Programme (click each day below to view)

DELEGATE CHECK-IN

Location: EXHIBITOR ATRIUM – Vienna Marriot Hotel

Location: Festaal B-D – Vienna Marriot Hotel

30 MINUTE + 15 MIN Q&A

Location: Festaal B-D – Vienna Marriot Hotel

Keynote, Location: FESTAAL B-D – Vienna Marriot Hotel

Our industry often speaks idealistically about being audience-centric, but for some that can be too abstract to implement. Our Microsoft Comms Strategy & Insights and WE I&A team did not accept that reality and instead built two productized solutions. Those solutions provide an audience lens that enable our key stakeholders and partners generate greater impact in the fragmented media environment which includes expanding pitch lists with creators and influencers on different platforms and conducting exclusive executive interviews with influencers who historically have not access to senior execs. Overall, it maximized our efforts with the right voices and channels and provided insights into what worked and where we can still learn.

• Meeting the audience where they are is not enough. You must craft the content in a voice and tone that represents their needs.
• Don’t fall into the trap of believing that larger audiences are better. Smaller, concentrated audiences can be very engaged and may net greater impact if you meet them on the channels they trust and consume.
• There is not a magic button you can press; instead, you must blend qualitative expertise with the data findings. Balancing the art of communication with the science of audience data delivers the best outcomes.
• Establishing a shared language around the audience is hypercritical for universal understanding, setting expectations and behavior change.

Keynote, Location: Festaal A – Vienna Marriot Hotel

In today’s interconnected yet polarized world, businesses that want to succeed must understand their stakeholders’ perceptions all the time, and act accordingly — and that means generating actionable insights from real-time perception measurement. This presentation will focus on how to effectively measure brand, reputation and trustworthiness, and how to use those insights to foster stronger relationships with stakeholders that contribute to business success. We will discuss practical tools to use perception data for risk mitigation and activity optimization, aligning with organizational goals to enhance trust and improve stakeholder loyalty.

Key Takeaways include:

– Tools and metrics by which to measure stakeholder perceptions in an actionable way

– The key factors that contribute to brand reputation, best practices for measuring those factors, and effective approaches to analyzing this data to inform future initiatives

– How to apply those tools to activate trust

– How to ensure the process of measurement and action becomes an ongoing part of the business strategy

Keynote, Location: Festaal A – Vienna Marriot Hotel

The inbox never sleeps. The deadlines don’t pause. The 3AM fact-check is just part of the job.
You’re burnt out. Underpaid. You’re watching your industry transform in real time.

“Disrupted. Dismissed. Distrusted.”, they say.  And yet — you keep going, because the stories still matter.
As trust is eroded and misinformation sprouts at every corner, you are both the problem and the solution.

Step inside the mind of a journalist in 2025 as Medianet’s Managing Director Amrita Sidhu shares a revealing snapshot of the Australian media’s state of play, based on insights from close to 1,000 journalists that were part of the latest Medianet Media Landscape Reports.

Why this matters:

• The AI anxiety in every newsroom
  With nearly 9 in 10 journalists concerned about generative AI, how is it reshaping journalism and redefining what “truth” looks like in a world of synthetic content?
• The pressures driving newsroom discontent
  Shrinking teams. Flat wages. Burnout on the rise. Discover how financial and structural instability is transforming the job of a journalist — and what it means for your organisation’s reputation and its communication efforts.
• The trust tipping point — and the opportunity for communications professionals.
  With public trust in journalism hanging in the balance, and social media being a double-edge sword, how can communications professionals step up and build much needed trust and credibility with journalists?
• The grounding  role of effective measurement
  How does reliability in measurement play an essential part in understanding communication impact and results in the context of generalised mistrust and a media industry in a constant state of flux.

Location: Festaal B-D – Vienna Marriot Hotel

In this candid conversation, top CEOs confront the defining challenges of 2025—from the rapid rise of AI and shifting geopolitical landscapes to copyright dilemmas, tech disruption, and the mental health of the modern workforce. This panel goes beyond trends to explore how today’s leaders are balancing innovation, ethics, and empathy while shaping resilient organizations for an uncertain future.

