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A team of Mackerel Media’s finest descended on the EICC, Edinburgh, for the 2025 edition of Turing Fest, a digital conference focusing on technology, leadership, product and engineering, growth hacking and digital transformation.

Bethany Gordon, Emma Lindsay, Elliott Henderson, Carolyn Spice-Reid, Adam Lyall, and Alex McLeman listened, learned and experienced a host of talks from speakers from around the technology business world, joined roundtable discussions where topics were debated and processes diagnosed, and enjoyed impromptu chats about new tools and platforms that will transform our ways of working.

The insights and fantastic learnings pulled from the massive two-day event covered a vast array of digital technology subjects, which we hope will cascade down to real-world, actionable insights the Mackerel Media team will leverage to drive business growth and innovation across our client portfolio.

What is Turing Fest? 

Turing Fest is a digital and technology summit aimed at showcasing the latest innovations, market shifts and discussing the future of the digital and technology industry.

The event provides those in attendance with the platform to debate new and emerging technologies, test new theories and sample experimental tools, while also reinforcing Scotland’s position as a rising hub for technological excellence.

Turing Fest is built around four key “Tracks” or themes, which include;

• Build → Aimed at those focused on the design aspects of product development – from engineers to product managers.
• Grow → For those who target the customer-facing side of technology and business.
• Lead → Executives, founders and business leaders who want to learn how to lead better.
• Invest → Venture capital firms who are here to support, share, educate and meet founders and business leaders.

Attendees are encouraged to listen, learn and ask as many questions as possible. The event hosts an exhibition space, where businesses showcase their products, services and latest innovations. The businesses in attendance included; The national Robotarium, who brought along a fantastic, and friendly robot, SkyScanner, Techscaler, the University of Edinburgh, Mixpanel, userfeel, MaltedAI, Bioliberty, HSBC Innovation banking, and many more.

Who Spoke at Turing Fest 2025? 

The 2025 edition of Turing crossed a number of digital and technological paths, the main focus, however, was on artificial intelligence, more specifically, how AI is going to fundamentally change the digital and technological landscape in the short, medium and long-term.

We were treated to talks and presentations from Paul Adams, the chief product officer at Intercom – a business at the sharp-end of building AI support agents for businesses – Ryan Singer, who was part of the team who built the project management tool Basecamp, Jonny Brooks-Barlett from Spotify – whose passion for AI could turn the most staunchly anti-AI individual pro-AI – Aiste Miskuniene from Vinted, Alibaba’s YitianXu, who mapped their AI and LLM workflow and explained how DeepSeek took the world by storm recently, plus a host of other tech leaders.

Each speaker offered a unique view of the AI takeover, providing their insight on where the technology will take us and how we can leverage its power to help our own businesses, processes and skill development.

What the Mackerels Learned at Turing 2025

Our key takeaway? That AI is here to stay and is going to help super-charge growth, not just for business owners, but for product managers, technical SEO experts, digital marketers, data scientists, and, most importantly, customers.

We learned first hand how AI can be harnessed into creating an in-the-moment Scottish beer brand. Thibault Imbert – the chief product and growth officer at Creatopy – shared an entire 20-minute presentation built around creating a new Scottish beer brand using only AI tools. He used: Loveable, Midjourney, and ChatGPT to create – the “Hop-Ness Monster” along with a bottle, branding, digital advertising assets and fully-functional website. Whilst wonderfully creative, his beer was the secondary item in the talk, rather, he distilled the incredible power these tools can wield in product innovation – illustrating how each can provide small teams with a vast array of skills and speed up any product development cycle. He showcased each platform’s capacity to perform advanced design and creative tasks, from creating a name, or label, to a fully functional website in a short period of time.

Aperture’s Hannah Parvaz walked the room through how her and her team analyse and review ad copy, ad design performance and user engagement/behaviours. She explained her process in detail, and the lengths they go to in ensuring only the most impactful, high-converting and engaging digital ads are placed in front of users – which almost always led to higher conversion rates and lower CPAs. Spoiler: it is a long process of trial and error, but one she and her team have used for years and never fails.

SYSTM’s Nopadon explained user inertia, transporting us into an average customer’s mind. Detailing the lengths brands and businesses need to go to to grow their customer base and drive conversions. Walking us through user inertia, and how we can break the “ better the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t” user thought-process when selecting new products and services. Providing ideas on how to pull users out of their comfort zones, remove those cognitive bias barriers and reframe new product risk aversion, which turns so many users off a product at that final, and most critical, stage of the conversion cycle.

