CMO Insight Summit
On 2 – 4 December 2019 the 20th edition of our CMO Insight Summit will bring together senior marketing decision-makers & business leaders from across North America at the 5* Omni La Costa Resort & Spa in Carlsbad, California. Drawing on experience within their organizations, senior marketers across industries will share knowledge & expertise on how to tackle today’s most pressing challenges.
The summit is an effective environment to engage, collaborate and drill down into key themes such as: Thought leadership; Content creation & dissemination; Customer experience; The digital & physical divide; Data analytics & insights; Organization & Culture.
From case studies which lift the lid on operations inside best-in-class organisations, to workshop sessions which focus on common challenges, the summit will provide all attendees with the knowledge, tools & techniques which they can immediately implement once back at their organizations.
The summit has given me exposure to a lot of interesting technologies that I would not have otherwise found out about.
I feel better equipped to approach these projects because I’ve come across some opportunities I didn’t know about before.
We have struck up many conversations and a couple of transformation projects with suppliers GDS have introduced us to.
Our Approach
Every GDS Summit has one stated aim: to help attending executives implement their key projects more effectively. We do this by developing an in-depth understanding of those executives' project needs, the business outcomes they want to achieve, and the challenges they face in terms of hitting those goals.
Who Attends
Attendees Include
Advisory Board
6 Challenges in Marketing
- Satisfying & exceeding customer expectations in an era of short attention spans & entitlement
- Leveraging analytics & consumer insights to create impactful & relevant content
- Delivering authenticity in brand strategy in a world where purpose drives purchase.
- Inspiring collaboration & agility across the organisation to optimise growth & customer engagement
- Bridging the digital & physical divide to create a seamless omnichannel customer experience.
- Harnessing the human approach in addressing customer needs & understanding where the brand message needs to go.”
Summit Schedule
Grab your name badge, say hello, activate the onsite app and prepare to leave the office behind for two-and-a-half days of networking, learning and intelligence gathering.
Details To Follow.
What? When? How? Where? Join our Master of Ceremonies for a brief welcome and orientation session, where we’ll explain your itinerary for the next few days.
The role of the CMO & senior marketers has gone through tectonic changes in recent years & continues evolve as market behavior & consumer habits & expectations shift. With that in mind:
- What are the future skill sets required of CMOs & senior marketers
- How best to realign internal & external resources to find efficiences and simplification in the marketing function
- How do marketers acquire & integrate those skills while accomplishing all the work required with resources that are so stretched?
The best brand experiences are built from a deep understanding of the brand, its relationship to culture, and an idea that is generated from consumer insight
- Why should marketers include the customer within the brand narrative so that the brand’s purpose and messaging becomes a collaboration? What are the benefits & risks?
- Is the process confined to the digital sphere, or can it manifest elsewhere effectively?
- As brand storytelling continues to morph into brand storymaking, where will the evolution take brand marketing to next?
- What does ‘thought leadership‘ mean to you and your organization?
- How do you identify the questions your target audience are asking & build your thought leadership & content strategy around providing the answers?
- How do you go beyond social media to establish yourself, & your business, as an expert authority?
- In an era of short attention spans, how can marketers ensure their brand resonates with consumers?
- How do you keep content meaningful to different consumer segments while maintaining an overall consistent brand message?
- With a plethora of channels to manifest your message, how do you keep content ‘on brand’, while extending your brand’s reach?
- Where do you prioritise your channel strategy when disseminating new content? Where does the message need to go?
- How do you balance attempts at brand distinctiveness with addressing customer needs?
- “Customer service is what happens when customer experience breaks.”(Chris Herrin – Comcast) – How do you create unified collaboration across the business to execute CX which doesn’t confuse or disgruntle customers?
- According to a survey by Oracle, long waiting periods are the top grievance in customer experience dissatisfaction – How do businesses eliminate the waiting game?
- With an overwhelming array of technologies, tools & knowledge, how do marketers bridge the digital & physical worlds to create a joined-up customer experience?
- Will AI prove to be the main driver, or a small cog, in simplifying the marketing process & helping to bridge the digital & physical divide? What else will play its role?
- How do you avoid brand fatigue in digital marketing?
- How do you ensure you are acting on your customer insights & not just using variations of the same content?
- When leveraging insights, how do brands know when to act on a trend & identify when a trend becomes a behavior?
- 80% of total data available was produced in the last 2 years: With so much data, how do marketers extrapolate what is useful from the data pool & target the right audience with the most relevant content?
- Marketing used to be a subset of sales, but now – in many industries – over 60% of sales are driven by marketing: How can marketers capitalize on this shift & increasingly drive growth?