Keynote, Location: Festaal A – Vienna Marriot Hotel

How are today’s leading PR teams adopting AI and proving their impact? In this micro-session, Natan Edelsburg, Chief Partnerships Officer at Muck Rack, shares exclusive insights from a survey of over 1,000 PR professionals. Get a data-driven look at how AI is being used in real-world communications workflows—plus the latest trends in measurement and reporting. From automation to attribution, learn how teams are evolving their strategies to stay ahead in an industry that’s changing fast.

Keynote, Location: Festaal A – Vienna Marriot Hotel

A presentation of the most recent findings of Meltwater’s annual State of Social report. We explore the trends, challenges, and priorities defining the future of social media. Based on insights from over 1,100 survey responses, this session provides a comprehensive overview of the social media landscape and actionable takeaways to guide strategy in 2025.

-Social is seen as important, but team size isn’t growing.
-36% plan to increase social budgets vs. 39% planning to maintain investment as-is.
-Instagram is now the most used channel.
-Brands are prioritizing brand awareness over web-traffic on organic social.
-Social listening is becoming increasingly vital for brands, but bandwidth and cost are barriers to having a robust solution in place”

Keynote, Location: Festaal B-D – Vienna Marriot Hotel

In popular culture, “gaslighting” – which was Merriam-Webster’s 2022 “word of the year” – is a widely used term to describe psychological head games, most often seen in either toxic family or intimate relationships. People who “gaslight” others generally use a range of unethical communication techniques to deflect responsibility for their own bad behaviors.

But what happens when the same disinformation-driven gaslighting techniques are industrialized… adopted by organizations, brands, and their PR teams, to deflect criticism, counterattack those who dare question leadership, and confuse valid issues by manipulating media? New and emerging research is delving into the problem of organizational gaslighting as an unethical PR practice – with metrics that the industry will want to watch, to take stock of whether one’s PR program is sliding down the slippery slope into unethical, trust-destructive territory.

Attendees will gain qualitative and quantitative insights gathered from senior PR agency leaders in recent months about:

• Ways in which organizational gaslighting manifests in the PR service context
• Whether organizational gaslighting is perceived to be on the rise, according to agency leaders
• Whether agency leaders perceive clients gaslight them / their teams
• The likelihood of PR teams doubting their own judgment or questioning their own credibility when under pressure from clients
• How self-censorship in the PR workplace correlates with gaslighting behaviors
• How this research is setting the stage for consumer-level inquiries in the next year

Keynote, Location: Festaal A – Vienna Marriot Hotel

Keynote, Location: Festaal A – Vienna Marriot Hotel

As PR and communication professionals navigate an increasingly complex media landscape, Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a game-changing opportunity to automate tasks traditionally reliant on human effort. This session presents a comparative evaluation of LLM performance on multiple coding tasks and explores how DataScouting’s advanced software infrastructure empowers media and PR teams. By leveraging AI-driven automation, professionals can streamline media monitoring, enhance data enrichment, and generate more insightful reports across online, social, broadcast, and print media—enabling faster, more accurate, and strategic decision-making.

Stavros Vologiannidis is one of the founders of DataScouting. He has a PhD in Control Theory and his research interests include control, machine learning and systems theory. DataScouting is a software development company committed to providing robust and scalable software solutions to companies and organizations for PR Dashboards, Broadcast, Online and Print media monitoring by using technologies such as text, image and video analytics, speech recognition, LLMs and machine learning.

Panel, Location: Festaal B-D – Vienna Marriot Hotel

This panel will discuss how AI and synthetic audiences are increasingly being used for insight mining, content development, to adapt communications in-flight, and to evaluate content performance.

