By Lashantay Richards, Strategy Director
This January, the7stars’ clients, colleagues and partners gathered for the second annual Grow conference, held at Odeon Luxe’s Leicester Square Cinema. In the previous year, the average UK adult spent a staggering 2,999 hours (125 days) with commercial, ad-funded media. Attention hasn’t disappeared; it has fractured. And in that fragmentation lies the defining challenge and opportunity of the year ahead.
This year’s agenda addressed four themes defining the future of growth: navigating constant change, shifting strategy for an age of abundance, unlocking growth through modern communication codes, and transforming marketing by empowering people. Across each, the ambition of our guest speakers and the7stars’ expertise was simple: cut through the noise and make sense of what’s next.
Geopolitical tensions have reshaped the global order, moving us away from easy globalisation and towards competing spheres of influence. For brands, geopolitical complexity has become an unavoidable strategic variable. Decisions around sourcing, partnerships, prioritised markets and even communications now carry geopolitical weight.
The media ecosystem echoes this theme of abundance and complexity. Fragmentation isn’t a weakness, but an opportunity, as audiences spend more time with media they actively choose. To benefit, brands must move away from isolated experiments and adopt more integrated planning that turns insight into action at pace.
In just a year, AI has rewritten the rules of discovery. Consumers now treat AI recommendations as trusted filters that simplify overwhelming choice. Large language models now act as gatekeepers. In this new reality, AI is the most influential distribution channel we don’t control. Brands must strengthen their clarity, credibility, community endorsement and the signals that AI uses to decide who surfaces and who vanishes.
Creativity must evolve alongside this transformation. While platforms push novelty, behavioural science remains consistent: people remember what is fluent, concrete and familiar. Creativity in 2026 is less about reinvention and more about building adaptable systems of expression, flexible enough to work across platforms, consistent enough to reinforce an unmistakable identity. Consistency isn’t a constraint; it’s a competitive multiplier.
Trust has become fragile, and audiences no longer reward brands for making noise, but for showing up with clear intent. Identity today is fluid, with communities forming around passions rather than demographics. Reach now matters less than relevance, so brands must focus on the audiences who actively choose them. But affinity with passion-led communities can’t be bought, it has to be earned through listening, collaboration with creators, and respect for community norms.
Finally, none of this is possible without a fundamental rethinking of how teams work. Silent work patterns, fragmented processes and burnout impose hidden costs that slow organisations down precisely when speed matters most. Teams need shared AI practices, transparency, experimentation and the psychological safety to adapt. In a world defined by abundance and acceleration, empowered people remain one of the few true competitive advantages.
Grow 2026 emphasised a singular truth. The brands that will lead from here are those willing to match the pace of the world around them, acting with intent, learning faster than their competitors, embracing AI’s new logic, and showing up in culture with authenticity. The event served as a reminder that independence of thought, strategic clarity and empowered teams are now the real levers of competitive advantage.