- What do organizations need to do to become nimbler & empower the marketing department to keep pace with changing consumer behaviors?
- How should businesses better enable closer collaboration across the organization to:
- Break down functional silos in order to create better customer experience
- Speed up time to market
Details To Follow.
Time to kick off your heels, loosen those ties and get to know your fellow summit attendees. Relax, drinks are on us.
Time for some fun; you’ve earned it. Join us for our night’s dinner and entertainment. Details to follow.
“It’s the best of times and worst of times for marketers.
Never before have we understood as much about the human mind, behavioral change and how marketing actually works as we do today.
Unfortunately, along with all this new understanding comes mass confusion and a sort of marketing fundamentalism: the adamant belief experts have that their way is the only right way to market.
Since we [YUM!] actively market in nearly 140 countries every year, we face every marketing challenge known to man. We’ve developed a simple system based on modern marketing principles to train all 2,000 marketers at Yum! around the world.” – Ken Muench – CMO – YUM! Brands
- In his Gala Dinner Keynote address, Ken will explain how the comprehensive R.E.D. approach to marketing works and how the lessons of Relevance, Ease and Distinctiveness leads to increased sales.
The most important meal of the day. Get yourself set for a productive day by joining us for coffee, croissants and more.
Details To Follow.
Younger consumers increasingly make buying decisions based on a brand’s purpose. And this radical change in behavior has necessitated an equally radical pivot in how companies formulate their brand strategy.
- What is the reason for this new consumer behavior? Are we interpreting the shift correctly?
- How do brands demonstrate authenticity when creating content which plants a flag on a particular purpose or cause?
- What opportunities does purpose-driven brand loyalty open up to marketers?
- How do big, legacy brands accomplish effectively shift in this direction?
Employee and customer crowdsourcing is emerging as a core competency for change management in organizations around the world.
In this interactive session we will meet Bugs and Elmer, discuss margaritas, ponder crowd wisdom and beta test cutting edge crowdsourcing software. Sound like fun? We think so too.
Humans feel more compelled to act when they engage, interact, personalize & listen. As such, building relationships is emerging as a catalyst for sustained brand engagement.
- Is the human approach to marketing more art than science? Why?
- How do brands achieve a balance of ensuring their message sticks & not overwhelming or alienating their audience with repetitive media content?
- What role should data analytics play in the personalization of content?
- How do businesses convey a more human presence online & in their marketing strategy?
When considering the pros & cons of brands taking a stance on social or political questions of the day, are you for or against companies being vocal on society’s topical issues?
- Do brands need to be more courageous & daring when designing their campaigns? What are the costs and benefits?
- Smaller, newer, digital-native brands do this effectively without much backlash, but how do big legacy brands accomplish it?
- Are consumers too cynical to buy-in to brands getting off the fence & explicitly engaging in societal issues?
Take advantage of time to network with fellow summit attendees and further discuss your business transformation projects.
Take Risks
Be Afraid
But Do It
Through a series of cases, Alexandre Antonello, Head of Marketing for Latin America at Burger King, will show the journey that has led the brand to become recognized as the most creative brand at Cannes Lions in 2019.
“The most common outcome of a marketing campaign is …. nothing.”
- In a cluttered advertising environment how do you make your brand stand out in a purposeful way.
- What it REALLY means to be creative and original with marketing content.
Trust. Whether among peers or with brands, what takes ample time to build can be destroyed in moments. This session will walk you through the state of consumer trust, followed by a workshop with your peers on what it means to establish trust & how to maintain it.
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- Learn how to effectively measure brand trust
- See how your peers are overcoming challenges with brand perception
- Collaborate on steps that you can take to earn consumer trust
Brands are increasingly realizing the importance of a proactive initiative to incorporate inclusivity in their marketing.
- What are the limits of personalization & how can brands better identify the extent to which it can be leveraged?
- How do you balance diversity with inclusivity? Both internally & in external marketing efforts. Does one become more important than the other?
- How best does a brand demonstrate authenticity & commitment to its efforts to encourage different communities to interact with the brand. Both as consumers & future employees?
- Is it important that the brand & marketing teams are representative of the audiences you are trying to speak to?
- Unconscious bias: How can organizations protect against its insidious impact and make employees and marketers, alike, more cognizant of it?
- Is it feasible for brands to fully satisfy the needs & wants of such heterogenous groups?
Have you ever wondered why the CMO asks randomly for data at 1:00am? Have you ever been the CMO asking for that data?
- Either way, the modern CMO is beset by troubles and opportunities on all sides as they try to navigate their way to corporate success.
