Now it is about relevance, and relevance is harder to fake. That was the thread running through “The World is Still a Screen: Winning Attention Beyond the Algorithm,” the session led by Nord & Smith CEO Kavindra Airlangga at Ideafest 2026, held at Merak 2, JICC Senayan Lower Lobby, from 17.00 to 18.00.

The session took on one of the more uncomfortable truths facing brands and creators today: content volume keeps rising, algorithms keep shifting, and visibility can disappear as fast as it arrives. Kavindra’s argument was straightforward. Chasing the algorithm is a losing game if the underlying idea is not built to be noticed, remembered, and acted on in the first place. Screens, whether they sit in a feed or on a street, are still just screens. What determines whether people stop scrolling or stop walking is the same thing it always was: an idea worth their attention.

That framing carried extra weight coming from someone whose business lives outside the feed. Out-of-home advertising does not get the benefit of a recommendation engine deciding who sees it. It has to earn attention in physical space, which makes the session’s core point, that algorithmic optimization is not a substitute for creative and strategic clarity, feel less like theory and more like operating principle.

The session closed with something more hands-on than a slide deck. Attendees were challenged to design and upload their own OOH mockups on the spot, with the winning concept awarded a free placement. It turned a discussion about attention into a live demonstration of it, asking the audience to do the exact thing the talk was about: create something people would actually choose to notice.

Ideafest 2026 marks another stop in Kavindra’s run of speaking engagements this year, following appearances at the Indonesia Digital Marketing Conference and Festival of Marketing Asia in Kuala Lumpur, each building on a consistent thesis: in a market saturated with content, the brands that win are the ones that treat attention as something to be designed for, not assumed.

Get your OOH campaign planned and executed with the right strategy with Nord & Smith, the most accurate data-driven OOH agency you can definitely trust.