Base.Camp Madrid Agenda

To learn more about the event, how to request your invitation, sponsorships, and more, please visit the full Base.Camp Madrid event page. We’re currently working to build out this agenda based on your feedback on what the most important topics need to be. The earlier you register for the event, the greater influence you can have on the conversations we’ll be having to drive our current work forward and define the future of what our industry will look like.

CHECK OUT THE FAMOUS TUESDAY AFTERNOON ACTIVITIES

Sunday, November 8, 2026

Session Time	Session Title	Session Description
3:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.	Arrival & Registration	Welcome to Base.Camp! Swing by, check in, and grab your swag and badge on your way up to your room.
5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.	Spilling the Tea: First-Timers Welcome Meetup	Not everyone thrives in a big, loud crowd right away. “Spilling the Tea” is a smaller, more intentional gathering for first-time Base.Campers. This is a friendly space for you to meet people in a way that makes conversation easier and introductions feel natural. And one more thing, this particular meetup is alcohol-free by design. We’ll have non-alcoholic beer, juice, sodas, tea (of course), and plenty of conversation. Drinking has never been a prerequisite for belonging at Base.Camp. Come start slow. Leave feeling connected.
6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.	Welcome Reception & Dinner	We’ll all come together for the first night, before a powerful week of collaboration and problem-solving kicks off.

