As Irish businesses grapple with mounting pressure to adopt AI while struggling to demonstrate measurable returns, more than 70 of Ireland’s senior marketers gathered recently in Dublin for ‘The New Media Playbook’, an invitation-only event hosted by Buymedia and Deloitte Digital and its creative agency Acne.
Senior marketers spanned sectors including financial services, FMCG, healthcare, tourism, education, the public sector and charities, coming together to discuss a growing challenge. Supermetrics’ 2026 Marketing Data Report found that 80 per cent of marketers feel under pressure to adopt AI, while just six per cent have fully implemented it.
Gartner separately reports that one third have yet to see measurable ROI from their AI investments.
Dylan Cotter (pictured above), managing director, Deloitte Digital and its creative agency Acne, argued that generative AI is cutting the cost of relevance, not just the cost of content. He pointed to a shift away from the catch-all TV ad and towards always-on creative systems built around segments, moments and states of mind.
Marketers discussed what is working, what is not, and how to turn AI into business results
Fergal O’Connor (above), CEO, Buymedia, said AI in media planning is no longer a tech question but a competitive one. He argued that the value of AI is in doing the work a human team cannot, processing thousands of data points across every channel to strip out the bias towards what is easiest to measure and plan against what the data shows.
“The marketers who win will not be the ones who adopted AI earliest, but the ones who put it to work most intelligently,” he added. For us that means powering the precision behind every media decision, while keeping human judgement in charge of the strategy.” Buymedia is an AI-powered advertising platform, founded in Galway in 2015.
Measurable
Stephen Barnes of Entire EDIH and the Walton Institute showed how extended reality is already delivering measurable outcomes, with case studies across health, tourism, hospitality and retail. A panel of senior marketers closed the session, joined by CeADAR Ireland, the national centre for applied AI.
The discussion focused on practical adoption rather than experimentation. Lynda Vance, group creative manager, Stena Line, discussed the company’s use of generative AI. She explained how it enabled the rapid localisation of creative assets for different audiences while stressing that expert human oversight remains essential to delivering strong marketing.
The open session was chaired by Peter McPartlin.
