Grab your pass, grab a bite, and power up with a brew or two before we dive into a day of conversation and collaboration.

Insurance is not what many would call a passion category. You purchase it because you have to, then you forget it exists until something goes wrong. That’s exactly the gap Liberty Mutual has spent a decade turning around — with a jingle that won Radio Marketer of the Year, a “guy named Doug,” an emu, and now a Henson-built puppet born from a seven-year-old ad flub. In this fireside chat, CMO Jenna Lebel unpacks why she keeps stacking characters instead of replacing them, how sports partnerships reinforce the same cues instead of running as a separate strategy, and why humor lands hardest in categories that don’t expect it.

Topics to be discussed include:

• Distinction as the strategy, not the decoration: How brand cues can get your brand shortlisted before buyers engage.
• Consistency beats novelty: How Liberty Mutual’s returns came from repeating the same brand cues and why audience fatigue and audience recognition usually arrive on different timelines.
• Let humor work for you: How finding levity in a category built on seriousness does more work than the joke itself would in a category that’s already fun.

Marketing culture is obsessed with what’s next: the next campaign, the next quarter, the next viral moment. But the brands people actually love, the ones that get evangelized on social media and defended in comment sections, were built by people willing to play a different game entirely.

This panel brings together marketers who made the harder bet: investing in conviction over conversion, storytelling over optimization, and community over reach. We’ll get into what it actually takes to build brand equity when everything around you is screaming for quick results and how that long-game thinking ends up paying off in ways the dashboard can’t fully capture.

Topics to be discussed include:

• Earning trust, not just attention, through cultural partnerships: What it looks like to choose collaborators for resonance over reach, and why the right partner can do more for brand credibility than a nine-figure media buy.
• Turning your own people into your best marketing channel: How brands build employee advocacy programs that actually stick, and why the most authentic storytelling often starts from the inside out.
• Making the case for softer investments: How to quantify (or convincingly argue for) the things that don’t show up cleanly in a dashboard: brand narrative, community, culture, and the long arc of trust-building.

PopUp Bagels grew not by running a million ads but by being impossible to ignore. From its Not Famous but Known® ethos to the Grip, Rip and Dip® method, the brand creates shareability through intentional product design, drop-style launches, and an unforgettable customer experience.

Topics to be discussed include:

• Building experiences worth talking about: How product decisions, store design, and customer experience create organic conversation before social ever enters the equation.
• Treating launches like drops: Why limited releases, partnerships, and cultural timing generate demand by giving people something genuinely new to experience.
• Turning customers into storytellers: How to create products and experiences people genuinely want to recommend, where organic advocacy and user-generated content become the natural outcome.

Reddit has become one of the most honest, real-time insight engines in marketing. Every subreddit serves as a live focus group and the smartest brands have figured out how to listen. This session examines recent case studies that prove that authenticity is the key to succeeding in niche, high-trust communities and makes the case for humanizing campaigns by using AI and data to find insights faster.

Topics to be discussed include:

• Start with the conversation: How the best campaigns begin by understanding what communities are already talking about, not just what brands want to say.
• Authenticity earns attention: Why real conversations and community voices create more trust than polished brand messaging alone.
• AI accelerates insight; people shape the story: How AI helps marketers uncover cultural signals faster, but the best campaigns still come from human creativity.

Sales got RevOps; go-to-market got the GTM engineer. Now marketing is getting its own builder: the marketing engineer who sits within the marketing function and builds the infrastructure that allows teams to optimize their work. This session digs into what the role actually looks like, how it connects the dots across a disjointed marketing org and tackles the question: is this a net-new hire, or is it already sitting on your team, waiting to be unlocked?

Topics to be discussed include:

• The right background: Why marketing engineers tend to come from SEO, demand, and growth backgrounds and step into engineering responsibilities.
• Hire or grow one?: How to build a practical framework for deciding whether to bring in a dedicated marketing engineer or identify and develop the systems-minded person already embedded in your team.
• Measuring success: How to determine the best metrics for judging whether this role improves efficiency.

Pinterest threw a Coachella activation where the first thing you did was lock your phone in a pouch. IBM, after three decades of behind-the-scenes sports partnerships built for clients, brought the Masters to a New York City park for anyone who wandered by. Two very different brands, but one shared bet: the standard experiential playbook is due for a rewrite.

This panel gets into what happens when brands design real-world experiences around intention instead of attention and how to justify the investment when the payoff doesn’t show up in a share count.