Monday, November 9, 2026

Session Time	Session Title	Session Description
7:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m.	Morning Run with Melissa	Join Melissa for a 5-7 kilometer run to get the day started off right. Walkers are always welcome. This is a move-your-body experience for all levels.
8:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m.	Rise & Shine for Breakfast	Enjoy a morning nosh (and perhaps a few cups of coffee or tea), to charge up for your first full day. And don’t forget to catch up with your new friends from the first night together.
9:00 a.m. to 9:15 a.m.	Welcome	Rob will officially kick off Base.Camp Madrid, reveal the first blazer, and help you get settled for our morning together. We’ve got something special planned for you. Rob Beeler, Founder & CEO, Beeler.Tech
9:15 a.m. to 9:55 a.m.	Inside the AI Bubble: What Publishers Aren’t Being Told	Parmy Olson has spent years inside the rooms where frontier AI labs make their biggest calls, from Anthropic’s boardroom to DeepMind’s founding years. In this session, she unpacks why OpenAI shelved both Sora and its erotic chatbot to chase enterprise sales, why Anthropic still won’t touch ads, and what publishers should read into these companies’ next moves. Publishers will leave with a clearer read on which AI labs are stable long-term partners versus which are still improvising, and where the commercial pressure on those labs is likely to show up next in deals, data licensing, or ad products. Parmy Olson, Bloomberg Columnist
9:55 a.m. to 10:05 a.m.	Transition – Get Moving to Your Next Session	Your first set of breakouts await!
10:05 a.m. to 11:05 a.m.		Breakouts #1
	The Programmatic Ceiling	Agentic buying is arriving with a promise that sounds a lot like direct: agents talking to agents, deals running inside your own ad server, less of the stack in between. So does programmatic grow from here, or has it hit its ceiling and started handing the premium end back? Everyone in the room says their number, what share of revenue is programmatic today, and what they think it is in 2028. Then we work out why the answers differ. Jason Tollestrup, Head of Monetization and Revenue Operations, The Washington Post
	Human or Agent: Does Ops Care Who (or What) Made the Sale?	Whether the seller is a person or an agent, someone still has to plan and deliver the campaign. So let’s talk about what really changes in the handoff from sale to delivery, and what stays the same? Lauren Howe, Head of AdOps, Bauer Media Samara Hocihara, Director of Campaign Planning & Operations, Telegraph Media Group
	Sites People Need (Not Just Read)	There are sites people visit where they seek specific answers, rather than a story: weather, travel, reference materials, tools. Traditionally, those queries would bring them to your site. Now, they can get the answers to those queries from AI-driven search experiences without them ever having to engage with your site directly. So we want to know, what has changed in your traffic, and what are you building for the visits you keep? Sheila Nazir, Sr. Digital Operations Manager, Rail Delivery Group Mary Brannen, Associate Director, Global Media Operations, Tripadvisor
	Inside the AI Bubble – Part II with Parmy Olson	Want to dive deeper into the AI Bubble discussion? Join Parmy Olson after the opening keynote for this smaller room working session. This isn’t another lecturing experience, this an opportunity to take the conversation deeper with your real-world experiences and situations. Parmy Olson, Bloomberg Columnist
11:05 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.	Networking Coffee Break	Hydrate, check in with your people, and head over to your next breakout session.
11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.		Breakouts #2
	AI Ops	This is the process and organization version of the AI conversation, for teams running AI across an ad operation rather than experimenting at the edges. We’ll cover what actually changed in the workflow, who does the work now, what got automated, and what quietly did not. Mimmo Palmieri, Founder, MIMMS
	Same Side of the Table	Publishers and ad tech companies are both under pressure, and the reflex on both sides is to protect margins and say less. This room resists that reflex. How do we work more closely together so we all win? Nobody is pitching. Meena Miles, Global Ad Ops Director, Independent Warwick Walker, Digital Commercial Director, Reach PLC
	Know Your Audience	Attention is the greatest currency, and holding it means understanding what fans care about. With the internet lighting up viral moments faster than ever, brands can go beyond niches and create more compelling content for the audiences they already reach. That opportunity is only as big as our ability to measure it. Join a discussion on how gaming and sports properties are segmenting, measuring and monetizing audiences across verticals, and how measurement can keep up with the way fans really engage. Nicolas Hulsmans, Co-Founder, Dexerto Raef Godwin, Program Director, Beeler.Tech
	Aligning Publisher Value with Buyer Algorithms	When algorithmic attribution decides media budgets, understanding the rules of credit distribution is critical to protecting yield and driving renewals. This interactive discussion is intended to share insights to help the sell-side understand how attribution models work, thus allowing you to maximize revenue for your properties. Martijn van Geelen, Commercial Director, Adevinta BNL
12:30 p.m to 1:45 p.m.	It’s Lunch Time	You’ve made it to the halfway point of day one. Celebrate with delicious food, new contacts, and the exchange of fresh ideas before an equally exciting afternoon.
