Hero Conf talks

The Invisible Hand of Google Ads: How the Algorithm Sets Your Prices

Google Ads looks like a free auction — but it isn’t. Beneath the interface lies an algorithmic market where Google dynamically adjusts prices to optimize its own efficiency, not yours.
Drawing from €25M of managed ad spend across multiple industries, Matthieu Tran-Van reveals the hidden economics of Google’s Smart Bidding system — and how to use it to your advantage.

How To Media Plan Like A Boss In 2026

Kat will go through a live demo of how to media plan without getting trapped in the usual ‘Google & Meta’ traps. How to respond to a brief, and work out where to target potential customers across a range of platforms including Reddit, TikTok, Pinterest, LinkedIn and more. Expect some laughs, maybe some mention of poo, and some practical examples you can take away.

No More Whack‑a‑Mole: A Scalable System for Amazon PPC

Sarah’s talk explores why most Amazon PPC programs stall—and why the real problem isn’t bids, but chaotic structure, weak signals, and overlooked creative. Sarah presents a practical, repeatable system to scale Sponsored Products, Brands, and Display by connecting clean account architecture, Search Query Performance insights, and creative optimisation to predictable growth. Attendees will walk away with a 7/30/90-day roadmap, actionable workflows, and clear guardrails to balance efficiency and scale across any category or market.

Is the swipe file dead? Meta ads and their insatiable creative appetite. Streamlining your creative strategy process.

Aggie will talk about why creative quality is just as important as creative volume and how her COLOURFUL™️ Creative Strategy process will mean your ad accounts will never run out of data driven, intentional creatives to test.

The Platypus Effect: Why Reddit Ads Don’t Fit Social or Search

Dhea will examine how Reddit Ads occupy a category of their own – sitting between social and search, and increasingly shaped by the platform’s influence on AI models. She will explain how Reddit users behaviours differs from traditional social browsers and search users, and what this means for targeting and intent. The session will give marketers practical insight into leveraging Reddit’s unique position to reach audiences actively seeking authentic, community-driven recommendations.

How to Scale Your Meta Ads Impact Without Scaling Your Spend

In this talk, Vicki will show how brands can grow their results on Meta without increasing budgets, using a smarter creative and funnel-first approach. She will break down what actually moves the needle in 2025’s ad environment, how to avoid wasted spend, and how small teams can get big-agency impact with lean processes. Attendees will leave with practical frameworks they can apply immediately.

Amazon’s AI Arsenal: The Next Frontier for Media Buyers

While AI-enabled media buying is surging, most platforms act as an opaque “Black Box.” Amazon is pioneering a different approach with Performance+ and Brand+, innovative AI tools designed to keep the media buyer at the center of the decision-making process.

This session will provide an in-depth look at how Amazon’s AI tools truly work, leveraging their vast streaming and commercial data to deliver precise outcomes. You will discover the infrastructure behind these solutions and learn exactly how Performance+ stands apart from similar products by delivering superior, more transparent results.

Attendees will receive essential case studies and practical guidance on how to access, deploy, and maximize the utility of these industry-leading AI tools for their own media buying success.

Can AI Agents manage PPC accounts autonomously?

In this talk, Benjamin Wenner will share hands-on insights on how automation experiments led to building a custom AI agent to manage a Google Ads account with as little human interaction as possible. The talk is about showing what’s possible, where the limitations are in AI, how one would approach this, and where it can be used to improve work. It’s less theory but more practical insights and showing experiments.

Proactively Manage Negative Keywords to Drive PPC Efficiency

Dez will guide the audience through a proven approach to negative keyword management that minimises wasted spend and strengthens campaign efficiency. He will cover how shifting from reactive fixes to a proactive approach creates cleaner signals, better targeting and most importantly, more profitable PPC campaigns. The session gives marketers the frameworks and steps needed to maintain control even as match types broaden.

The New Rules of Google Ads: Redefining Search Marketing in the Age of AI

AI is redefining paid search, not just through automation, but through changing search behaviour. With AI Overviews and AI Mode, users shift from short keyword queries to conversational questions, and Google increasingly decides which answers and ads appear. Performance Max, Broad Match and AI Max push this algorithmic approach even further.

For PPC managers and digital leaders, this creates both uncertainty and opportunity. Visibility moves into AI-generated surfaces, and control over placements continues to shrink.

In this talk, Cindy shows how advertisers can regain strategic control in an AI-first search landscape: from feeding the right signals into Google’s systems to steering campaigns with structured testing and clear decision frameworks.

Scaling ROI Through Advanced PPC & SEO Integration

Everest will explore strategic approaches to integrating paid search (PPC) and organic search (SEO) efforts to maximize return on investment and create synergies between both channels.

Everest will likely demonstrate how to leverage data insights from PPC campaigns to inform SEO strategy and vice versa, identifying opportunities where paid and organic search can work together to dominate search results and improve overall performance.

Attendees can expect to learn actionable frameworks for aligning keyword strategies, content development, and conversion optimization across both channels to achieve better results than treating them as separate initiatives.

Survival of the Strategic: Rethinking Growth in Search Advertising

Paid search alone is not some magic engine for exponential growth; it’s a vacuum cleaner designed to efficiently capture existing demand. For too long, PPC professionals have been pressured to create new business out of thin air, leading to wasted spend and strategic burnout, rather than helping solve the true barriers to business growth. This session reframes the role of the paid search marketer from a button-pusher to a strategic diagnostician. We will explore why true business scaling happens outside the ad account and how your most valuable skill is identifying when you’ve hit the limits of existing demand, and asking the right questions. Stop chasing impossible growth inside your campaigns and learn to guide your clients and stakeholders toward the true levers of scale.

