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Mark Adams
As a college student in the early 2000s, Mark Adams began using the internet to organize parties for hundreds of student communities across London universities. “It was a hell of a lot of fun,” said Adams, who will deliver a keynote at Convening APAC 2026 in Singapore on April 13. But he soon recognized, Adams told Convene, that online networks could be used for much, much bigger things than parties.
It was the beginning of a career that saw Adams leading digital strategy for many of the world’s best-known names, including Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, and former President Barack Obama, and working with the world’s biggest brands, such as Google, L’Oréal, and Unilever. He later helped grow Vice Media Group from a punk magazine into a global, youth-focused media brand and now advises CEOs and boards of Fortune 500 companies about innovation and the ethical adoption of AI into their business.
Convene spoke to Adams about how the insights he’s gained over more than two decades of leading digital strategy apply to the challenges we face today. Here are three highlights from our conversation:
Why community and connection beat content
“There’s a good statistic that came out very recently — if every one of the 8 billion of us on Earth just sat and watched content on YouTube and Netflix and Amazon Prime, etc., for every hour in the day and didn’t sleep, there would still be 10 times more content than there are human hours to watch it,” he said. “People say that this is the global warming of the content ecosystem. It’s completely unsustainable.”
Moreover, “human beings no longer get the hit that they used to get from content. It’s not enough. Now we want not just to experience content, we want to experience the community around the content. And so that’s where the events industry is an extremely exciting place to be.”
Why understanding networks is the key to navigating technological change
He learned early on that “everything — every app, every platform, AI — all of it just comes back to one word: networks,” Adams said. “It’s all about networks and it’s all about the signals within the networks.” That’s true, he noted, for an innovation like Uber. “If you think about it, all they did was to have the insight that every city is a network of roads.” Instead of those who need a taxi randomly stepping out into that network and hoping to bump into one, Uber enabled riders to emit a signal that taxi drivers could see. “And then supply and demand could meet within the network.”
In every shift, “it’s all about networks and it’s all about these signals,” he said. “Once you realize that signals of demand are arising, you can start to build amazing ways to contribute to helping meet that demand.”
Why AI is forcing a deeper question about human value
“The best way to think about [AI] is that intelligence — or the ability to throw more than just your own cognitive abilities at a problem — is now flowing the way that water is. We now have to start to ask the very deep identity question, which is: In what other ways can we add value? If the easy thing is intelligence, we have to find what the hard thing is. And my answer is the hard thing is going to be compassion.… In order to actually be good at business, first of all, you have to find a group of people in some type of pain — ideally a group of people in some type of pain that nobody else has had the compassion to notice enough yet.”
To bring it back to the events and the conference industry, Adams often asks audiences: “If you could watch a conference online, why did you get a flight to come here in person?”
The answer, he said, is belonging. “It’s the therapy and the catharsis of being with people who have similar frustrations, pains, anxieties, and excitabilities that you do. It’s wondering who you might meet and bump into — the collision of ideas.” We don’t yet fully understand the economic value of those things, he said. “We think everything is about rationality, but it’s highly irrational to get on a plane and fly to wherever the next conference is when you could easily watch it online. We don’t respect that enough yet — but we will have to start respecting it now.”
Barbara Palmer is Convene’s deputy editor