1:45 p.m. to 2:25 p.m.	What’s Defensible: Publisher Monetization in the Age of AI	Is publisher advertising still worth the cost, complexity, and risk? Gabriel Dorosz, who leads INMA’s Advertising Initiative, has spent 2026 exploring that question and others with publishers around the world. His session works through how to answer for your own business, in three parts. First, what does the advertising market want to buy? Hint: outcomes. Second, what can publishers sell them? Hint: a much wider portfolio than banners, sold as brand partnerships rather than inventory. Third, what’s really defensible in the age of AI, and how do you monetize it? Hint: trust, and three ways to monetize it. He’ll also make the case that scarcity is starting to work in publishers’ favor: ad supply is shrinking, and publishers who can prove their quality are holding or raising prices while the commodity open web deflates. And he’ll take on the biggest open question of the AI age directly — whether AI eventually eats the funnel and the ad spend attached to it — with case studies from more than a dozen publishers on five continents. Attendees will leave with a rubric for transformation and the case to make to their own leadership. Gabriel Dorosz, INMA Global Advertising Lead & Founder, Mighty Blackbird
2:25 p.m. to 2:35 p.m.	Transition	Are you ready? Your next session awaits.
2:35 p.m. to 3:15 p.m.		What Worked?
	What Worked: Shedding Light on Dark Traffic	When readers use new generation adblockers, legacy tools can miss out on measuring and monetizing real human audience known as “dark traffic”. Thomas Bergemann, General Director Product & Revenue at Axel Springer, walks through how the European publishing giant identified, measured, and recovered this hidden traffic, resulting in uplifts in visible pageviews, ad inventory, and overall net ad revenue. Thomas Bergemann, General Director Ad Product & Ad Operations, Media Impact / Axel Springer Dustin Cha, Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Ad-Shield
	What Worked: From Weeks to Hours, Scale Across 500+ Domains	A major Danish digital publisher grew domains by over 500% over a few years, at scale with over 500 domains reaching 3.7 million visitors. Maintaining ad serving, header bidding, and consent management severely strained their small team. To replace weeks of repetitive manual updates with streamlined efficiency, the organization unified its wrapper management, Prebid analytics, and ad server intelligence into a single machine-learning-powered platform. By completing live split testing with zero downtime they are able to migrate sites seamlessly, eliminate operational bottlenecks, reduce network-wide execution times to mere hours, and gain the agility needed to rapidly build and validate ad products. Simon Burgess, SVP Sales, EMEA, Assertive Yield B.V. Jakob Peters, Senior AdTech Specialist, STEP Network A/S Ulrik Kristensen, VP Publisher Solutions, STEP Network A/S
	What Worked: A Blueprint for Unified Reporting Across the Globe	Rapid global growth through mergers and acquisitions often breeds operational fragmentation, conflicting KPIs, and disconnected data silos. Operating across Europe, North America, and South America requires balancing regional autonomy against central oversight across distinct regulatory landscapes, currencies, and time zones. Layer in acquisitions, and things get complicated fast. Better Collective shares how they unified acquired companies and international divisions into a single, cohesive source of truth for group-wide performance and revenue. Michael Bellom, Sr. Director, Revenue Operations, Better Collective Miruna Ionite, Head Of Programmatic, Europe, Better Collective Claudia Caldera, Head of Programmatic (North America), Better Collective Frans Holmgren, Senior Solutions Director, Burt Intelligence
	Rob Wants to Understand What It Means to be Cool	Rob Beeler sits down with The COOL Company to learn more about being Cool. Learn more about how COOL helps publishers achieve their goals. Tianyi Cong, Chief Technology Officer, The COOL Company Rob Beeler, Founder & CEO, Beeler.Tech
3:15 p.m. to 3:45 p.m	Coffee Break & Head to Your Next Session	Grab a spot of caffeine, check back with the office, and then head off to your next session.
3:45 p.m to 4:45 p.m		Breakouts #3
	What Would Programmatic Look Like If It Were Built Here?	Much of the plumbing, from the standards and pricing conventions to the newer agentic protocols, was designed around one market and then exported. What have you had to work around, what have you built yourself, and what would a version designed here actually look like? Tobi Hauschild, Head of Ad Technology & Compliance, Kronen Zeitung
	Safe for Whom?	Brand safety cuts both ways. Advertisers’ rules keep budget off news and hard topics, and publishers have to protect readers from the bad ads that still get through. What does each side cost you, and what actually works? Ashley Beepur, Head of Ad Operations, Mail Metro Media Susanne Watts, Head of Ad Tech & Commercial Systems, News UK
	The Site Itself: How We Build It, How We Protect It	In this collaborative discussion, we’re going to rethink the publisher website: how it gets built, as well how it gets protected from bots, scraping and everything else coming at it. Rowena Lam, Sr. Director, Privacy & Data, IAB Tech Lab Rob Beeler, Founder & CEO, Beeler.Tech
	Continued: Publisher Monetization in the Age of AI	Gabe continues the conversation: “Is publisher advertising still worth the cost, complexity, and risk?” with attendees in this breakout session. Gabriel Dorosz, INMA Global Advertising Lead & Founder, Mighty Blackbird
4:45 p.m to 4:55 p.m	Transition Break	Join us back in the main room where we’ll recap the day and discuss where we’re heading to next.
4:55 p.m. to 5:15p.m.	Closing For The Day!	We’ll come together before dinner to put a cap on a busy day. What did we learn? What’s still up for debate? And where are we heading tomorrow? Rob Beeler, Founder & CEO, Beeler.Tech
6:45 p.m. to 10:15 p.m.	A Fiery Spanish Affair at Flamenco de Leones	Set beside the iconic Puerta de Alcalá, Flamenco de Leones is the city’s premier modern tablao… but this is far more than dinner. We’ll begin in a beautifully appointed private space with an avant-garde Spanish tasting menu that takes traditional flavors in unexpected directions, paired throughout the evening with premium local wines. Then, as the final plates are cleared, the entire mood shifts. The lights dim. The haunting voice of a solitary singer cuts through the room. And just feet from your table, the rapid-fire rhythm of world-class flamenco dancers takes over. What follows is raw, visceral, and impossible to experience from a distance, with every stomp, turn, clap, and note unfolding right in front of you. Dress code: Bring the drama. Think classic black, deep red, and chic evening attire with as much flair as you dare. Leave the casual sightseeing gear at the hotel.

