In this opening presentation you will hear from Matt Watson – CCO at PepsiCo’s European In-House Agency Sips & Bites and PepsiCo Europe. Matt and S&B have won over 50 global awards in 2025 including In-house agency of the year. But more importantly, his campaigns is driving real growth of the brands with work that works and paying back to the business with over $5m in value creation which is over 200% in 2024 vs 2023.

Matt helped to build PepsiCo’s in-house agency from scratch and will share their great growth story, including a talk on:

• The people first approach – how do you cultivate human centricity and human led leadership. Exploring the four Cs necessary for success: culture, collaboration, challenger, and celebrate

•  Insights into work on Subcultures and how PepsiCo leverages the niches. How do you bring in cultural knowledge and understanding and make your brands more relevant to humans through subcultures.

•  Lessons learned from award-winning and successful campaigns such as Doritos ‘Silent’, 'For the Bold in Everyone' and more.

• Navigating the  impact of economic uncertainty and rising geopolitical tensions. With reduced marketing budgets and more pressure on efficiency -  how do you continue to add value across all the touch points  and demonstrate your ROI on spend?
• Proving the commercial and creative value of in-house teams to the rest of the business – how do you position yourself within the business and educate the key stakeholders about your strategic role? 
• Why good creative is good for business? Building a culture of creative excellence and bringing creativity to the heart of the business.
• Rediscovering and articulating the benefits of in-housing: from unlocking the power of in-house creative innovation to bringing agility and speed to media buying. How deeper connection and better understanding of a brand can ensure authenticity and lead to better engagement with audiences across all channels.
• Proven ways to scale up in-house operations successfully – how do you maximise your team’s impact to increase conversions throughout the marketing funnel and build customer trust.
• How do you scale in-housing across various business units, as well as globally?

How Skyscanner's Head of Brand & Creative Andre Le Masurier built a world-class creative team filled with misfits, makers and travel geeks hell bent on putting a positive dent in the travel universe.

From startup scrappiness to billion-dollar brand recognition across the globe. Andre will reveal how his team didn't create another dusty brand playbook that sits in a drive – they have unleashed it through systematic design and fighting for simplicity to scale distinctive consistency and craft across every aspect of the brand.

What you'll learn:

• Why In-Housing actually works (when done right)
  Forget the agency vs. in-house debate. Andre reveals how to align brand muscle with business strategy – and why this matters when you're building something special that lasts.

• Building a platform with personality
  Step-by-step transformation: How to turn a cold-calculator into a beloved global community of helpful travel geeks – through storytelling that hits different in every market.

• Test, Learn, Scale, Repeat
  The insider playbook for creative optimisation that works. Leading indicators, brand lift studies, and the art of knowing when to trust your gut, double down or pivot fast.

• Earning your seat at the table
  How to speak CMO and CFO language with metrics that matter. Plus: the other factors that prove brand and creative worth beyond the spreadsheet.

• No one-size-fits-all formula. Exploring different approaches to in-housing models. What works for some sectors and brands and what does not work for others? From fully serviced in-house agency to hybrid models.

• The power of trust.  How do you build trust with colleagues in the marketing and brand teams in-house and how do you ensure trust and integrity  whilst working with agencies?

• Setting and understanding the boundaries - defining roles, responsibilities and deliverables. How to improve client-agency relationship through better communication and building a foundation of mutual respect.

• Steps to take when things go wrong. Top tips to navigating tense moments, creative disagreements and other frictions between in house and agency.

• Creating an environment for blended teams to thrive in the changing media landscape.  

• How is the relationship between in-house and agency evolving? 

This panel brings you 4 zone exhibitors from the APA's Production Unplugged event.

The initiative was a curated masterclass spanning two weeks of brand-side selection, 30 stellar exhibitors across 5 zones, and 22 brand categories. In-house leaders from Diageo, Waitrose, Vodafone, Channel 4, Sainsbury’s, Estée Lauder, Reckitt Benckiser, Pernod Ricard, SKY, what3words and Merlin Entertainments hand-picked the exhibitors that had demonstrated the greatest business impact through Agile Partnerships, ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance), Smart Production (Efficient and Effective Processes, Future Innovation, and enhanced Customer Experience (CX).

