Mira Marketing Visits Paid Media Conference ‘Performance MCR’

In what’s been a busy few months of getting to industry events, our team was on the road once again, this time venturing to the North West to attend Performance MCR. Hosted at The Bridgewater Hall in the centre of Manchester, this paid media conference is led by practitioners and professionals in the industry for the PPC and performance marketers running campaigns daily.

From the 9am start to the 5:45pm finish, the day was filled with speakers from a huge range of industries, all focused entirely on paid media from PPC and Paid Social, to Shopping, YouTube, and other emerging platforms.

Of our team, Stuart, Adam, Alessandro, and Madison were in attendance at the event, and here are some of the key takeaways they gained.

Feed Optimisation

Feeds optimisation was one topic that resurfaced throughout many of the sessions and talks throughout the day. For ecommerce, shopping and product feed quality has snuck its way into becoming one of the most important levers in performance marketing, with several speakers making the case that brands are leaving real budget efficiency on the table.

By treating feed structure as "set it and forget it" rather than an ongoing discipline, there's a real loss in results relative to budget spent, more than many working in paid media may realise.

This is what made many of the talks so memorable, with the speakers showing their knowledge and passion for tactical, reusable assets for feed optimisation. It said a lot about where the industry's attention is right now. This is less about clever bidding tricks, more about making sure the foundational data feeding the algorithms is actually doing its job.

For us, it was an emphatic reminder of our own best practices within PPC and performance marketing, primarily the unglamorous plumbing of an account. Feed hygiene, attribute completeness, and structured data is still where a lot of performance gains are quietly won or lost.

The Importance of Proper AI Architecture

AI as a conversation piece was, unsurprisingly, everywhere, as is to be expected at modern conferences. But the tone in Manchester was notably more grounded and far removed from the "vague AI panels" that many other PPC and performance marketing-focused conferences may build their days around.

Rather than another round of generic "AI will change everything" talks, each of the days’ events leaned into how these systems actually work and what that means for the way teams plan and operate accounts. Benjamin Wenner’s ‘I Let an AI Agent Run My Google Ads (Here's What Happened)’ and Sian Well’s ‘It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint: The Hard-Working Foundations That Make AI Actually Work’ were two talks that struck a huge chord with our team in attendance.

The implication was a genuinely interesting one for marketers: if you understand how to think in terms of signals, feedback, and iterative learning (which is, frankly, how good PPC strategists already operate), you may already have a head start on working effectively alongside AI-driven platforms rather than being replaced by them.

It reframed AI less as a black box to fear and more as a system that rewards the same instincts that make a strong performance marketer good at their job in the first place.

Creative Diversity & Taking The Bigger Swings

The third big theme was creative. There's a growing consensus that the "safe," formulaic ad creative that's dominated feeds for the past few years is losing its edge, simply because audiences have become numb to it.

Several speakers pushed for genuinely diverse creative testing, such as more variation in formats, tone, and message angles, as well as for brands to be braver about taking big creative swings rather than iterating cautiously on the same proven template.

It's a theme that ties neatly back into the AI conversation: as platforms get better at finding the right audience for an ad, the bottleneck increasingly shifts to whether the ad itself is interesting enough to earn attention. Creative is becoming the differentiator again, not just the targeting.

What Our Team Gained From The Conference

Mira as an agency is all about being in the room and learning and growing with the industry, hence why we’ve placed greater emphasis on attending these industry conferences and bringing the knowledge back to the wider team.

Madison Lumley, Associate Account Strategist at Mira, reflected on what she took from the day:

“It’s always fascinating to be at these industry conferences, particularly for something as specific and hyper-focused as PPC and Performance Marketing. Keeping in tune with the direction of the overall industry helps us produce even better results for our client partners.”

Stuart Bramley, CEO and Co-Founder of Mira, spoke highly of his experiences at the event:

“The talks were fascinating for a variety of reasons, but something that stuck with me was taking into account the areas we were flourishing, like around the work we’ve done with AI and understanding the creative diversity of ads. A really interesting day of talks from some of the industry’s top professionals, and we’ll definitely be back!”

We’ve already delivered incredible work across PPC and Paid Social for our client partners and with the knowledge from the event will only push this further. So, if you’re ready for your ads to work harder for you, why not get in touch with us today for a free quote.