Social Media, Storytelling & Content Marketing

• Reflect on how AI is reshaping content creation & storytelling and the impact this has on modern brand engagement
• Connect brand strategy, storytelling, and content systems into unified growth models
• Examine how leading brands balance speed, scale, and creativity in an automated world
• Discuss where investment, talent, and technology will matter most in the next phase
• Define what successful brand leadership looks like in the era ahead

Marketers trust their metrics. Engagement, sentiment, share of voice, these numbers guide strategy, budget, and how a brand reads its own health. That trust can now be a liability. AI-driven narrative attacks have gotten fast enough, cheap enough, and convincing enough to manufacture those exact signals: a stock price sliding in lockstep with a coordinated pile-on of fake profiles, a fabricated “former employee” story engineered to look like a genuine pattern, a deepfaked clip racking up shares before anyone thinks to question it. These aren’t hypotheticals. They’re recent, real, and aimed at brands that never saw them coming.

This category finally has a name: Narrative Intelligence. Gartner formally defined it in June, in its first-ever Emerging Market Quadrant for the space, and named Cyabra a Market Shaper within it. It’s a threat most marketing teams still have no framework for, and one we believe deserves the same urgency as a cybersecurity breach.

In this session, Cyabra’s CMO David Low will break down how these attacks actually operate, the actors, the coordination, the manipulated content, and what it takes to catch them before they hijack your brand’s narrative.

Key Takeaways:

• The “So What?”: Why AI-driven narrative attacks can now produce the exact signals your team relies on, and why that’s already damaging brand equity, moving stock prices, and putting executive safety at risk.
• The “Now What?”: What it actually takes to catch these attacks before they hijack your brand’s narrative, and how to spot adversarial intent while there’s still time to act.

• Analyze how generative and multimodal AI are reshaping content, video, and personalization
• Explore how brands preserve originality and creative integrity in high-velocity environments
• Examine how AI-powered production, testing, and optimization systems scale output efficiently
• Understand how teams manage rights, ethics, and brand consistency at scale
• Assess how human creativity and machine intelligence create sustainable competitive advantage

Brands are producing more social content than ever, yet more content alone doesn’t create better paid social performance. The opportunity is to move from campaign-based production to a continuous creative system – one that connects strategy, creative diversity, performance intelligence and ongoing optimization to make existing media investment work harder.

Attendees will learn:

• Why more content isn’t the answer. Creative volume without strategy creates more outputs, not necessarily better outcomes. The goal is a diverse portfolio of creative built around different audiences, hypotheses and objectives.
• Why creative is a media-efficiency lever. On paid social, creative influences whether people stop, watch and act — and can materially affect metrics including CPM, CTR and VTR. Better creative can therefore generate significantly more value from the same media investment.
• Why creative diversity matters more than asset count. The question shouldn’t be “How many ads are we making?” but whether you’re testing enough distinct concepts, audience segments, creators, hooks and formats to discover what drives performance.
• How to turn creative performance data into action. Analytics alone tells you what happened. A creative system connects those insights directly to what should be scaled, paused, remixed or created next.

Drawing on real social video data from the FIFA World Cup, this session breaks down what actually worked across platforms during one of the year’s biggest cultural moments, and how brands can apply those lessons to the year’s next major events.

Key Learnings: 

• The content formats, durations, and posting patterns that drove the most engagement across platforms
• How media brands and influencers performed differently during the World Cup, and what that gap means for your next event strategy
• How to identify whitespace opportunities in the buildup to the next major cultural moment

Garage Beer has taken social media by storm. As a relatively new player in a crowded category, the brand has fully embraced a challenger mindset across its social platforms. Join Corey Smale, Chief Creative Officer at Garage Beer, as he shares how the brand’s follower growth, reach, impressions, and engagement rate have scaled at an exponential pace. You’ll also discover:

• How Garage Beer’s humorous, nostalgic approach to social content, designed purely to entertain, has fueled rapid audience growth
• The impact of high-profile partnerships, including collaborations with Jay Bilas and Jason Kelce, on the brand’s reach across North America
• How cultural insights and audience signals are used to build relevance across generations and platforms
• Why community participation and short-form storytelling are essential to cultivating long-term brand affinity
• How Garage Beer stays agile while continuing to push creative boundaries

Modern marketing depends on capturing attention in an increasingly distracted world by delivering relevant messages to the right audiences across multiple channels, including television, radio, print, websites, and social media. As video becomes central to marketing across many departments, managing media content has become a significant challenge.