Tuesday, November 10, 2026

Session Time	Session Title	Session Description
8:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m.	Rise & Shine for Breakfast	Gear up for another exciting day at Base.Camp with a full breakfast and another chance to connect with friends, new and old.
9:00 a.m. to 9:15 a.m.	Opening: Reflect on Monday, Plan for Today	We’re back for another day. We’ll recap the hivemind goodness that came out of day one and talk about how to make the most of day two. Rob Beeler, Founder & CEO, Beeler.Tech
9:15 a.m. to 9:20 a.m.	Transition
9:20 a.m. to 10:25 a.m.		Working Rooms Round 1 During this collaborative problem-solving session, you’ll spend your time in one of four dedicated tracks. Your group will start by putting the questions and problems you want to tackle on the table. Together, you’ll prioritize the list and start working through it, with moderation support to keep the conversation moving and focused on what matters most to the group.
	Working Room: Programmatic	IN THIS TRACK: Where are you currently experiencing friction with programmatic? What’s working? What’s not? What needs to change? And who should be responsible for that change? Jerome Holder, Global Media Director, VICE Vikesh Chevli, Director, Ad Tech & Programmatic Strategy, News Corp
	Working Room: Traffic Loss	IN THIS TRACK: What can publishers actually do about losing traffic, leaving legal and legislation aside? What would help those actions succeed, and what can you do right away? Henry Thomas, Global Director, Revenue Operations, Mail Metro Media Leslie Harris, Director of Commercial Video, Reach
	Working Room: Direct	IN THIS TRACK: What are the challenges and opportunities with innovation, efficiency, and profitability in direct-sold lines of revenue? What can we do better? Anamaria Alexandrescu, Executive Director, International Revenue Operations & Analytics (Advertising), New York Times Lewis McDowall, Associate Director, Advertising Operations, Xbox Media
	Working Room: How to Make Revenue Streams Work Together	IN THIS TRACK: Most publishers are adding a second and third line to a business that still rests on selling their own impressions. What does each new line cost in headcount and sales attention, what does it take from the others, and how do you organise the people around it? Michelle Sullivan, VP, International Media Services, Live Nation Nat Francis, Digital Revenue Operations Director, Bauer Media UK
10:25 a.m. to 10:55 a.m.	Morning Coffee & Networking Break	We’re halfway through our Working Room session. Grab a coffee, check your email, and take a few minutes to stretch your legs.
10:55 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.		Working Rooms Round 2
	Working Room: Programmatic	IN THIS TRACK: Where are you currently experiencing friction with programmatic? What’s working? What’s not? What needs to change? And who should be responsible for that change? Jerome Holder, Global Media Director, VICE Vikesh Chevli, Director, Ad Tech & Programmatic Strategy, News Corp
	Working Room: Traffic Loss	IN THIS TRACK: What can publishers actually do about losing traffic, leaving legal and legislation aside? What would help those actions succeed, and what can you do right away? Henry Thomas, Global Director, Revenue Operations, Mail Metro Media Leslie Harris, Director of Commercial Video, Reach
	Working Room: Direct	IN THIS TRACK: What are the challenges and opportunities with innovation, efficiency, and profitability in direct-sold lines of revenue? What can we do better? Anamaria Alexandrescu, Executive Director, International Revenue Operations & Analytics (Advertising), New York Times Lewis McDowall, Associate Director, Advertising Operations, Xbox Media
	Working Room: How to Make Revenue Streams Work Together	IN THIS TRACK: Most publishers are adding a second and third line to a business that still rests on selling their own impressions. What does each new line cost in headcount and sales attention, what does it take from the others, and how do you organise the people around it? Michelle Sullivan, VP, International Media Services, Live Nation Nat Francis, Digital Revenue Operations Director, Bauer Media UK
12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m.	It’s Time for Lunch	You’ve made it to the summit of day two. Enjoy a well-earned lunch with new connections.
12:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.	Tuesday Activities	During our famous Tuesday Base.Camp excursions, we set aside our big discussions to do the equally essential work of coming together as a true community of humans who share common goals. If you ask anyone who’s attended a Base.Camp before, they’ll be the first to tell you that these are where some of the most valuable memories are made, new relationships are forged, and existing bonds are strengthened, making up the foundation of the work we must accomplish as a whole. Learn more about Madrid’s Tuesday Activities here.
6:45 p.m. to 11:30 p.m.	Feast, Spectacle & Strikes at SLVJ Madrid	For our final night together, we’re taking over SLVJ Madrid. The setting is lush, extravagant, and wildly theatrical, with exotic architecture surrounding us as we settle in for a feast of world-class Japanese fusion. As the night deepens, the DJ turns up the heat and SLVJ comes alive around us. Dazzling dancers and spontaneous live performances erupt throughout the dining room, turning an incredible meal into a full-blown, high-octane celebration without ever asking you to leave your table. To close the evening, we’ll head downstairs to SLVJ’s exclusive underground bowling alley for our own VIP after-party, where neon-lit lanes, craft cocktails, and some very high-energy competition will keep the night going. The dress code? Dress like the elite of Madrid’s nightlife are watching. This is the night to go big with sharp blazers, stylish dresses, polished shoes, and fashion-forward looks made for the city’s elite party scene. Leave the athletic wear, casual gym sneakers, and torn jeans at the hotel.