Key take aways:

• How agencies are creating custom AI models that can replicate and predict the responses of key audience segments.
• How synthetic audiences are revolutionising strategy and planning processes
• How the world’s leading PR agencies use synthetic data to predict communications impact
• How synthetic audiences are used to aid in crisis management and rapid response
• Closing the gap in linking outputs to outcomes and business impact with synthetic audiences

Location: Festaal A – Vienna Marriot Hotel

In today’s world, reputation is a delicate balance. A negative customer experience shared online or a viral video exposing unethical practices can tarnish a brand overnight. Similarly, legislative changes can appear suddenly and catch businesses off guard. Most social listening & brand tracking activities are too noisy and reactive to keep pace, requiring new innovative approaches that provide the “data that matters” for a world where even real time isn’t always fast enough.
In this thought-provoking session, Ketchum will present a clear, actionable framework for modern risk monitoring, illustrated with insights and examples from the field.

Keynote, Location: Festaal B-D – Vienna Marriot Hotel

Great campaigns don’t just tell a story—they’re built on data. This session will explore how to use measurement and theories of change to align complex communications objectives.

Key Takeaways:

A theory of change is critical for both strategy and measurement.
Attendees will leave with actionable strategies to turn research into impact, ensuring their campaigns resonate and drive meaningful organizational outcomes.

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Location: COBURG 5-6 – Vienna Marriot Hotel

Table 1: Not-for-Profit Hot Topics
Host: Camille Raymond, Head of the Communications Impact, Standards & Capacity Building Division (CISC) at the OECD – OCDE

Table 2: One Voice, One Value: Measuring the Impact of Unified IR and PR strategies
As Communications becomes Increasingly tied to business performance, how can we better align and measure the outputs of financial and PR Communications? This roundtable explores the intersection of IR and PR, focusing on how integrated, messaging, measurement, and strategy can drive real company value. Join peers to share best practices and discuss how to demonstrate impact to the C-suite and investors.

Table 3: Coming Soon

Table 4: Coming Soon

Table 5: Coming Soon

Table 6: Coming Soon

Keynote, Location: Festaal A – Vienna Marriot Hotel

Linking communications to hard business outcomes is challenging but necessary to gain influence in budget decisions. This presentation proposes a framework for measuring how communications worth through brands, consumer behaviors, and other marketing communications to drive sales.

• Communications measurement professionals need to do a better job of linking communications to hard business outcomes (i.e., sales).
• The best results come from a combination of modeling and field experiments.
• Experimental design for communications can be challenging, but is facilitated by new technologies and worth the effort.
• The direct effect of communications on sales is weak or non-existent.
• Communications’ effects on sales are largely indirect, moderated or mediated by brand, consumer behaviors, and/or other marketing communications.

SAREC Keynote Presentation, Location: Festaal B-D – Vienna Marriot Hotel

This study explores the integration of organizational alignment into HRM by examining the role of employee-organization fit within communication measurement and evaluation (M&E). Through interviews with 26 communication professionals in Australia, it reveals that objective metrics alone cannot fully capture the performance of communication professionals. Subjective measures, such as stakeholder relationships and cultural contributions, are equally vital. The study highlights the importance of assessing organizational alignment as a key input in M&E, offering a fresh interdisciplinary perspective on combining HRM practices with communication frameworks.

Keynote, Location: Festaal B-D – Vienna Marriot Hotel

What content shapes what Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT says about the world’s largest brands? Hard Numbers has done the hard yards and analysed where ChatGPT sources the content it disseminates about the world’s 100 largest brands. If you want to know how earned, owned and shared media play a role in influencing the content AI models are sharing about your brand, business, organisation or client, this is the presentation for you. Darryl Sparey, Co-founder of Hard Numbers will present the findings from the latest in their Coverage to Capital research series, this time about AI and Reputation.

Key Takeaways will include:

• How much of what ChatGPT and Large Language models says about the world’s largest companies is sourced from earned media
• What role do company websites, blogs and owned media play in shaping the views expressed by ChatGPT
• What impact does PR and communications work have on the content within large language models, and what are the channels that have most impact

Keynote, Location: Festaal B-D – Vienna Marriot Hotel

In this presentation, we’ll explore how AI has reset the media landscape by shifting the focus back onto broadcast as the most reliable source. AI enables structured, actionable insights from a landscape that has evolved from traditional media to fragmented digital and social platforms with varying credibility. At the same time, AI has revolutionized broadcast monitoring, making content more accessible, structured, and manageable.

