Life with the robots
Thurs 11 March 2027
Curzon Cinema, Oxford
Every new technology reshapes how people behave.
The internet did. Smartphones did. Social media did. Now AI is doing the same.
As it gets woven into more and more of our daily lives it's changing how we find information, make decisions, solve problems, and create new things. And if behaviour changes, marketing has to change too.
So our line-up of smart, interesting speakers will be tackling everything from how people’s search habits and buying journeys are shifting and how LLMs are changing the role of brand, to what it looks like to build credibility, influence, and content when nobody trusts the internet.
Plus you'll get the chance to connect with other local marketers adjusting to this new terrain, stretch your marketing muscles in a hack session, and round it all out with fab food and booze.
This isn't about how marketers can use AI. This is about how marketers need to adapt to connect with a world that uses AI. So join us round the campfire and together we’ll explore what marketing looks like now the robots have pitched their tents.
Agenda
9.15 - 10.00
Register, then grab a brew and a bite and a chance to chat ☕
10.00 - 10.15
WELCOME HAPPY CAMPERS
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SPEAKER: Sophie Bell – Managing Director at Toast TV, who loves performing in musicals with a local theatre group (she most recently played Reno Sweeney in Anything Goes) and enjoys peanut butter and salad cream sandwiches.
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Used to be you could see a photo or video online and take it at face value. Now most people’s first thought is ‘yeah, but is that real?’ So when anything can be generated, edited, or manipulated, what makes us believe what we’re seeing?
The generic advice of rougher photography, more behind-the-scenes footage, or sticking your CEO in a hoodie doesn’t cut it. Authenticity isn’t an aesthetic. It’s something people infer from the evidence in front of them.
So this session will explore how to embed that evidence in our content. We'll walk away with specific, practical advice for how to create social media posts, videos, campaigns, and thought leadership in ways that signal human authorship – bringing lived experience to the surface, showing the expertise behind an opinion, revealing the complexity that’s so often neatly edited away, highlighting the provenance of information, and offering the little bits of friction that make something feel less manufactured.
And along the way, we’ll look at real-life examples of brands finding ways to make people stop, believe, and connect.
10.15 - 11.10
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SPEAKER: Colin Cather – Director at Bottle PR, who sings in a band once reviewed as “affable” and despises conference lanyards.
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We’ve spent decades killing off Homo Economicus - the idea of the ‘rational consumer’. We know people don’t choose brands by calmly comparing features, benefits, and price. We choose with our hearts, our habits, our friends, and our prejudices. And this knowledge has been the ammunition of brand-marketing champions everywhere.
But now AI agents - ruthlessly rational by definition - are starting to make decisions on our behalf. So many believe we’re heading for a world where brands become little more than entries in a giant machine-readable comparison table.
We don’t buy that. This session will explore an alternative future, where AI doesn’t reduce brands to a set of functional attributes but instead learns and surfaces the messy, emotional, and irrational reasons why we choose what we choose. A future where brand associations, distinctiveness, and meaning still influence decisions – even when the decision-maker is a machine.
Together we’ll look at what this means for the brand-building choices marketers need to defend and continue making. And, crucially, how to make the case for those choices when the pressure to prioritise what’s measurable, comparable, and immediately commercial gets even stronger.
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SPEAKER: Liz McCarthy – Head of Content and Digital Communications at the University of Oxford, who grew up on a farm in rural Oregon (USA) and toured the world as a professional Irish dancer even competing at the Irish dancing World Championships.
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This session is for marketers who are thinking about their next step – perhaps into a senior position – and wondering what they need to do differently to get there.
Because the higher you go, the less your value comes from simply getting things done. It comes from knowing what needs doing in the first place. And as machines take more of the execution, human judgement becomes a career differentiator.
So we’ll explore how to develop and hone a strong set of uniquely human skills: understanding the context, making good calls, spotting what matters and what doesn’t, connecting marketing activity to business priorities, and becoming someone people trust to shape the direction, not just deliver the brief.
We’ll also look at how senior leaders assess value, and unpack some of the commercial thinking that helps marketers have better conversations outside our own team – so you can move from reporting on what’s been done to influencing what happens next.
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SPEAKERS: Ches Hume – SEO Specialist at Invanity, enthusiastic sailor, and recent extra on Clarkson’s farm AND Jack Kennedy – Founder of Invanity, mechanical-bull-riding champion, and terrible surfer who once crashed into a turtle.
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AI is changing how people find things - whether they’re looking to learn, buy, or just be entertained. They’re asking longer, more complicated questions, having conversations instead of typing keywords, getting recommendations without clicking through to a website, and using AI to narrow down what they want before they ever reach a brand.
