1. How is your organization exploring the integration of AI-driven commerce within content to create new monetization streams and deepen consumer engagement?

At Shopsense, we’re focused on transforming content into commerce in a way that feels seamless, scalable and deeply tied to consumer passion. That’s because fandom drives purchases; whether it’s tied to a talk show, drama or live sports, viewers are inspired by what they watch on-screen. We built our AI engine to ingest video, image and text-based content to identify contextually relevant products and automatically generate curated storefronts around that very content. In fact, we’ve already ingested over 1 billion SKUs from more than 1,250 retail partners, so our system can quickly surface product matches—including exact matches or items that are stylistically aligned—without requiring a ton of labor and manual effort. This capability is what allows us to unlock monetization opportunities wherever content lives, and gives publishers, networks and creators tools to activate their IP in new and meaningful ways.

2. How do you plan to maintain editorial integrity while embedding commerce solutions within native content experiences?

When it comes to content, we’re not the creators—we’re the enablers. Here’s one way to think about it: our technology uses existing content as a creative input and pairs it with shoppable experiences that are authentic and aligned. But of course it’s critical that the content partners maintain full control of the experience. We work closely with each partner to respect their brand, editorial and audience guidelines, which could mean weeding out certain retailers, filtering by price point, or blocking entire categories. For example, a publisher may want to exclude big-ticket luxury items from a mass-market piece, and so our models adapt accordingly. Because we’re not authoring the editorial, but rather enhancing it with intelligently surfaced commerce, we’re able to preserve integrity while still driving value.

3. What role does personalization and product relevance play in improving conversion rates and retaining audience attention in a saturated content market?

Our whole ethos is that product relevance is everything. When we’re able to surface the exact lipstick worn by a talk show host or the really cool blazer featured in a scripted series, we see conversion rates jump—as much as 4 times higher compared to more generic thematically aligned recommendations. Audiences are emotionally invested in the content they consume. If someone connects with a character or host, they want that exact same item because it’s a tangible extension of their emotional connection to the content. That’s where our AI-powered personalization engine really shines. We’re able to tap into fandom and emotional connection at scale, and bridge the gap between the screen you’re watching and the shopping that’s inspired by that screen. In fact, nearly 63% of consumers say they discover new brands or products through TV content, which shows just how powerful entertainment has become as a driver of commerce.

4. How are you rethinking your monetization model to capitalize on the convergence of storytelling and shopping, particularly among Gen Z and Millennial audiences?

This is exactly why we prioritize the second screen experience. Gen Z and Millennials are fully accustomed to consuming content with a phone in hand—it’s their default behavior. We’ve seen this play out: if a show is shoppable but the call-to-action isn’t clear or well timed, even the most eager viewers might miss it. But when we lean into that phone-in-hand behavior—surfacing real-time shoppable moments on mobile, aligning products with the content they’re already immersed in—engagement rates spike when we meet them in the moment on the device they’re already using. For younger audiences, content-integrated commerce isn’t disruptive when it’s done right; it’s an experience they expect these days. The key is to meet them in the moment without asking them to shift context.

5. As commerce integration expands across editorial, video, and social content, how are you preparing your organization to scale AI-driven commerce across multiple formats and channels?

Even though we launched last year with broadcasters in our sights, we built Shopsense from day one to be format-agnostic. Whether it’s text, video, stills or live content, our models can ingest and interpret it—identifying relevant products, creating storefronts and tagging shoppable moments across channels. Because our product library is already robust and our AI is contextually trained, we can easily plug into new formats with very little friction. We’ve already proven we can do this across digital articles, linear TV, CTV and social posts. So as content continues to fragment across platforms, which it inevitably will, we’re positioned to scale along with it, and to ensure commerce is embedded natively and intelligently wherever audiences choose to engage.

6. How is your company managing the balance between leveraging contextual data for commerce personalization and maintaining user trust and data privacy?