Topics to be discussed include:

• Designing for presence, not posts: What it takes to build an experience good enough that people don’t need to document it and why the conversation a brand earns can outlast the content it gives up.
• Taking B2B to the block party: What can be learned from how enterprise brands are moving sports and event partnerships beyond client hospitality to reach the spheres of influence around them, from everyday fans to their own employees.
• Measuring what the dashboard can’t see: How both brands evaluate earned attention, brand perception, and long-arc affinity when the usual experiential KPIs are deliberately off the table.

From pop-up fan experiences to social takeovers to custom clothing and food items, Netflix is betting that the future of fandom extends well beyond the couch. Now with the expansion of live events, Netflix House, KPop Demon Hunters sing-a-longs, and more, the steamer is taking the fandom from Netflix’s most popular series and films and extending those storylines off-screen. In this session, hear the specifics of a recent case study where Netflix partners with a brand to tap into culture, building something only they can do, together.

Topics to be discussed include:

• Building brand love: Why creating branded co-created campaigns deepens the relationship with fans and creates loyalty to the company at the same time.
• Co-creation as a non-starter: Hear how pushing the boundary on creativity can create a more lasting campaign that drives results.
• The value of quality over quantity: Learn Netflix’s unique approach to partnerships that challenges the industry status quo.

This session focuses on how marketers are using AI to enhance creativity, not replace it. We’ll showcase examples of concepting, copywriting, visual design, audience engagement, and everything in between all while keeping human storytelling at the center.

This session focuses on cutting through the noise to find clarity in a fragmented data landscape. We’ll explore how to unify data across platforms, decide what signals matter most, and build trust in metrics that guide creative decisions. Expect perspectives on social listening and cross-channel attribution.

This session unpacks how cultural relevance is created by exploring how marketers interpret emerging trends, decide when to follow trends or create their own, and how to take calculated risks that strengthen brand identity rather than dilute it.

Your campaign wrapped, but now what? This session dives into how brands move beyond vanity metrics to identify what truly matters: the KPIs that signal growth, loyalty, and long-term brand health. We’ll explore frameworks for post-campaign analysis, attribution modeling, and the evolving balance of quantitative data and qualitative impact.

Consumers have built up an immunity to advertising, and no amount of budget seems to cure it. The brands winning now aren’t the ones spending the most - they’re the ones making something people would actually choose to watch. But there’s a harder question underneath that: what does it take to make content that doesn’t just stop the scroll, but actually makes someone feel something?

The answer was “Money Therapy,” Acorns’ first content franchise, where people with bad money habits sit down, face the truth, and get help. In this session, CMO Kasia Leyden unpacks the creative conviction behind the series - including the decision to never mention the brand or product once - and what the results say about and how a series like this builds the kind of trust and engagement a traditional ad never could.

Search isn’t what it used to be, and many brands are still optimizing for a world that no longer exists. United Rentals moved beyond traditional SEO and started building content infrastructure designed for how AI actually retrieves, interprets, and surfaces information.

In this session, attendees will learn how United Rentals built a full-stack approach to AI search readiness by combining content governance, agentic automation, and structured content architecture into an AEO-first strategy built for scale across one of the most complex B2B website footprints in the country.

As digital ad fatigue hits a ceiling, the most forward-thinking brands are betting on physical spaces, not as a sales floor, but as a cultural statement. In this session, our speakers pull back the curtain on how they’ve used New York City as a proving ground for a new kind of retail marketing; one where the store opening IS the campaign.

From Los Angeles to Miami to San Francisco to Flatiron NYC, they’ll share what it actually takes to turn a store launch into a cultural moment, what they’ve learned, and why community-first experiential is the channel that converts.

Most acquisition strategy jumps straight to levers before anyone’s asked the harder question: is this audience even receptive to being reached right now? Oar Health couldn’t skip it. The challenge wasn’t just that nobody was searching for their category; it was that conventional demand generation was fundamentally mismatched to the people they needed to reach. Their audience’s motivation and self-perception shifted throughout the day and week, which meant the usual playbook often landed in the exact moments when people were least open to hearing the message — or least likely to remember it later.

In this session, Oar Health’s Neil Walker unpacks what it took to genuinely understand the people they were trying to reach — not as a static target, but as an audience whose mindset and receptiveness could change hour to hour — and how that insight led to an unconventional SMS-based strategy designed around those conditions. With retargeting off the table and standard push-and-pull tactics falling short, the result is a case study in what becomes possible when channel strategy starts with human behavior and psychology.

