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

Few brands live rent-free in culture the way Taco Bell does. From fan campaigns that resurrect menu items to collabs that sell out before lunch, the brand has turned listening to its audience into a full-blown marketing engine.

In this opening conversation with Taco Bell’s Chief Marketing Officer, Luis Restrepo, we’ll pull back the curtain on how one of the most talked-about brands in fast food decides what’s worth chasing, what’s worth ignoring, and how a legacy brand stays a fan favorite when the fans set the agenda.

Topics to be discussed include:

• Letting fans drive (some of) the bus: How Taco Bell decides when audience demand becomes brand strategy and where the line sits between responding to culture and being run by it.
• Balancing craveability and credibility: What it takes to show up in viral moments, collabs, and cultural conversations while protecting equity of a decades-old brand.
• The CMO’s real job in 2026 and beyond: How Restrepo thinks about the connective tissue between brand love, value perception, and the metrics the business actually runs on.

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.

Details coming soon

(Details coming soon!)

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.

(Details coming soon)

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.