This is such a great question. We focus on contextual signals, not behavioral ones. Our approach to personalization is rooted in the content itself, rather than tracking individual users or hoovering up personal data. What that means is that we can deliver highly relevant product recommendations while keeping user trust intact. In other words, our technology is privacy-first by design, offering our partners a compliant way to unlock commerce-driven value without the thorny complexity of data collection. And for consumers, the experience feels seamless and secure and something they don’t have to second-guess. We believe the smartest personalization simply requires intelligent alignment between content and commerce.

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1. How are you positioning yourself to support clients in navigating regulatory, cultural, and market-specific complexities? 

Launching our newest office in the MENA region allows us to build a team of regionally based talent, possessing an expert understanding of the diverse regulatory landscape, cultural significance, and market-specific complexities. We are positioned as true partners to our clients, so we don’t just deliver the final product; we guide them through cultural nuances and regulatory guidelines to ensure they comprehensively understand these markets. 

2. How do you plan to tailor services such as digital health innovation, patient engagement, and multichannel marketing to meet the specific cultural and clinical needs of the MENA audience? 

Central to all our work is a core understanding of how communities across different MENA markets access, trust, and act on health information. In this region, tailoring solutions accordingly is necessary, whether it’s adjusting digital tools or incorporating cultural and social considerations. From hyper-specific messaging to leveraging trusted community figures, our engagement strategies are rooted in cultural respect and clinical relevance.

3. How can you integrate global best practices with local healthcare priorities to deliver meaningful outcomes for patients and healthcare professionals?

We benefit from a dual approach. Our work is guided by the Havas Life global mission to inspire ideas and improve lives, which ensures alignment with international best practices and standards. At the same time, we operate with deep local insights, allowing us to balance global consistency and local relevance. This dual approach empowers impactful, meaningful, and localized work.

4. How do you ensure that storytelling and campaign strategies reflect the cultural values, health literacy levels, and communication preferences of diverse populations? 

Authentic storytelling starts with audience research to understand beliefs, behaviors, and cultural contexts that shape how patients in the MENA region engage with information. This localized strategy informs the tone of voice, imagery, and how we structure information within a campaign. Values, literacy levels, and communication preferences aren’t just respected; they’re embedded in every step of the creative process, influencing how the work is conceived, created, and shared.

5. What are the biggest risks or barriers to success in this regional expansion, and how is the leadership team planning to mitigate them? 

One of the key challenges in the MENA region is the fragmented regulatory landscape. Each market requires its own approval process, which can create additional complexities for clients operating across borders. We’ve addressed this by structuring an agency with regulatory fluency, ensuring we can provide expert guidance at both local and regional levels.

We are also working to overcome the uneven pace of digital impact while the demand for healthcare communications accelerates. Some markets are highly digitized with advanced healthcare ecosystems, while others are still building digital foundations. This means we tailor digital strategies market-by-market.

6. How do you see the role of healthcare advertising evolving in the next 3–5 years, and how are you preparing for this shift?

We believe healthcare advertising is shifting from transactional to transformation. As the landscape becomes more consumer-centric, we expect advertising to take on more responsibility for building awareness and providing education, empowerment, and navigation. The most successful campaigns won’t just inform; they will inspire action, drive behavioral changes, and support long-term health outcomes. We’re building teams, acquiring tools, and seeking partnerships to set us up for early success as this shift takes shape.

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1. How critical is it for organizations to detect and address data collection activity that occurs after a user opts out? 

It's mission critical. If businesses can record a consumer opt-out of data sharing or selling but fail to stop firing tags and trackers according to that consumer’s wishes, are consumer preferences really being respected? Certainly not. 

Q.1) What frameworks do you follow to ensure your AI initiatives scale across global teams while remaining aligned with your core business strategy? 

Murf AI helps global enterprises create high-quality voiceovers and dubs effortlessly. At Murf AI, we follow three key principles to ensure our AI initiatives scale globally across diverse industries. 

1. Consent-first creation - Every Murf voice begins with the active involvement and agreement of the artist.
2. Full control - Artists have the freedom to withdraw consent at any time.
3. Royalties that grow - Artists earn royalties each time their voice avatar is used, and earnings grow with the avatar’s popularity.