After pondering in this session along with Kirk, you will walk away knowing how to:
Identify the “efficiency plateau” when existing demand is maximized, and paid search can no longer grow without outside scaling efforts.
Diagnose external issues limiting scale by investigating key aspects of business fundamentals.
Reframe conversations with stakeholders to focus on solving core business problems instead of minor campaign tweaks.

Problematic briefs meet programmatic: How connected TV (CTV) complements your campaigns

In this talk, Alavi will cover why CTV should be part of every modern media strategy. Connected TV is no longer just a brand-awareness channel; it has become a performance-driven opportunity that many agencies and clients still struggle to harness effectively. With UK households subscribing to multiple streaming services, audience fragmentation and overlap are increasing, often resulting in wasted budgets and underexposed campaigns.

Alavi will show the audience how to turn these programmatic headaches into meaningful results. She will explore why CTV deserves a central place in media strategies by offering incremental reach, high engagement, and detailed measurement. Attendees will learn how to develop platform-ready creative that captures attention and drives action, as well as how to structure a minimum test budget to validate performance and optimise campaigns.

The session will also provide practical guidance on available CTV platforms, programmatic buying approaches, and strategies for avoiding audience duplication. By the end, attendees will leave with clear, actionable steps they can implement immediately to ensure their CTV activity is effective, scalable, and seamlessly integrated into broader video and omni-channel plans.

Use Meta Ads To Attract High Quality Leads

In this talk, Duane is going to show you why he thinks Meta is the most unrated marketing channel for brands looking to acquire more high quality leads in 2026. There are a half a dozen ways he sees ad accounts phone in the work and end up with leads who don’t remember signing up.

This talk will cover the following:


• Meta’s Lead Ads: Why 95% of brands should stay away
• Meta’s Lead Ads: three tips to make it work (when you have no choice)
• Meta’s Andromeda and why you should care about it
• How we run campaigns to get high quality leads
• Why a custom landing page is a must
• Levers you must use: ad creative, and audience targeting
• What conditions must exist if you want to scale your efforts


If you are looking to branch out to paid social and scale up your leads in 2026. You need to add Meta to your marketing.

Dominating the potential of First- and Third-Party Data in LinkedIn Ads

In this session, Sveva will demonstrate how to build a high-performance LinkedIn strategy by strategically combining third-party and first-party data sources—many of which are already sitting unused in your organization. Attendees will discover how to unlock hidden value in customer databases and leverage an often-overlooked asset: the LinkedIn Company Page. Rather than treating it as a branding tool, Sveva will show how to use it as a real-time testing ground for creative messaging and audience validation, turning organic engagement signals into paid campaign intelligence.

Through practical examples, Sveva will explain how campaign data itself becomes a continuous feedback loop: learning which audiences convert, which messages resonate, and which creative formats drive action. Attendees will learn to adopt a data-driven approach that connects multiple touchpoints into a cohesive acquisition system. While the examples focus on LinkedIn, the framework applies across platforms.

This talk is designed for marketers ready to stop leaving performance on the table and start treating their data as a strategic advantage—not just a reporting requirement.

Why Rising Costs in 2026 Could Be the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Your Paid Social ROI

Many businesses complain that Facebook ads are too expensive and that CPMs are out of control.

But here’s the upside: when ad costs rise, lazy marketers quit, leaving more room (and profit) for those who know how to adapt.

In this session, Sarah will share how she turned higher costs into higher profits by rethinking how she runs campaigns. You’ll see how rising prices forced her to zoom out, optimize the full funnel, diversify traffic, and uncover hidden profit opportunities most advertisers never even notice.

Google Ad Grants in 2026—New opportunities for charity advertisers

Google’s free ads program for charities has a longstanding reputation for being difficult to get results, but new features have led to a renaissance of the program.

For the first time in 20 years there’s a new campaign type available: Performance Max has no keywords, and enables you to target ads at defined audiences instead. Local charities’ ads can now appear on Google Maps and further P-Max inventory might be coming soon. Your nonprofit’s ads can now appear in AI overviews in Google searches.

Policies have recently been simplified, there’s now support from product experts on the official Google for Nonprofits forum, and the program has opened up to 100+ new countries.

Most nonprofits and the digital agencies that work are unaware of the new opportunities, so let’s break down what’s possible in 2026.

Every Penny Counts: How to Run Effective PPC on Small Budgets

In this talk, Ramial will explore how small budgets behave differently in PPC and what matters most when spend is limited. He will share practical observations drawn from real Google Ads accounts, focusing on reducing waste and focusing on fundamentals that reliably improve performance.

Stop Chasing Audiences, Start Creating Them: The Power of Creative in Paid Social

This talk unpacks why the best paid social doesn’t find audiences, it forges them. A quick hit on how creative does the heavy lifting when targeting can’t.

Winning In B2B E-commerce With Microsoft Ads

Matt will be explaining how he drives almost the same amount of revenue from Microsoft Ads as he does on Google, whilst spending significantly less. He will detail the strategy he has used to drive significant year on year growth through a tailored Microsoft Ads strategy