This is your chance to move beyond the pitch. Each production company will provide an unplugged look at how they collaborated with brands, revealing the tangible value they added and the commercial and creative impact their work delivered.

Moderated by Janet Markwick

• Focus on talent and relationship management in-house - what can creatives learn from production and vice versa. How do you inspire and engage your teams to deliver exceptional outputs, as well as connect them and engage with the wider business.

• Making impactful work to elevate the brand and drive brand and business growth - how do you build best-in-class capabilities in-house and boost team collaboration to execute world-class work.

• Exploring the impact of the social first strategy on creating different ways of working. How more brands are becoming more self-sufficient and bring production in-house to strengthen their in-house offering.

• Where do the suppliers really add value? Top tips to collaborating with production companies and partner agencies and getting all teams together to deliver outstanding results in an efficient way.

• Operational excellence to maintain quality and deliver best results through the entire in-house setup. Key considerations whilst managing an in-house operations: structure, technology, budgets and more.

• Navigating misaligned expectations for in-housing: Lessons learned and what to do when things go wrong?

Moderator – Patrick Burgoyne, Co-founder, In-House Agency Leaders Club

Joanne will talk about Sainsbury's journey to growing and transforming their in-house agency from a small studio to a full in-house creative agency. She will share the approach taken to setting up and expanding the agency, and lessons learned.

• Creating an in-house agency model and new ways of working  fit for the retail industry. Bringing in-house capabilities such as creative operations, design, production and account management
• Addressing the ever-growing volume of production in a digital and multi-channeled world. Focus on production, especially photography and video shoots - how do you bring those capabilities in-house to add value?

Integrating all functions from an operational point of view. How to overcome silos and create efficiencies. How to deliver on key components comparable to external agencies?

With 1.4M daily site visits and 4.4M active customers, the Very Group is one of the largest digital-only retailers in the UK. In this case study you will hear from Mark Stocker who in his career has led creative teams across a huge transformation agenda from print and film through to digital innovation and ai.

At the Very Group he has recently led the evolution of an internal Creative team into a brand new in-house agency ‘Hello Studio’ serving both internal stakeholders as well as partner brands utilising the retailer’s wealth of customer data throughout the ideation process to collaborate with brand partners to curate omnichannel campaign and ecommerce assets that truly resonate with how customers shop.

• Hello Studio launch – lessons learned.

• Building an external facing agency with an internal team. How do you scale up to serve multiple  brand partners?

• How do you choose your priorities and navigate in a complex environment – overcoming category challenges, as well as balancing customer requirements and what needs to be delivered internally.

• How do you achieve full control through the funnel - from campaign all the way to customer conversions. Leading creative capabilities in optimising own brand marketing, driving material growth in brand attribution, sentiment and shopper intent.

• Examples of real-life AI applications – from copy and creative support to digital twin testing.

In her first in-house role with ITV, Niki is accountable for all creative output from concept to execution across all media channels, ensuring ITV continues to deliver the best innovation and creativity. Niki has over 20 years of agency experience, including 12 years which she’s spent at Mother working with clients ranging from Ikea, PG Tips, Diageo and Samsung. In this presentation she will talk about lessons learned whilst being in-house and how she has built an award-winning in-house team. 

• Finding and retaining the best talent. How do you define roles and responsibilities, as well as build future capabilities for team success?

• Speaking your stakeholder’s language. The importance of performance measurement – how do you measure and demonstrate the value of your work?

• In-housing with an impact - delivering highly effective, brave creative work which changes people’s behaviour and delivers great business results.

• Overcoming challenges whilst in-house – lessons learned and top tips.

• Understanding the bigger picture - emerging trends in audience behaviour and media consumption and their impact on what’s expected from in-housing to bring to the table.
• The AI revolution and its impact on in-housing: from current applications to how it will reshape the future of media and marketing.
• The human factor - building future capabilities and leaving a legacy. How do you nurture future talent and build a strong talent pipeline?
• Embracing technology to improve efficiency, free up resources and make smart data-driven marketing decisions in-house. Examples of tools which can increase your team’s efficiency by reducing the time-consuming and repetitive tasks involved in media buying.
• Focus on innovation and brand growth via creativity – future-proofing and creating conditions for creativity to thrive.  How do you build the right mindset to grow and continuously adapt?