1. How can businesses balance user experience (UX), and conversion rate optimization (CRO) for maximum impact?

User experience and conversion rate optimisation (CRO) go hand-in-hand. One is the discipline user research, understanding user requirements and best practices around things like accessibility and design. The other is the mechanism, or process, to allow you to test different experiences against another. By utilising both together you should be able to drive better experiences on the website, with confidence in only deploying new features, components or functionality if you know they are going to positively impact your website. At the very least, you should expect the changes won’t harm them!

2. What are the most common website optimization mistakes, and how can businesses avoid them? 

The most common mistake is not testing changes to a website. We’ve seen multiple pieces of research that has converged around a similar figure – the likes of Optimizely (80%) and Google (70%) have both found that the majority of changes don’t do a thing to improve engagement and conversion rates. And some of those will even make those metrics worse. It’s really important that you’re using data to understand challenges, but then also using data to validate that the changes you’ve made to address those challenges is a positive one.

3. How has the role of website optimization evolved with the rise of mobile-first and omnichannel experiences? 

We will always be guided by data and as you would expect the majority of B2C sites now have more traffic on mobile sites. As a result, there’s a much heavier weighting towards website optimisation on mobile. For some B2B brands, we still see the majority of traffic on desktop, and as such, our research and efforts would pivot that way too. More broadly, we see an increase in, and advocate for, connecting experiences together from media or CRM to touchpoint to website. This “symmetrical messaging” has generated incredible results when we’ve deployed it and it’s as simple as targeting experiences based on the presence of a certain value in the landing page URL. For one client, we saw a 46% increase in conversion by tying the PPC ad to landing page experience more closely together.

4. What emerging technologies are set to redefine website optimization in the coming years? 

AI is disrupting all areas of marketing and business, and website optimisation is no different. Most of our technology partners are embedding agents within their platforms, so you can either ask them to support with insight generation, suggestions for new web page layouts, or even to build out those experiences so that they can be tested. Likewise, those platforms are leaning into the analysis and categorisation of users into different buckets depending on “digital body language” to allow you to personalise experiences. For example, some users might be researching or just more conscientious in wanting to review more information. You should give those users a different experience to those you can infer are in buying mode or are more impulsive and want to simply get through the purchase process as quickly as possible.

5. How can businesses prepare for the future of privacy-first digital marketing while optimizing their web presence? 

This is a two-fold answer. The first is ensuring that you maximise the data you’re able to collect whilst respecting user privacy and the relevant legislation in your country. The second is ensuring you’re using your collected data to fill in the gaps on those users and sessions where you couldn’t collect their data. On the first point, there’s a multitude of steps you can take to ensure you’re best able to measure and optimise your marketing and website. From looking at server-side set-ups to very specific solutions like Google Tag Gateway, they help to mitigate some of the solutions that block tracking as a by-product of blocking ads. Likewise, collecting first-party data and sharing that back to the media platforms to allow for ad to conversion matching (amongst other things) helps increase the amount of data these platforms have to use in their algorithm. On the second point, modelling is a critical component in helping to optimise in a privacy-first way. Whether you’re using Google’s own Advanced Consent Mode – which tracks users who reject cookies in a cookieless way and utilises modelling off the users who accepted cookies to fill in the gaps – or you’re doing your own modelling, it’s a natural step to take to ensure we’re working with as much as we can.

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1. What measures are in place to help your clients identify and mitigate risks associated with Unfair, Deceptive, or Abusive Acts or Practices (UDAAP) in their marketing materials?

UDAAP compliance is complex. For marketing and compliance leaders, UDAAP is often difficult to identify and comply with because of its very broad definition and the many federal and state regulators that enforce it.

At PerformLine, we’ve been helping our clients monitor for potential UDAAP issues for almost 20 years. Our compliance rulebooks are curated libraries of terms and phrases used to automatically flag potential marketing violations across digital channels. Think of them as the engine behind automated compliance monitoring. (Read more about our rulebooks here.)

