Format   Roundtable discussions, a brief presentation and circulating discussions

Dress   Informal and comfortable

Session 1  ·  14:00 – 15:00

Unified identity across surfaces

Introduced by Cal Young, International Marketing and Communications Director, Epsilon

Cal opens with findings from the RetailX research report Reliable Forecasting from Mixed Signals and the accompanying UK consumer survey (1,000 respondents, May 2026). The data surfaces how fragmented channels, inconsistent signals and duplicated reach are eroding marketer confidence — and what customers themselves say about how well, or badly, brands recognise them across touchpoints.

The core question for discussion:

How can you know your customer if you can’t recognise them as the same person in different contexts, surfaces and channels?

• What “good enough” looks like for cross-surface recognition today — web, app, email, in-store, retail media
• Organisational fragmentation: different teams owning slices of the same human
• Practical trade-offs: deterministic vs probabilistic, scale vs precision, speed vs governance
• How identity changes what we measure — people, not devices; journeys, not last-click

Session 2  ·  15:45 – 16:45

Future identities

Question:

“As retail media moves into store and real-world data gets richer, aided by new contextual and behavioural insight, what new identities become possible — and acceptable?”

This session is conducted in two distinct parts.

Background brief: Beyond demographics: contextual and passion-based personas

If customers transcend socio-demographic markers, how do we architect richer, context-aware personas? How can we engage at a strategic level above mechanical, funnel-obsessed approaches?

• Limitations of traditional targeting: why “young mum” or “affluent male” fails compared to actual passions and concerns.
• Lenses based on passion—such as gaming, travel, or sport—and their manifestation in content choices and behaviour.
• The impact of context: weekday vs weekend modes, exploration vs replenishment, and social vs professional settings.
• Operational reality: capturing and governing passion signals to drive action without crossing into intrusive territory.

Future identities: beyond the cohort

While traditional markers like geography, wealth, and life-stage have served us well, they remain mere proxies for authentic engagement. Today’s behavioural and contextual signals allow us to pierce through these shortcuts to reach a more profound understanding. In this session, we’ll investigate what happens when we recognise a customer by their current mode of interaction rather than a static paper profile.

Provocation:

“If age, income, and life-stage were off the table, how would you define your most valuable customer—and your next one?”

We will explore the emerging axes of identity that surface when demographics are stripped away, focusing on two dimensions that redefine addressability across every segment:

Identity posture: How visible does the customer choose to be?

The spectrum ranges from the Visible customer—who embraces data exchange for tailored relevance—to the Shielded customer, who employs ad blockers and avoids sign-ins to prevent data extraction. This distinction is behavioural, not generational, and dictates who is truly addressable in the modern landscape.

“Agency” posture: Who is trusted to make the final call?

We contrast the Delegator—comfortable letting AI and loyalty programs curate their choices—with the Verifier, who demands final control and views automation with scepticism. As AI agents begin to mediate the purchase journey, this axis may become the defining characteristic of your future audience.

By crossing these dimensions, we identify four archetypes vital for the next phase of commercial modelling:

• The Open Delegator: Visible and automation-friendly; the high-LTV profile many brands currently over-target, yet a shrinking segment of the market.
• The Open Verifier: Visible but insistent on personal agency; they value personalisation but reject intrusive nudges.
• The Shielded Verifier: Guarded and independent; a high-value, loyal customer once reached, though resistant to traditional identity signals.
• The Shielded Delegator: The critical new frontier; they reject surveillance but embrace delegation via their own AI agents. They will buy through an assistant long before they accept a cookie.

Our discussion will challenge which archetypes your brand is optimised for, which you are systematically ignoring, and how to build models that serve all four.