Ever wonder why some brand partnerships feel like culture while others feel like a big miss? For the most successful brands, fan engagement today focuses on community as a growth strategy. From sports franchises turning game days into always-on content machines to disruptor brands building cult followings, the smartest marketers have stopped chasing attention and started earning belonging. This session brings together leaders who’ve cracked the code on fandom: in stadiums, on social media, and everywhere their fans gather. They’ll unpack what it actually takes to turn passive audiences into passionate communities.

Topics to be discussed include:

• Meeting fans where they are: How winning brands show up for the moments their fans already prioritize.
• Turning fans into a media channel: Why smart marketers are building programs that activate their most obsessed fans instead of just broadcasting past them.
• Creating real-time relevance: How brands that consistently show up inside culture have built the internal speed and creative approvals to move at the speed of culture.

In this fireside chat, Collectively and Dove break down how brands earn a place in cultural moments, and what it takes to show up in spaces your audience already loves.

Topics to be discussed include:

• Driving cultural relevance: How tapping into a moment and bringing in the right creators to amplify it makes you part of the conversation.
• Collaboration is the new product launch: Limited-edition collabs create urgency and novelty that traditional campaigns can’t replicate. The collab itself becomes the story, giving creators authentic content to build around.
• Combining consistency with evolution: Brands that iterate on what works signal confidence in their approach while keeping audiences along for the ride.

The marketers growing their brands are the ones who’ve figured out how to find new audiences and are building smarter prospecting strategies from the ground up. In this session, we’ll break down how smart marketers use customer data to build new audience profiles, identify the channels delivering the most addressable reach, and leverage behavioral signals to personalize for people who’ve never heard of you. Plus, gain an understanding of how second-party data partnerships, predictive models, and automation are changing the prospecting game.

Every marketer is drowning in data and being told AI will fix it. The leaders getting it right are asking a different question: not “how much can we automate?” but “how does this help us understand people better?”

This session is a view from inside the building: marketing leaders who are living the modernization firsthand by reorganizing teams, rewiring workflows, and making the daily judgment calls about where machines help and where humans decide.

Topics to be discussed include:

• Personalization with purpose: How brands use data, analytics, and emerging tools to deepen relationships with the customers they already have and build new products by creating timelier, more relevant, and even empathetic experiences without making personalization feel transactional.
• Making AI adoption trustworthy from the inside out: How marketing leaders drive responsible AI adoption across their own teams — empowering everyone to test, learn, and build — while treating AI as an enabler of better judgment, creativity, and execution, not a replacement for human insight.
• Insight that actually travels: What happens when creative and data stop talking, and how marketers move insight upstream, partnering with product and operations to spot friction, pressure-test decisions, and make sure the brand promise holds up in the moments that matter.

In this presentation, Kristin Wozniak of Cosmo5 makes the case that the best marketing decisions come from integrating every form of intelligence you have — always in service of understanding people, not just data points.

Topics to be discussed include:

• Which signals deserve your trust: How to sort meaningful customer feedback from the noise, and when instinct gets a vote alongside the data.
• The full intelligence stack: Why operational, strategic, ethical, and emotional intelligence turn measurement into judgment.
• Escaping the Goodhart trap: When a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. We’ll discuss how to keep metrics serving your brand agenda instead of quietly replacing it.

Oatly built its brand by challenging the conventions of both advertising and the grocery category, proving that a functional product could carry a distinct point of view, create conversation, and become part of culture. That approach has always gone beyond clever copy or unusual billboards. It is rooted in a consistent worldview, a willingness to take creative risks, and a belief that product, design, storytelling, community, and business strategy should reinforce one another.

As the media landscape and consumer expectations evolve, the question is not how a brand reinvents itself, but how it continues to express the same core conviction in new and relevant ways. This closing conversation will explore how Oatly builds cultural relevance beyond traditional campaigns, creates platforms people can participate in, and balances creative bravery with commercial discipline.

Topics to be discussed include:

• From advertising to world-building: How Oatly connects product, design, events, editorial ideas, community, and storytelling to create a brand people can participate in.
• Distinctiveness through conviction: Why a strong brand voice only works when it reflects a clear worldview, and how Oatly protects that point of view as the company and category evolve.
• Creative bravery with business discipline: How brands can take meaningful risks, stay culturally sharp, and remain closely connected to commercial priorities and growth.
• Building relevance beyond the shelf: How products, rituals, and communities, from coffee culture to experiences like Aftertaste, can turn a grocery brand into something with broader cultural meaning.
• Structure that supports bold ideas: How Oatly’s way of working helps creative, commercial, and strategic teams stay connected, move quickly, and avoid becoming generic as the business scales.