What’s Next? 

There is no knowing what the future holds, especially given current market trends, but what we can guarantee is the tools, thinking, and new ways of working knowledge the Mackerel Media team have gained from their experience at the Turing Fest 2025 event will help to position us in the driver’s seat on technology innovation, growth and digital skill-enhancement.

Whatever happens, the knowledge gleaned from this year’s event offers a bright future for all of our fantastic clients in 2025, and beyond.

This March not only saw the arrival of Spring, but also some major updates across both organic search and paid advertising. From Google’s recent algorithm updates and Performance Max improvements, to changes in YouTube advertising and AI security developments, here’s a look at what’s been happening in the digital marketing space.

This month ​Google rolled out its March 2025 core update, which began on the 13th of March and completed on the 27th of March. Although Google has not disclosed which parts of search have been impacted by this update, there have been some early reports which show search fluctuations across a range of different marketplaces. As with all core updates, it is important to monitor your search performance and ensure that your content and overall site technical performance is in good health. Mackerel Media are on hand to assist with a review of search visibility, and advise on strategies to mitigate and improve search performance and overall user acquisition.

The Future of Google Search

Google’s Head of Search, Elizabeth Reid, made headlines this month by predicting that over time the standard Google search bar will become less prominent, and voice queries and image based queries will continue to rise. An ex-Google executive hinted that Google is moving away from its standard model of sending users to websites, and instead wants to keep users on the Google platform as much as possible. This coincides with the recent rollout of AI overviews which gives users answers to their questions within the search results, reducing the need for users to visit external websites. The effect that this will have on the SEO space means that it could lead to fewer users visiting websites directly. Optimising your site for better visibility within Google’s AI overviews, whether that is through optimised content, featured snippets and structured data becomes more important now than ever.

Performance Max Ads Reveal Their Secrets

Google also responded to the demand for more visibility in Performance Max campaigns. Advertisers can now see the actual search terms that are triggering their Performance Max ads, thanks to a recent update which integrates this data into the existing Search Terms report. Ad managers can now add negative keywords directly from the report which will help reduce spend and ensure ads are only showing for relevant searches. For brands running Performance Max campaigns at scale, this update is a useful step towards greater ad control and performance.

Google’s structured data guidelines have recently been updated, allowing merchants to display new pricing details directly in search results. The new properties include priceType, which labels prices as ‘strikethrough’ to indicate discounts and savings, and validForMemberTier (currently in beta), which displays prices exclusive to loyalty program tiers. These new improvements provide users with clearer pricing information which could lead to an overall increase in engagement and conversions. If you are planning on running any upcoming Spring sales or tiered offers, it would be worth checking your schema markup to ensure you’re making the most of these new features.

YouTube’s New Ad Strategy

YouTube has unveiled new plans to revamp their mid-roll ads starting in May 2025. Ads will now appear during natural content breaks to help reduce interruptions, such as during natural breaks and transitions in the video. YouTube creators will be able to add manual, automatic or a combination of both ad placements. Early tests show that using both ad placement types can increase video revenue by 5%. These changes could affect video monetisation strategies, especially for videos with manual ad placements, and so it is worth staying on top of any ad placement updates when planning future content.

On the AI front, ​Cloudflare has introduced AI Labyrinth, a free, opt-in tool designed to prevent unauthorised web-scraping bots collecting data from your website. When this tool is enabled, it will redirect any known bot to AI-generated decoy pages, which consumes all their crawling resources and prevents them from scraping important data. This new feature allows Cloudflare to identify and analyse malicious bots while protecting the site content from potentially being repurposed by AI in the future. As more companies and users are using AI for search and content, protecting your content could become just as important as optimising for it.

TikTok Turns Scrolls into Billions!

Finally, Sensor Tower’s Q4 Digital Market Index revealed that TikTok has led the mobile app market by generating $6 billion from in-app purchases in 2024. This total is almost double that of its closest competitors, and marks a 36% increase from the previous year. This surge shows the influence that TikTok has in both product discovery and user engagement. Additionally, 70% of TikTok shoppers have reported that they’ve purchased products after seeing ads or shoppable content. As TikTok continues to grow, it is important to consider ways to best maximise TikTok’s advertising and shoppable content to improve visibility and drive conversions.