Wednesday, November 11, 2026

Session Time	Session Title	Session Description
8:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m.	It’s Time for Breakfast	It’s our last morning at Base.Camp. Enjoy filling breakfast before the day begins. We’d wager you have a lot of memories to share from last night over coffee.
9:00 a.m. to 10:20 a.m.	Your Second Audience	You’re talked about far more often than you’re talked to. Decisions about your deals, your promotions and your ideas get made in rooms you’re not in. This morning, publishers take the floor: share an idea, hear how it lands, and learn how it travels when you’re not there to explain it. Rob Beeler, Founder & CEO, Beeler.Tech
10:20 a.m. to 10:45 a.m.	Coffee Break	Get ready for your next session. Your time at Base.Camp isn’t over just yet.
10:45 a.m. to 11:45 a.m.	Your Second Audience, Part II	We’ll continue our time together exploring the concept of second audiences, with publishers in the pitch seat. Rob Beeler, Founder & CEO, Beeler.Tech
11:45 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.	Closing Remarks	It’s the bittersweet moment we’ve all been dreading: Base.Camp Madrid is now coming to a close. What did we learn? What are we taking with us? And where will we go next? Rob will bring us together one last time to answer those questions.
12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m.	Lunch Before You Go	We wouldn’t recommend traveling on an empty stomach. Catch up with your new friends, share ideas, and take time to talk about what we can all accomplish together. (Just don’t talk with your mouth full.)