So when fewer and fewer journeys follow the old ‘search → click → website → buy’ formula, the answer isn’t to just bolt LLM optimisation onto our existing SEO strategy. The bigger question we have to ask ourselves is: what does being findable look like now?
Jack and Ches will unpack the changing ways people are discovering and evaluating businesses, how AI is impacting the information that gets surfaced, and what it takes to make sure you’re in front of someone when they’re looking for what you offer.
11.20 - 12.15
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SPEAKER TBC
But we promise it will be someone smart and interesting with practical experience of marketing to share…
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SPEAKER: Rin Hamburgh – brand strategist and authority researcher, who used to teach art to juvenile offenders in a women’s prison and once came second in an Annie look-a-like competition.
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Being good at something doesn’t automatically make you known for it. You can have years of experience, deep expertise, and plenty to say – and still find yourself overlooked when the right opportunity comes along. And as machines get better at producing competent answers to almost any question, expertise alone isn’t enough.
Whether you work in-house or run your own business, building a professional reputation means making a deliberate choice about what you want to be known for, then giving people enough reasons to associate you with it.
In this session, Rin will apply some of the foundational thinking of brand strategy to your own personal brand. We’ll look at how to find your thing, define a distinctive position around it, and build the associations that make you memorable and trusted in your chosen space. We’ll also look at the signals that turn expertise into authority, and tackle some common reputation-building traps.
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SPEAKER TBC
But we promise it will be someone smart and interesting with practical experience of marketing to share…
12.25 - 1.20
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SPEAKER: Ellena White – Head of Marketing & Comms at The Story Museum, who lives in the Oxfordshire countryside with her husband, two small children, and Badger the dog and who once got to spend a day driving David Attenborough around Kew Gardens in a golf buggy.
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The influencer marketing model used to be pretty straightforward. Brands made the content, then creators amplified it. Finding someone with the right audience and paying them to say the right things = job done.
But now AI has made content abundant and trust scarce. And that changes what we should be asking our influencers to do. Simply renting someone’s reach and asking them to shout about your brand isn’t enough any more. The opportunity is to build genuine partnerships with people who actually believe in what you’re doing – and give them the freedom to talk about it in their own way.
So this session will look at what that means in practice: how to find the right creators for your brand, negotiate terms and create contracts, brief without strangling the authenticity out of them, and measure whether a partnership is hitting its goals.
We’ll look at real examples of what works and what doesn’t, and learn how to avoid the common mistakes that turn potentially brilliant collaborations into nothing more than overpriced ads.
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Panellists TBA
AI is bringing us more information, more ideas, and more options than ever before - and at a faster pace. But the job of deciding what matters and how to act on it still sits with us.
So what does good marketing leadership look like now? What are the biggest challenges - and opportunities? Where should we be embracing this technology and where should we be resisting it? What should we be looking for in the marketers we hire and develop? What do we need to value more in ourselves and our teams?
We’ll put those questions - and any others you want to bring - to a panel of senior marketers from a range of organisations, exploring where they think our attention, energy, and investment should be in this new landscape.
1.20 - 2.20
A well-earned brain break and a spot of lunch 😋
WELCOME BACK HAPPY CAMPERS
2.20 - 2.40
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Here's your chance to put those marketing muscles to work on behalf of the community 💪 We'll be splitting into groups to hear about different marketing challenges some of our campers are facing, then working together to offer up ideas 💡
2.40 - 3.40
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SPEAKER: Michael Heseltine – a postdoctoral researcher in the University of Oxford’s Social Sciences division, who once completed a competitive burger-eating challenge in record time and is not any relation to the former Deputy Prime Minister who shares his name.
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Most conversations about AI focus on the tools. This one focuses on us.
As AI becomes part of everyday life, it's slowly but surely reshaping habits, expectations, relationships, and behaviours. Some of those changes are obvious. Others are only just beginning to emerge.
Drawing on research from sociology and psychology, Michael will help us take a broader look at how humans are adapting to life with the robots – both individually and culturally - and why understanding those shifts matters for anyone trying to communicate, persuade, or build trust in the years ahead.
4.00 - 5.00
5.00 - 6.00
Drinks at the bar – first one’s on us 🍻
Hear from our happy campers
Energising and fabulous. Brilliant marketers having big conversations, thought-provoking sessions with practical ideas, genuinely friendly and lovely people, and awesome catering (not a beige buffet in sight). Marketing Camp team you played an absolute blinder. See you next year.
Rachel Kemp
Senior Marketing Manager at Macmillan Learning
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If Carlsberg organised conferences… they wouldn't be a patch on Marketing Camp. Everything about the day was top-notch - it set the creative cogs in my brain whirling and I took away so many brilliant nuggets of insight. The only downside is we've got to wait a whole year for the next one!