Unlike static checklists or generic keyword libraries, our UDAAP rulebooks are dynamic, comprehensive, and built with real-world use cases in mind. With over 1 billion observations across the PerformLine platform, we’ve witnessed how marketing compliance evolves as language, tactics, and channels shift. UDAAP, in particular, remains one of the most complex regulations to monitor—broadly defined and constantly changing.

Take a phrase like “guaranteed approval” or ”risk-free.” While they may seem like strong marketing language, they can also imply deceptive outcomes under UDAAP. Each rulebook includes thousands of precisely curated terms tied to deceptive marketing tactics, consumer complaint trends, and regulatory language so organizations can spot problematic language before it impacts their customers or their credibility.

2. What challenges and opportunities are there in integrating automated compliance solutions across different marketing platforms?

One of the primary challenges lies in the variability of the marketing platforms or channels to be monitored—each with its own data structures, APIs, and content formats—which makes standardization and integration complex. At PerformLine, we've built an unmatched technology to gather, organize, and deliver high-quality compliance data from diverse and challenging sources. Our extensive web crawling and discovery technology, deep integrations with social media platforms, and ability to collect consistent email data from hundreds of thousands of inboxes represent the critical groundwork that LLMs simply can't replicate or replace. Additionally, the fast-paced nature of digital marketing, especially with AI-driven or user-generated content, adds to the difficulty of real-time oversight. Compliance standards can vary, requiring automated tools to be highly adaptable and often customized for specific regulatory expectations.

Despite these challenges, the opportunities are substantial. PerformLine’s compliance automation enables brands to scale compliance monitoring across a myriad of channels, ensuring faster detection of potential violations and enabling real-time risk mitigation. It also promotes regulatory adherence across all marketing touchpoints, while generating actionable insights that help inform marketing and compliance strategies. Ultimately, PerformLine allows organizations to shift from manual and reactive compliance to a more proactive, efficient, and integrated approach that aligns with the complexity of the digital marketing ecosystem while allowing for compliant growth.

3. How do you evaluate the effectiveness of your current compliance rulebooks in detecting and preventing potential violations across various marketing channels?

We evaluate effectiveness through a combination of quantitative metrics and continuous refinement processes. Rulebooks are designed with specificity for the client’s industry, regulatory environment, and risk tolerance. Their performance is assessed based on detection accuracy, coverage across marketing channels, and reduction in false positives and false negatives. The platform continuously monitors flagged content across marketing channels to ensure that rules are identifying compliance risks. Feedback loops from client reviewers and internal audits are used to adjust and fine-tune rule logic, ensuring alignment with evolving regulations and marketing practices. Additionally, aggregated data from across the platform provides insights into rule performance trends, allowing for proactive adjustments that keep compliance programs both effective and adaptive.

4. What is PerformLine’s approach to monitoring marketing compliance across various channels, from initial material review to monitoring across the web, email, social media, and messaging platforms? 

At PerformLine, our approach to marketing compliance centers on helping teams work more efficiently without sacrificing oversight. The platform delivers a unified, omni-channel solution that supports compliance from the moment content is created through live monitoring across web, email, social media, calls, and messaging. With Document Review, marketing materials are automatically ingested, reviewed, and scored before publication, reducing tedious back-and-forth delays between marketing and compliance. Once content is live, PerformLine continuously discovers and monitors assets using a combination of AI and rule-based tech to flag potential risks—like missing disclosures, misleading claims, or unapproved language—across both owned and third-party properties. All findings are centralized in a single dashboard, giving teams full visibility and actionable insights to resolve issues quickly. By replacing disconnected tools with a streamlined process, PerformLine makes compliance seamless, scalable, and consistent across every marketing channel.

5. How do you assess the effectiveness of your compliance oversight in maintaining brand integrity and consumer trust?

Our platform enables organizations to proactively identify and remediate non-compliant or off-brand content before it reaches consumers, helping to prevent reputational damage and regulatory exposure. We track key performance indicators such as the volume and severity of violations detected, time to remediation, and the rank of partner or agent compliance over time. Additionally, we work closely with clients to align compliance oversight with their brand standards, ensuring that every consumer touchpoint reflects accurate and transparent messaging. Through ongoing rule optimization, reporting, and feedback loops, we help organizations build a culture of compliance that reinforces their brand’s credibility and earns long-term consumer confidence.

