You Platforms

You Platforms is more than a content marketing agency. We own our audiences across Leeds-List, Yorkshire-List and Manchester-List, giving us access to incredible data science that drives the success of our client work. We create awesome multi-channel, native advertising campaigns that make people want to take action, while putting user experience and the reader at the heart of everything we do. There are no invasive pop-ups, we never post clickbait and we keep everything hyper-relevant. As a result, our readers are more engaged, and because our content always inspires action, they’re more responsive to campaigns too.

The result? Stats that well exceed the industry average, readers who keep coming back for more and extremely happy clients.

Trusted by teams at: First Bus, Jet2, first direct bank, Sky.

Find out more about You Platforms

Passata

Passata is the AI productivity coach for people with goals bigger than their to-do list.

Designed for ambitious freelancers, founders, and multi-taskers, Passata uses smart time tracking, personalised coaching and actionable insights to help you stay focused on what truly matters. Passata empowers you to build better habits, make meaningful progress, and work towards the life you actually want.

Find out more about Passata

Girls in Marketing

Girls in Marketing is a global learning provider and community empowering women to thrive in their marketing career.

Founded in 2019, the platform supports over 500,000 marketers worldwide through accessible online courses, expert-led webinars, in-person events, and a thriving membership. Girls in Marketing creates space for ambitious marketers to connect, grow, and succeed – no matter their background or career stage.

Find out more about Girls in Marketing

Pedagogue

Pedagogue.io is solving the £200B AI productivity gap holding back UK businesses.

Our AI Adoption Operating System delivers hyper-personalised microlearning that certifies teams in AI Literacy in just 5 minutes daily, powered by our secret sauce – an Institutional Memory Engine that trains employees on your specific company data, making AI productivity gains actually happen.

We’re building tomorrow’s AI-powered workforce, today.

Find out more about Pedagogue

Meet our speakers

F*ck Being Humble

Stef Sword-Williams

TikTok

Broghan Smith

Expedia Group

Perla Bloom

The Sidemen

Martha Evans

The Sidemen

Shannon Royal

N Brown Group

Helen Hope

Google

Andreas Stefanou

Connective3

Tom Lanaway

Cloud Nine Hair

Naomi Horan

View all speakers

Up North in numbers

Day

400

Delegates

Speakers

Why attend up north?

Whether you’re a marketer at an established brand, or someone just starting out – the content is designed to help marketers of all levels improve not only their skills as practitioners but also as professionals.

If you want to network and learn with the leading marketers in the North of England, then this is the event you need to be at.

And the best part? It’s completely free.

Unique & historical venue

Up North is proudly hosted Victoria Warehouse in Manchester. Victoria Warehouse is a truly stunning venue and we knew it was the venue to host Up North from the moment we walked through the doors. Set a stone’s throw away from Old Trafford, the former cotton store is a uniquely designed event spaces, perfect for a gathering of Northern marketers. Expect plenty of exposed brick and dramatic lighting – throw in a few stages and 400 digital marketers, and we’re sure to have one hell of a day.

What makes us different?

Digital Marketing events happen across the country every day, and the variety offered in the market is more than ever before, so why should you spend a day with us?

Our team have attended 100s of marketing events, we’ve run conference and seminars for 50-1000+ people, and we felt there was a gap in the market for an event that not only informed, but inspired.

We chose to host this event in Manchester, as we are passionate believers in the value of uniting the digital community in the north. We have our second largest connective3 office here, have built our Digital Bites networking events here and felt that this city had to be the home for Up North.

Up North Content Hub

Here’s a sneak-peak at the BTS of setting up and running Up North.

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Un-Plugged Up North Edition

C3 Unplugged is our digital marketing vodcast series where we sit down with industry experts to find out more about their roles, career paths and industry updates.

We interviewed some of our Up North speakers for the series and the first three episodes are now live!