Chasing friction-free digital marketing is so 2025. Embrace the burn at SOS26.

We encounter all kinds of friction in digital marketing. Every. Friction. Day.

And as you’ll discover at State of Social ’26, that’s a good thing (even ‘bad’ friction is good friction). Allow us to explain…

🔥 Learn to identify your friction points. The hotspots in your business, your marketing, your processes are where the sparks of radical, transformative solutions lie. Fan those flames!

🪨 Harness friction to knock the rough edges off. There will always be rough patches. Question is: how can you use them to refine strategies and streamline creative executions?

🛫 Move fast, create altitude! How does a plane take off? Speed and resistance. The same goes for marketing. The faster you move forward and iterate, iterate, iterate, the higher you’ll go.

👍 Embed ‘good’ friction for your audience. Learn the keys to sticky content, to slowing them down, to stopping the scroll. They’ll love you for it.

🚧 Use ‘bad’ friction to seize opportunities. Broken tech. Barriers to entry. Broken customer journeys. They’re all problems. Fix them the right way, and they’re HUGE opportunities.

🏗️ Build strategic friction into your methodology. From challenging assumptions in briefs to pressure-testing AI tools, a little time spent in beta makes a big difference.

🫦 Get comfortable being uncomfortable. Necessity is the mother of invention. Learn to relax into friction, tension and resistance. That’s when those Eureka! moments happen.

🦪 Be the grain of sand that creates the pearl. In a world of seamless, soulless (AI-generated) content and feeds, be awkward. Be human. Be creative. The world is your oyster.

SOS26 won’t smooth over the uncomfortable bits.

We’re here to lean into the friction in our marketing lives. To turn tension into traction. To question more. Push harder. Think better.

Join us and a whole lot of your smartest peers on 25 & 26 August at Optus Stadium and learn from the people doing the real work.