Ahhh, Advertising Week Europe 2026. Though the (new) year is hurtling by at lightspeed, we always welcome its arrival. Three days of ambitious ideas, ambitious leaders and ambitious forecasting, in sunny London, nonetheless.
Rubbing shoulders with our industry peers, it wouldn’t be remiss to say, “great minds think alike”. But this year’s Ad Week had other ideas. 2026’s theme: “Great minds think unalike.” And in a time where every ad professional would rather lose an eye than be lost in a maze of monotony, we see the appeal.
From March 24–26, we joined thousands of attendees as over 400 speakers shared their take. Star power illuminated the sessions – Alan Carr and Charles Dance brought humour and passion in equal measure. Notebooks were filled. A few opinions were changed. And one thing kept pulling everyone back to the same place: trust.
With audiences more sceptical than ever and LLMs changing how we discover brands, trust has never been more fragile – or more valuable. Whether with your customers, your clients or your colleagues, here’s how trust shaped our takeaways.
We're in a Trust Recession
B2B marketing isn’t playing by the same rulebook anymore. The New Rules of B2B Marketing session recapped the discipline’s journey through three distinct phases. The informational phase, where thought leadership was currency. The attention phase, where volume and disruption reigned. And now, the trust phase. “People buy people.” Relationships, culture and authenticity are what close deals.
LinkedIn’s Mimi Turner illuminated this. 94% of B2B buying groups will use AI LLMs before even talking to a salesperson. But here’s the thing – made up of 1s and 0s or not, both humans and LLMs are influenced by the same signals: trusted voices, verified sources and real, lived experience. Which means the quality of what you put out there matters just as much as ever – arguably more. Turner left us with the quote of the week: “Shit that travels at the speed of light is still shit.” A wise reminder that crap creative won’t cut it in 2026. We’ll be thinking about that one for a while.
Creators Hold the Keys to Trust
Creator content is outperforming brand content by a factor of ten. That’s not a figure to tuck into a footnote. According to the Building Brand Legacy in The Creator Era session, the ROI is “off the scales” – and creators should no longer be treated as an add-on tactic to nudge younger audiences.
Vinted’s Senior Influencer Marketing Manager spoke about how creators are now the entry point for consumers onto brands. And Jennie York from WaterAid showed what’s possible when you build a genuine community: over $40 million raised, led by YouTube’s Mr Beast and Mark Rober alongside 10,000 creators. Whether we like it or not, influencers do far more than grab your attention for 10–15 seconds. Brands that partner with a trusted creator see audiences become 60% more likely to trust them as a result. That officially makes them trust-builders – and it might be time we treated them like it.
Authenticity is Still the Buzzword of the Year
We know, we know. But hear us out – because this year it came with some genuinely fresh evidence.
A conversation with Alan Carr, Jaime Laing and Sophie Habboo captured exactly where audiences are at: done with the ultra-curated and polished, and reaching for the messy and the imperfect. But – and this is the part that stuck with us – that authenticity still has to be built on a strategic core. It can’t just be chaos with good lighting.
The best example of the week came from Veo Technologies, who walked away with Gold and Silver at the Clios on a budget of less than €5,000. Their AI cameras travel to grassroots Sunday games, youth leagues and amateur clubs across 40+ countries – capturing the goals that would otherwise disappear into the ether. You know the FIFA Puskas Award, the annual prize for the most beautiful goal in football? Veo asked a simple question: what about the goals nobody ever sees? People’s Puskas was born – a platform for local legends. 300,000 voters showed up for it. People who already cared, now with a genuine stake in something. The lesson wasn’t to slash your budget. It was to find the thing your audience is already passionate about and give them a reason to own it.
Trust Inside Organisations Is Just As Important
This was the session that quietly shifted the conversation. Behind The Title Live – Redefining Strength & What Leaders Don’t Say Out Loud – moved away from profit-making and into something entirely personal.
Hamish Nicklin, ex-Google and ex-Dentsu, silently struggled for seven years while leading his teams to success. The last person to get the “how are you doing?” Slack message is often the highest-performing leader. In industries like ours – built on energy, confidence and output – voicing these things is hard. Which makes it all the more important to do.
The Future is Female nominees were equally candid, speaking about the very real barriers they’d faced and the work of building trust within their own organisations – as well as within themselves. Charlene Gravesande of INK MEDIA LTD put it plainly: “If you don’t take care of your wellness, you’ll have to take care of your illness.” It hit differently in a room full of people who’ve probably pushed through more than they should.
Same Destination, Different Roads
Sure, this year’s theme was “Great minds think unalike.” And the sessions delivered a genuinely varied mix of perspectives, personalities and lived experience across every room. But the destination kept being the same.
The fundamentals of great marketing haven’t changed; the conditions have. Audiences are increasingly fragmented. AI is accelerating and altering everything. Yet the brands and people who stood out most leaned into humanity. Whether a grassroots footballer whose goal finally got seen or a community that raised $40 million because someone gave them something real to rally around, long-term relationship building continues to do what it’s always done.
So, we came away from Advertising Week 2026 with one clear conviction: in a world where everything moves faster, trust is the thing worth slowing down to earn. Credibility compounds – and the brands that understand that are the ones still standing when the noise settles. That’s not a new idea, but after three days in that room, it felt more urgent than ever.
As Mimi Turner reminded us, speed is nothing without substance. We couldn’t agree more.
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