6. How do you ensure that your compliance monitoring systems are updated regularly to reflect the latest regulatory changes and emerging marketing tactics?

We combine regulatory intelligence, client collaboration, and agile technology updates to make sure our clients' compliance programs stay up-to-date. Through tech and dedicated teams, our rulebooks track changes in regulatory guidance—from agencies like the FTC, SEC, state attorneys general, and others, as well as emerging enforcement trends and industry best practices. This intelligence is used to update our rulebooks and monitoring logic, ensuring our clients stay aligned with current requirements.

We also collaborate with our clients to understand evolving marketing strategies and new campaign formats, enabling us to adapt rulebooks to cover emerging tactics like AI-generated content, influencer marketing, or short-form video. Our platform is built for flexibility, allowing for rapid deployment of rule changes and customizations, so compliance oversight evolves in lockstep with the dynamic digital marketing landscape.

7. How does PerformLine integrate AI into its platform while maintaining the transparency and control that compliance teams require?

At PerformLine, we understand the importance of balancing innovation with an organization's specific risk posture. That’s why we provide a dual approach to AI—offering both AI-based and non-AI compliance oversight systems to ensure that compliance oversight remains robust, transparent, and tailored to the organization's risk requirements.

Providing a dual system ensures that no matter where an organization is the AI adoption curve, they have the tools and support to stay compliant today and in the future.

Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.

1. How are you leveraging emerging technologies to enhance the experience for creators and audiences alike?

A: We're using a lot of AI to help with messaging and content creation for social media, and we’re also teaching it. Personally, I’ve used AI to generate headshots. It’s a powerful tool for creators and for streamlining our processes.

2. What approaches have proven most effective in engaging diverse creator communities, and how will these be expanded or refined for future events?

A: The arts are accepting to everybody. That creates an inclusive environment where all are welcome. The arts teach culture and differences while uniting us in a like-minded space. Our Arts Across America initiative is one way we do this—giving people with a passion for creative industries a path to turn their passion into purpose and profit. Events like DigiFest speak to all kinds of digital mediums, which makes it naturally inclusive. Whether you're a computer programmer, podcaster, or filmmaker—there’s a space for you.

3. How do you plan to deepen your connection with local and global audiences to foster a more inclusive and interactive festival environment?

A: That’s the mission behind Arts Across America—bringing events like DigiFest to audiences everywhere. You don’t have to live in Temecula to be part of a creative content community. We’re expanding our reach to include more virtual offerings, so everyone can join in.

4. What monetization models have been most successful for DigiFest, and how might these evolve to support sustainable growth and increased value for stakeholders?

A: Our current models include submitters, general attendees, sponsors—some of whom provide financial support, others offer in-kind services—and speakers who are eager to share their message on stage. Moving forward, we’re exploring improvements to the VIP experience to provide added value for both attendees and sponsors.

5. How is the leadership team preparing to address potential challenges and capitalize on opportunities in the rapidly changing digital media landscape?

A: We are forever learners. Our team is constantly improving our tech skills and leaning into artificial intelligence. We’re evolving how we deliver programs—offering both in-person and online options, and merging virtual and physical creative spaces through initiatives like Arts Across America.

6. How has DigiFest Temecula influenced the broader digital media industry, and how do you envision its role evolving in the next five years? 

A: DigiFest is the first of its kind that embraces all digital mediums. Other festivals like Podfest, VidCon, or traditional film fests are often niche or focused on one platform. DigiFest is broad, inclusive, and welcomes everyone. In the last few years, we’ve added scriptwriting and acting categories. As digital tech evolves, so will DigiFest. We’re already seeing growth in AI, gaming, and virtual reality—and we plan to keep integrating those as part of the festival’s future.

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