Ali Hanan, Founder and Executive Director of Creative Equals, made a rational and emotional appeal for inclusivity in all aspects of marketing – from team composition to creative output. She demonstrated how operating in an inclusive, human, and genuinely empathetic way drives incremental business results, introducing “the new ROI” – Return On Inclusion. 

Many ads fail to reflect the society in which we live, yet when ads show people as they are – and as they want to be seen – brands increase both sales and perception. Inclusive marketing’s impact is felt in Ali’s “Five Rs”: Reach, Relevance, Referral, Reputation, and Resilience – qualities vital for survival in the hugely challenging mid-2020s marketplace. Over half of Procter & Gamble’s growth of the past three years has come from including previously excluded audiences, and more inclusive ads are more likely both to drive profit ROI and to win creative and creative effectiveness awards, from the Effies to the IPAs. 

In an industry increasingly dominated by AI, we need to be particularly vigilant of both the biased data sets on which large language models are trained and the very real perils of non-inclusive prompt engineering, which should become a focus for training and development. 

Creative advertising legend, Sir John Hegarty, made a sober yet impassioned plea for brands to invest in truth as the guiding principle for commercial communication.  

“Pursuit of the truth is the most powerful tool that an advertiser can follow … In our world of post-truth, half-truths, and alternative truth, real truth is more valuable than ever. Truth is a beacon in our mad world that offers tremendous opportunities.” 

 He argued that it is truth which makes advertising effective, yet many believe that advertising exists to subvert it. Today, advertising professionals are trusted less than almost any other group, apart from politicians. 

For Sir John, the ad industry is today obsessed with data and algorithms. “We are a slave to data, yet this obsession is destroying marketing and companies. We talk about data as if it’s magic, and yet data – what’s happening out there – can only ever drive incremental growth, not exponential growth.” He cited the iPhone and Dyson’s bagless vacuum cleaner as being rooted in truth. He said that this was the key that unlocked the creativity behind the products and their hugely successful ad campaigns, effectively engaging audiences through entertainment. 

Sir John’s encouragement for brands to entertain was picked up by System 1’s Orlando Wood. In a masterclass of the medium as the message, Orlando championed the role of showmanship rather than salesmanship in advertising. 

For Orlando, salesmanship is the data-driven, focus-on-the-details approach. Citing the work of psychiatrist, Ian McGilchrist, Wood maintains that salesmanship appeals to the left hemisphere of the human brain, which has a narrow attentional focus, is goal-orientated, and breaks down bigger concepts into their constituent parts. Meantime, showmanship commands the broad attentional focus of the brain’s right hemisphere which understands metaphor, humour, emotions, and whole narratives. 

For the past 20 years, advertising has focused more on salesmanship and less on showmanship; on short-term performance marketing to the detriment of long-term brand-building. As Dr Nick Pugh showed, reporting Ebiquity’s 2024 Profit Ability 2 study, every £1 invested in advertising generates £1.87 in short-term profit payback but fully £4.11 in total profit payback, when long-term impacts are factored in. Orlando underlined the importance of showmanship and brand building, with those ads generating stronger emotional response from showmanship generating much better profit ROI. 

Orlando ended his lecture bringing together the rational and the emotional, the logic and the magic, arguing that, to thrive in 2026:  

“If you’re gonna grow, put on a show.”