Sarah Taylor
Community Fundraising Manager at Homeless Oxfordshire
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I had a fab day. Amazing learning, comfy seats, delicious food, brilliant people, and cocktails to finish. I love this community of like-minded people, all so willing to share and help each other. I’ll be back next year!
Nikki Shield
Graphic designer at Designs Like These
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Still buzzing! The talks were inspiring and practical, the keynote was hilarious and thought-provoking, and I loved getting stuck into the hack session - the energy in the room was next level. Can’t wait for next year already!
Neha Mistry
Senior Marketing Manager at Oxford University Press
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From the warm welcome and the relatable and useful talks to the fab food and comfy seats, everything was spot on! I’ll definitely be coming to more Marketing Camp events - and bringing marketing mates with me.
Hannah Qualtrough
Associate Director of Journals Marketing at Wiley
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You know those events that just go like clockwork, and everything's relaxed, and on time, and easy to find, and the speakers are top-notch, and the excellent lunch and the cocktails afterwards are included in the very reasonable ticket price? Well it was one of those. Well done team.
Ned Wells
Director at Cicada Consulting
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Some very good questions
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Nope. Some of the people who come to our events are employed in marketing and comms roles, or working as freelancers or consultants. Others are entrepreneurs or business owners who have to manage all their own marketing as well as running their companies. We often get people working in related fields like fundraising, sales, or events. And we also get quite a few students and others who are keen to explore the industry. We don’t mind what your deal is - if you’re interested in marketing, you’re welcome around the campfire.
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Nah. Just give us your name at the door (and as a back-up have your e-ticket ready on your phone) and you’ll be good to go.
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Train. Bus. Bike. Car. Unicycle. Golf cart. Your own legs. The options are endless. Best place to get all the info you need is on The Westgate Centre’s website, as the Curzon cinema is tucked away up on their third floor.
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Sorry, no can do. We just think there’s something special about the way you learn in-person - plus so much of the value of the day will be about the conversations and activities in between the talks. So we’re focusing on making the physical experience as fantastic as possible, and if you can’t make it on the day then hey - there’s always next year.
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Absolutely. The whole venue is wheelchair accessible and each of the rooms we’ll be using for the sessions has two dedicated wheelchair spaces. The tech set up also has audio description and hearing-assist headsets available - you just need to give us a heads up before the day if you want either of those. And if there’s anything else you need or want to know, just ask us at hey@marketingcamp.uk
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We’re staying put. All the sessions, including lunch and the after-party drinks, are happening in the cinema space. Easy.
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You bet. Can’t have you getting hangry when you’re trying to learn. From snacks as you arrive and a fantastic lunch when we take a break in the middle of the event, to drinks throughout the day, it’s all taken care of as part of your ticket price. We’ll even buy your first cocktail at our after-party. Boom.
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100%. We always use lovely, local businesses to keep us fed and watered, and we make sure they're all set up with easy vegetarian, gluten-free, and dairy-free options. So when you book your tickets just make sure you let us know about any allergies or dietary reqs and we’ll sort it. Or get in touch on hey@marketingcamp.uk for any other questions or if you forget to give us the info when you book.
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We’re not. Call us old fashioned, but we’re just pretty keen on the whole humans-in-a-room-together thing. If you buy a ticket then after the event is over we’ll send you the slides from every session, no matter which talks you choose to go to on the day. But that’s it. At the end of the day you pays your money and you takes your choice.
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We’re only a small event, so we just deal with refunds on a case-by-case basis. If you ask us about cancelling your ticket more than two weeks before the conference, and you’ve got a genuinely good reason, then most likely we’ll say yes and we’ll sort a refund. But if you’ve just changed your mind, or you leave it too close to the day, then you probably won’t be able to get any money back.
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We admit we can get carried away with the camping lingo. But no, you won't have to spend any time in a tent. Since most of you will be coming from in and around Oxfordshire, you can just enjoy sinking into your own bed after an action-packed day. But if you do end up coming from further afield and want some advice on local places to stay, just give us a yell on hey@marketingcamp.uk and we’ll send you some suggestions.
Our partners in grime
Too often sponsorship is just about slapping logos on anything that stays still long enough. Not here. Our brilliant partners, the savvy marketing minds at Invanity, are always as generous with their time and expertise as they are with their money.
At the conference they’ll be sharing their knowledge in one of the talks, as well as offering 1-1 advice in their lunchtime clinic. So if you need to pick a brain or two about any part of your marketing, these guys are the ones to find.
Want in?
Early Birds get the good stuff, with tickets starting at £175.
