PGC London 2026: five things UA teams actually talked about

PGC London 2026 ran across January 19 and 20 at the Barbican. It drew roughly 3,000 attendees from more than 1,450 companies, over 70% of them in senior roles, alongside the co-located Apps Business Summit and Beyond Games summit. Conference takeaways usually thin out by the time they reach print, but five themes came up often enough across sessions and tracks this year to be worth stating plainly, without attributing them to any individual speaker.

PGC London's first takeaway: lifetime value over volume is now default

Sessions across the UA and monetisation tracks treated the shift from new-user volume to lifetime value expansion as a starting assumption, not a debate. That lines up with what recent industry reporting already shows in the numbers: revenue growing modestly while downloads soften, and top advertisers increasing creative variation rather than raw spend volume. The direction wasn't the news. What stood out at PGC was how quickly a once-contested position has become the unremarkable baseline.

Creative volume is a production problem, not an ideation one

Conversations about scaling creative output kept returning to one operational question. How does a team turn a validated concept into the dozens of variants a modern campaign needs for each size, for each market, for each network, without every variant consuming a fresh creative decision? That mirrors reporting from earlier this month putting leading advertisers at 2,400 to 2,600 creative variations a quarter. The PGC conversation treated that volume as a pipeline and tooling challenge rather than a sign that studios need dramatically more original ideas; for teams without a top-decile production budget, that framing is both more useful and more achievable.

AI in production is showing up as tooling, not as a replacement for judgement

References to AI at PGC leaned toward specific production tasks: drafting variations, assisting with reporting, speeding up asset iteration. Sweeping claims about AI running creative strategy or media buying end to end were rare. That's a narrower and more credible use case than AI sometimes gets in vendor marketing, and it matches other reporting this month, which specifically cited AI assistants doing UA reporting rather than creative decision-making itself.

Web shops and platform risk were discussed as one conversation, not two

With Apple's revised EU terms only weeks old, web shop strategy came up repeatedly, but rarely in isolation from platform risk more broadly. Attendees framed a web shop less as a way around a specific fee and more as a hedge against dependency on any single platform's rules changing under a studio with little warning. On that view a web shop build is infrastructure. A studio wants it regardless of the current fee structure in any one market, since fee structures have already shown they can move.

Three thousand delegates and 170-plus sessions inevitably produce more noise than five clean themes can capture, and plenty of vendor pitches and product announcements across the two days will only matter to the teams they targeted. Still, the pattern holds. These five threads, lifetime value, production-scale creative, narrowly scoped AI tooling, and platform-risk-driven web shop planning, surfaced across unrelated tracks and unrelated companies, which suggests they describe where the industry's attention has actually moved rather than where any one speaker wanted it to move.

Related archive reading

• PGC London 2025: Five UA Takeaways From the Show Floor
• PGC Helsinki UA Takeaways for Creative and Growth Teams