The Popcultr Marketing Summit returns to ExceL London on Friday 23 October for its sixth London edition, running inside MCM London Comic Con as a single-track day for people who market film, games, tabletop and licensed brands.
This year’s theme, About Time, argues that the pop culture industry still plans, buys and measures around attention when the thing it is really asking for is time: an evening for a film, a year for a game, a lifetime for a collection. Every session is built around one question: what gets chosen tonight, and what earns the return tomorrow?
The day opens with new national research on how audiences behave compared with how they describe themselves. In May, 82% of people surveyed at MCM London Comic Con called themselves fans, and the October study will put the same questions to a representative UK sample to see how many people watch, play, collect and queue without ever using the label.
Zoe Scaman, founder and chief strategy officer of Bodacious, 77X and the Luka Dončić Foundation, gives the morning keynote, The Tithe, on why fans accept AI in some places and punish it in others. Behavioural scientist Lea Karam, founder of Mindscope, closes the day with a talk on why consumer time is a more honest measure than attention, asking why people too busy for a six-second ad will queue for hours at Comic Con.
Between them sit six sessions covering games, partnerships, tabletop, theatrical film and creators, plus The Popcultr Edit, a review of the campaigns that moved culture. That session features Calvin Innes of Innes Consulting and Experience12, Gena-mour Barrett of Netflix and creator Cameron Robertson, moderated by fandom consultant Dani Rayner.
Tickets include the MCM Friday Industry Pass, with a 75-minute lunch break to explore the show floor and a networking reception from 5.30pm. Every attendee also receives a report written up from the day’s sessions.