On 29 July 2026, more than 200 CMOs, marketers and agency leaders filled the conference room at Pagoda Resort & Spa in Como for the 52nd Intrigue MADVERSE Marketing & Martech Summit — an edition that also marked ten years and fifty global summits for the Intrigue Summit series.
We were there twice over: exhibiting with our own stand on the expo floor, and working as the official photography partner for the day.
The tagline for the Perth edition was “West of the Hype: Real Marketing for a Market That Demands More.” Having spent the whole day in the room, that turned out to be an accurate description of the conversation rather than just a line on a banner.
The themes that actually dominated
Six panels, two keynotes and a round table produced more genuinely candid discussion than most conferences manage. A few threads ran through nearly all of it.
Search is changing faster than most strategies are
Brijesh Munyal of Ethinos Digital Marketing opened with a keynote titled “1 Billion People Just Stopped Googling” — on how AI assistants and conversational interfaces are changing where discovery actually happens, and what that means for brands still optimising purely for a traditional results page.
This landed particularly hard in a room of in-house marketers. The uncomfortable question underneath it: if a meaningful share of your audience is asking an AI for a recommendation rather than scanning ten blue links, what exactly are you optimising for?
It’s a theme we’ve been building into client work for a while — structured data, clear factual content, machine-readable business information — precisely so a brand can be surfaced accurately by whatever is doing the answering.
The brand versus performance pendulum has swung back
The panel titled “We Broke Marketing Chasing Performance. It’s Time to Build Something That Lasts” was the most pointed session of the day, and probably the most useful.
The argument, made by senior marketers who have lived it: a decade of optimising for immediately measurable returns produced brands with no differentiation and no loyalty, and rebuilding brand equity after years of neglect costs far more than maintaining it would have. The hardest part, everyone agreed, is holding the line when a CFO asks why brand can’t be tracked in GA4.
Small budgets, sharp thinking
“Perth’s Best-Kept Marketing Secret: The Brands That Win Without a Big Budget” covered ground that’s especially relevant in WA, where not every business has a Tier 1 resources marketing spend. The consistent theme was owned channels, local partnerships and content that travels — creative work outperforming budget.
The talent gap is a genuinely WA problem
One panel dealt squarely with something Perth marketing teams face specifically: a smaller talent pool, direct competition from the resources sector for analytical and digital skills, and good people being drawn to east-coast or international roles. Practical, unglamorous, and clearly the session several attendees had come for.
The client–agency relationship, discussed honestly
“The Agency Relationship Is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It — From Both Sides of the Table” put in-house leaders and agency people in the same conversation about briefs arriving without strategy, clients expecting full-service at freelancer rates, and agencies overpromising.
As a Perth agency, this was the session we had most personal interest in. The takeaway was unsurprising but worth restating: the partnerships that work are the ones where the brief is a genuine conversation rather than a handover.
What exhibiting taught us
Having a stand changes what you get out of a conference. Sitting in sessions, you hear what the industry says its problems are. Standing at a table for a day, you hear what people actually ask about when there’s no microphone.
The recurring questions were about content: how to keep producing enough of it, how to make it look consistent, and whether photography is worth commissioning when a phone camera is “good enough.” That last one comes up constantly, and the honest answer is that it depends entirely on what the images have to do — a social post has different demands than a product page that has to convert.
The other observation: the best conversations happened during breaks, not sessions. The agenda deliberately built in three networking breaks, a lunch, a round table and a closing reception, and that structure was clearly intentional. For an event photographer it’s also where the most useful images come from — nobody remembers a photo of a slide.
Photographing a summit like this
Since we were covering the day as well as exhibiting, a note on what that involves.
A single-day conference gives you one attempt at everything. Registration at 8:30am, keynotes from 9:40, panels running to 4pm, a 200-person group photo inside the lunch break, and a cocktail reception to close. Nothing repeats.
The room itself was demanding in the way most hotel function spaces are — warm overhead light, daylight down one side, dark timber panelling, and stage lighting on speakers that differed from the light on the audience. Everything was shot on available light with fast lenses, because firing a flash into a speaker’s eyeline or across a concentrating audience isn’t acceptable at a professional summit.
We also ran delegate headshots through the day, which has quietly become one of the most valued deliverables at business events: attendees leave with a current professional portrait, and the organiser gets speaker imagery for promoting the next edition.
The full coverage is in our MADVERSE conference photography case study.
Was it worth attending?
For Perth marketers, yes — and not primarily for the content, though the panels were strong. It’s the room. Two hundred senior marketing people from WA organisations in one venue is a rare thing locally, and the conversations that started over coffee were worth the day on their own.
If you’re weighing up the next edition, our advice is to treat the breaks as the actual programme and the sessions as the reason everyone showed up.
Running a conference, summit or corporate event in Perth? We cover business events across Perth and WA — keynotes, panels, exhibition floors, headshots and group photos, planned against your agenda so nothing gets missed. See our Event Photography Perth service or our guide to the best Perth venues for corporate events and conferences.
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