Marketing teams must deal with growing volumes of media while ensuring content is purposeful, well-organized, searchable, and reusable. They also face challenges such as metadata management, campaign organization, AI-generated and human-created content, automation workflows, and restrictive corporate IT policies.

Behind the scenes, technical complexities—including formats, codecs, storage, backups, archiving, version control, and content repurposing—continue to increase as organizations scale from terabytes to petabytes of media.

In his presentation at this year’s DMWF conference in New York, Creative Director and ELEMENTS VP of Business Development Danny Peters explores practical strategies to simplify media operations through Media Asset Management (M.A.M). He demonstrates how a modern MAM platform helps marketing teams centralize their content, accelerate campaign delivery, improve collaboration, leverage AI-powered search and metadata, and unlock greater return on every creative asset—allowing marketers to spend less time managing content and more time creating impactful campaigns that engage their audiences.

Social media in 2026 looks different, and so does the role of managing it.

Metricool draws on its latest platform research: LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, alongside its first-ever Well-Being in Social Media Professionals survey and a State of AI in Social Media report, to get real about three questions the industry keeps tiptoeing around: Where should social teams really focus their energy? How is AI really changing the work? And how are the people doing it every day, actually holding up?

You’ll get a platform-by-platform look at what’s driving results as organic reach declines and competition grows, and an honest conversation about what’s happening off-screen. Social media professionals are managing more accounts, more demands, and higher expectations than ever, while AI simultaneously shifts workflows and blurs the line between creative work and automated output. The well-being data makes clear this isn’t just a productivity story, it’s a people story.

Leave with a sharper platform strategy, a clearer picture of where AI is genuinely helping versus where it’s quietly adding pressure, and a more honest framework for what sustainable, high-performance social media work actually looks like today.

• Review how platform algorithms, formats, and monetization models are reshaping social strategy
• Explore how AI tools, automation, and analytics are transforming content planning and optimization
• Examine how brands adapt to evolving audiences across established and emerging platforms
• Understand how enhanced social listening and data insights enable smarter engagement
• Discuss which technologies and trends will define the next phase of social growth

• Explore how brands turn social audiences into engaged, loyal communities
• Understand how content, creators, and conversations drive brand belonging
• Discuss how brands balance scale, moderation, and authenticity across platforms
• Examine why social-led communities deliver long-term growth and lifetime value

• The insight: AI has commoditized generic content — anyone can generate infinite blog posts on any topic, so “content marketing” as differentiation is dead. But original, research-backed content is the one thing AI can’t fake, and it’s outperforming everything else across every metric that matters: conversion, backlinks, social impressions, and even visibility in AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity). The market knows this too — most B2B SaaS marketers are planning to increase research budgets in 2026.
• The bottleneck: Nobody’s scaling proprietary research because the traditional process is brutal — recruit, schedule, run, transcribe, synthesize, write. Six months, a quarter-million dollars, and a PDF that dies in a shared drive.
• The unlock: Gather compresses that entire pipeline into a conversation. You describe your objective in plain English, pick your audience (real LinkedIn-verified panelists or synthetic panels, 65M+ reach), and AI conducts genuine interviews — quant breadth (the “what”) combined with qual depth (the “why,” via real follow-up questions). This collapses timeline from 6 months to under a week: briefed same-day, interviews live within an hour, sample complete by day two, insights synthesized by day three, content shipped by day five.
• The multiplier effect: One study isn’t one asset — it’s a content engine. A single 400+ person study becomes a branded report, a full blog series optimized for both SEO and AEO, a stream of social posts, press hooks, and investor-deck data points — all sourced from one underlying dataset.
• The scope: This isn’t a niche use case — it applies anywhere research adds value: brand health, message testing, competitive intel, ICP definition, pricing, win/loss, NPS, churn, thought leadership. The pitch is essentially “if you can describe the study, we can run it.”
• The through-line: Speed and cost used to force a tradeoff — you got either quant scale or qual depth, and either way you waited months. Removing that tradeoff is what turns research from an occasional, expensive project into a repeatable content and insight engine that can outrun the AI-content commodity flood precisely because it’s actually original.

• Discuss the current landscape of short-form, long-form, and live video shape modern brand narratives
• Learn tactics and trends for storytelling across platforms, screens, and audiences
• Understand how data and insight inform creative and editorial decisions
• Review video-led storytelling drives memorability, loyalty, and growth

• The new world of AI, algorithms, and platform shifts reshaping social media leadership
• Explore evolving strategy, structure, and investment models in response to constant change
• Examine the role of data, creativity, and experimentation in sustaining relevance
• Discuss balancing innovation, speed, and brand governance
• Define effective social leadership for the next era