Key Takeaways:

• Discover how AI has reset the media landscape, reinforcing broadcast as the most reliable source
• Explore how AI-driven media monitoring has evolved from simple keyword detection to
  comprehensive story tracking
• Gain insights from an industry pioneer with 30 years of experience in AI”

Location: Festaal A – Vienna Marriot Hotel

Traditional comms run like an old‐school software install – download once, hit 100 %, freeze until the next big release. Tomorrow’s high-performing teams run a living CommsOS: a perpetual update cycle where data patches strategy, strategy powers action, and action instantly generates the next data set.

Iskren Lilov (Head of Marketing & Comms at Ruepoint and AMEC Comms Taskforce Lead) will guide you through upgrading from the linear “plan-push-pray” workflow to a six-phase, always-on loop. Building on research and an extensive development cycle, Iskren will show why the time is now to roll circularity out at scale across organisations of all sizes.

You will see how the right blend of human expertise and smart tech (quality media data, AI-driven insight, repeatable processes) keeps the loop turning – and why a flawed toolbox can crash the whole system. Expect clear prerequisites, practical examples, and an insightful look at the tools that make continuous improvement frictionless.

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗰𝘁
✔️ A bug-by-bug teardown of the linear comms “operating system” and why it stalls
✔️ The six interconnected phases of CommsOS – and how each lap compounds ROI
✔️ A checklist of resources, processes and software needed to install the loop
✔️ Real-world metrics linking inputs, outputs and outcomes for C-suite proof
✔️ Guidance on merging analyst insight with AI to keep updates automatic yet human-led

Iskren’s evidence-based approach will leave you with a ready-to-deploy roadmap for a sustainable, data-driven PR ecosystem – no reboot required.

Keynote, Location: Festaal B-D

This session will look at developing an Integrated Evaluation Framework for Internal Communication using the current IEF as a model including:
– Valuing internal communication within the communication mix
– Common internal communication outputs, outcomes and impacts
– Using a channels, topics, listening and leadership model for activities
– Using the ICQ10 for formative research

Panel, Location: Festaal B-D – Vienna Marriot Hotel

This session will unveil the fourth iteration of the Barcelona Principles – our industry’s global articulation of what best practice in communication measurement and evaluation should incorporate. Since their inception in 2010, the Principles have offered a compass for comms practitioners whether in house or in agencies, in house teams, vendors, researchers and students alike to guide the evolving practice of PR and comms in how to measure and evaluate its work in a more meaningful, transparent, and outcomes-driven manner.

Location, Festaal B-D – Vienna Marriot Hotel

Location: Palais Coburg Residenz

Coburgbastei 4, 1010 Vienna (2 min walk from the Summit Venue, Vienna Marriot Hotel)

Delegates are cordially invited to the pre-gala dinner drinks reception, generously sponsored by MI Brand Distillery. The theme for the evening is A Rising Tide Lifts All Ships—Your Invite to the Captain’s Table. This unique gala—celebrating the idea that a rising tide lifts all ships—will be the ultimate Captain’s Table gathering. Held in the atmospheric Casemates of Vienna’s historic Palais Coburg Residenz, the evening invites delegates to unwind over fine food, flowing drinks, and a shared sense of purpose.

Suggested Dress Code:

Wear your favorite cocktail attire—or if you’re feeling like you’re cruising through choppy waters, bring your best cruise-inspired look to celebrate the night in style. Think bold touches, elegant details, and a bit of fun—after all, you’re at the Captain’s Table.

Location: Palais Coburg Residenz

Coburgbastei 4, 1010 Vienna (2 min walk from the Summit Venue, Vienna Marriot Hotel)

The Summit gala theme in 2025 is celebrating the idea that a rising tide lifts all ships—will be the ultimate Captain’s Table gathering. Held in the atmospheric Casemates of Vienna’s historic Palais Coburg Residenz, the evening invites delegates to unwind over fine food, and flowing drinks.

Dress Code 🎩:

Wear your favorite cocktail attire—or bring your best cruise-inspired look to celebrate the night in style. Think bold touches, elegant details, and a bit of fun—after all, you’re at the Captain’s Table.

Included with all in-person passes.