Foresight is our bi-monthly salon series for senior marketers, built to navigate change with clarity and confidence. Think TED Talks for the industry: short, sharp sessions, one speaker or panel at a time, each one built to cut through the noise rather than add to it.
This edition tackled one of the most urgent challenges in modern marketing: how brands actually produce social content that works. A room full of brilliant people, and some bold opinions on where social content is heading next.
The Production Problem, hosted by Patricia Lefebure, set the scene with an uncomfortable truth: we've spent years industrialising content production, chasing speed and volume, and in the process made most content easier to ignore rather than harder to skip.
From there, Stop the Scroll: The Playbook of Attention, hosted by Henry Scriven, got straight to the point. You have three seconds to make your content count, and if you're not designing for that window from the first frame, you've already lost the scroll.
The New Rules of Social Craft, hosted by Nate Harper, pushed back on the idea that content has to look thrown-together to feel real. Attention spans aren't broken, most content just isn't earning time, and craft is still what separates the two.
After the Post: Building Community, hosted by Sarah Heavens with guest speaker Candy Goodman from The Crown Estate, took the conversation past the moment of publishing, to where the real work actually starts. The next content plan is usually hiding in plain sight, in the comments section, if brands are willing to listen rather than just broadcast.
Internal Content: The Channel Most Brands Ignore, hosted by Will Parkinson alongside guest speakers Dino Portelli from Workplace Forge and Lisa Marr from RWE, made the case for the audience companies forget they have. The whole workplace is a canvas, and it deserves the same creative thinking as anything external.
The Rise of the Specialist Creator, hosted by Henry Scriven with guest speakers Anna Merabishvili, Kerry Maule and Yasmin Laggoune from Tripadvisor, looked at how today's most influential creators build loyal, niche audiences, and what brands need to understand before trying to partner with them.
Closing things out, Intentional Creative in the Age of AI, hosted by Emily Mulhall, tackled the debate running under all of it. Without craft, AI output is just slop. AI can extend good judgement, it can't replace the absence of it.
Alongside the talks, our Creator Lab ran throughout the event, capturing moments from the day in real time and turning them into multiple formats live, a working demonstration of how different production decisions shape performance.
Seven sessions, a lot of very different angles, and one line running through all of it: craft still wins.
Thanks to everyone who came, spoke and argued with us, including our guests from The Crown Estate, Workplace Forge, RWE and Tripadvisor.
