Two of our team spent the day at the Prolific North’s marketing festival on its final day taking place in Manchester. Many sessions, a full room and, if we’re honest, a day that confirmed more than it surprised.
That's not a criticism. In a year where every conversation seems to default to AI, it was quietly reassuring to spend a day with a room full of marketers who kept arriving at the same conclusion: the fundamentals still win. Brand matters. Emotion drives decisions. Slow thinking at the start saves wasted time later. The channels change. The principles don't.
Here's what landed, and what we think it means.
Jess Atkinson Organic Search Director at Embryo, opened the day with a reframe that cuts to the heart of something we've been saying for years. In a crowded search results page, people scroll past brands they don't recognise, even when those results rank well. Familiarity and trust do the heavy lifting before a single click happens.
This isn't just a search insight; it's a brand insight. The reason brand investment is so hard to sell to growth-stage B2B businesses is that its effects are diffuse and delayed. Jess put a sharp point on it; if people don't recognise your name, your ranking is irrelevant. Brand recognition is a multiplier on every other channel - paid, organic, referral, everything. It's not soft. It's structural.
A panel hosted by Fergal O'Connor of Buymedia, with contributors from Print.com, Citipost Mail, Bauer Media and Sky, named something that too many marketing plans still refuse to acknowledge. Direct mail is making a comeback. Print never truly left. The marketers seeing the best results are the ones who have stopped treating channels as separate conversations with separate budgets.
The honest answer to "what should be in our media mix?" is almost never "more digital." It's "where does your audience actually pay attention?". Those are different questions entirely and confusing them has led to a lot of wasted spend. We push clients on this in our Discover phase, not because we have a channel agenda, but because the evidence sometimes points somewhere more interesting than the default.
Dmitry Bastron from Byteminds made a point that will reshape how a lot of agencies talk to clients about digital builds. Yes, you can vibecode a website in two hours. The harder question, the one that determines whether the investment was worth it, is what your marketing team can do with it once it's live. Can they run campaigns? Personalise content? Prove what's working?
The CMS market is moving fast and the distinction between "content management" and "AI-powered marketing operations" is disappearing. The best platform in 2026 isn't the one with the nicest interface, it's the one with the most capable agent. We're already asking this question during our Develop phase, but Dmitry's framing sharpened it considerably.
Eleanor Barker, CMO at Lipton Teas & Infusions, walked through the return of the PG Tips Monkey, and made a genuinely compelling case for the commercial value of emotional brand assets. The Monkey wasn't brought back out of sentimentality. It was brought back because it owned a feeling that no amount of new creative could easily replicate.
The lesson here for B2B is underappreciated. Established businesses often have dormant brand equity they've stopped investing in - assets, associations and reputations that carry real commercial weight. The instinct, particularly at growth stage, is to modernise everything. Sometimes the smarter move is to understand what you already own before you discard it.
Bill Dennett from Uber Advertising made a point that sounds obvious but rarely gets acted on: the brands people keep coming back to aren't the ones with the best loyalty programmes. They're the ones that are genuinely useful. Stop competing for attention. Become the answer to something real.
In B2B, this matters enormously. Long sales cycles mean brand perception is being formed long before a buyer is in market. The businesses that win are the ones their clients think of first - not because they've been loudest, but because they've been consistently relevant. Relevance is earned through positioning, content and reputation. It's not bought through incentives.
Ben Cunningham and Ben Ducker from IMA were refreshingly candid about the media and creative relationship. It involves compromise. It involves communication. It won't always produce the work you imagined on paper. But when the creative is built to travel through the right channels, and the channel thinking has shaped the creative from the start, the connection is what makes it work.
This is something we've seen hauled out repeatedly. Clients who treat brand, content, and distribution as a joined-up system consistently outperform those who brief them separately. It's not a process preference; it's a results question.
Andrew Holland from JBH PR introduced a framework we think will become standard vocabulary quickly: FAME x FITNESS = probability of being chosen. In an AI-mediated search environment, rankings matter less than recommendations. Being cited by a language model is increasingly as valuable as appearing on page one, and it requires the same underlying work: be known, be credible, be consistently useful.
This reframes a lot of how we think about thought leadership and content strategy for B2B clients. The brief was already "create content that builds authority." Now the measure of success includes whether that content is being surfaced and attributed by AI. The standard has risen. The principle hasn't changed.
Hannah Craig and Lauren Henley, from Impression, mapped the fragmentation of modern search across social, search engines, and AI - and what it means for campaign design. The phrase that stayed with us: design for unrestricted visibility.
Campaigns can't be channel-specific anymore. They need to generate clear, consistent, structured signals that travel across platforms and that AI can understand and summarise. It's not a radical departure from good content strategy but it does raise the bar on clarity, consistency and structure. Vague, loosely attributed content gets lost. Specific, well-sourced, clearly positioned content gets cited.
Rebecca Lott, Commercial Director at Co-op Live, closed the day with a perspective drawn from one of the most ambitious venues launches the UK has seen. The insight ran wider than events: the audiences brands want to reach whether fans, customers or clients want authenticity, seamless experiences and evidence that you mean what you say. They can tell the difference between genuine engagement and automation dressed up as it.
In B2B, where trust cycles are long and reputations are hard-won, this matters as much as anywhere. Brand promises must be lived at every touchpoint. The gap between what a business says it stands for and what clients actually experience is where brand value gets lost. Closing that gap is strategic work, not marketing window-dressing.
Across nine sessions and a full day of conversation, a few things kept surfacing.
Brand is not a nice-to-have, it's the thing that makes every other channel work harder. Emotion drives B2B decisions just as much as it drives consumer ones; the buyers are the same people. The brief is where good work either starts or gets derailed. The AI shift in search doesn't replace the need for clarity, credibility and consistency - it amplifies it.
None of that is new thinking. But it's thinking that too many businesses still treat as secondary to the next campaign, the next platform or the next technology. The marketers in that room on Thursday weren't chasing shiny objects. They were doing the harder, more valuable work of getting the fundamentals right.
That's exactly the approach we take with clients at WDC Brands, and it was good to spend a day with people who think the same way.
If the themes from Manchester are live questions in your business; brand recognition, media mix, campaign structure, AI visibility, or simply getting a brief that sets the work up properly - we're happy to talk it through.
WDC Brands is a B2B brand strategy and marketing agency based in Manchester. We've worked with established businesses in professional services, financial services and technology for 25+ years, across 500+ projects. We work with founders, MDs, and senior marketing leaders at moments of growth and change.
Get in touch. No obligation, no agency pitch. Just a straight conversation about your business.
Created on
May 29, 2026
Last updated on
May 29, 2026