- Knowing the dirty little secrets they keep, and the implications of those secrets for areas such as analytics, campaigns, customer experience, customer journeys, and content, can help leaders at every level make smarter decisions along the way.
- As a former CMO of a B2C company that became a B2B company, a former agency leader advising global clients on marketing strategy, and the current CMO of marketing cloud leader Acoustic, Norman has seen it all and will share some of the secrets he has learned and has kept along the way.
Worked up an appetite? Recharge those batteries with our buffet-style lunch, and prepare to meet the afternoon head-on.
- Thought Leadership
- Content Creation & Dissemination
- Customer Experience
- The Digital & Physical Divide
- Data Analytics & Insight
- Organization & Culture
Upstart direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands are challenging the status quo with strategies which rely on digital channels to package products and experiences that resonate with the consumers.
Seraj Bharwani – CSO at AcuityAds – will be moderating a fireside chat to journey through a case study with Joe McCambley – CMO of Saatva.
Details To Follow.
As many senior marketers find their budgets stretched & departments under-resourced, it is necessary for marketing to be more innovative in its approach & to identify efficiencies.
- Where in the marketing effort are resource pressures most detrimental to your assigned goals & objectives?
- What role will AI & new technologies play in increasing efficiencies & taking on the bulk of the workload?
- What tools & insight do marketers need at their disposal to better allocate spend with the aim of optimizing growth & spreading brand awareness.
Consumer habits & expectations change so rapidly that marketers are now expected to pre-empt future shifts in customer behavior. Therefore, do you believe the customer now posseses the ultimate power over a brand’s content creation?
- To what degree can marketers influence customer behavior & predetermine content that audiences will actively want to consume?
- With so much resource invested, & high volumes of data analyzed, to help understand customers purchasing decisions, is the customer now the proverbial tail that wags the dog?
- Why is the relationship changing & what is the role of the marketer now?
Time for a well-deserved break in your busy schedules.
Time to kick off your heels, loosen those ties and get to know your fellow summit attendees. Relax, drinks are on us.
Time for some fun; you’ve earned it. Join us for our second night’s dinner and entertainment. Details to follow.
Galvanized by the conclusions of beahvioral science, a selection of brands are beginning to experiment with meta-advertising – such as Geico & Old Spice – & acknowledging their flaws – e.g. Guinness & Volkswagen – in their advertising campaigns to showcase their human side.
- How can showcasing your brands weaknesses/flaws translate to successful brand engagement?
- Are consumers more inclined to trust & value a brand that shows its imperfect side over one that oversells itself?
- Can the mechanics of human-to-human relationship creation translate meaningfully to brand-to-consumer relations? How do you make a seamless transition to this method of marketing? Should “the pratfall effect” underpin brand strategy or be a short-lived brand tactic?
A case study that encompasses the reimagined Sony Creative Center (internal hybrid agency model) moving from a decentralized to centralized global shared service.
- Promoting & internalizing new capabilities by adopting best practices from the agency world & synthesizing them so they live & breathe your brand.
- How do we create a culture with a large enterprise business that is both highly creative & agile.
- Breaking down functional silos across large organizations to engender closer collaboration, internally, & consistent messaging to consumers.
- Thought Leadership
- Content Creation & Dissemination
- Customer Experience
- The Digital & Physical Divide
- Data Analytics & Insight
- Organization & Culture
A case study which reveals how marketers, globally, are tapping into AR to reach audiences at scale & drive real business results.
- On Snapchat, AR usage isn’t experimental, it’s habitual — with 70% of its 203 million users interacting with AR every day – so how do marketers leverage this new technology to drive growth and engagement?
- How can marketers integrate AR from creation through to measuring its performance?
- What can the AR experiment look like for different industries?
The number of podcast subscribers is forecast to triple to 3 billion in the next few years & this presents a significant opportunity for marketers
- Today we are bombarded with visual stimuli when marketed to by brands. So, to what new realms of brand engagement can audio content take us?
- “Content is king” still rings true, but can audio content have the same impact as the visual?
- Consumers increasingly listen to podcasts at the expense of music playlists. How should marketing tap into this trend in behavior?
- What is your most important take away from the summit?
- What new projects are you excited to implement as a result of this summit?
- In what direction will marketing pivot in in the next 12 months?
Summit Location
Our events take place at some of the most prestigious venues in the world. Five-star accommodation, dining and amenities make attending one of our summits both business and pleasure. Being productive has never been so much fun.
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GDS Summits host experts to help experts. Our speakers are leading executives willing to share their insight to change the industry and the world in critical ways.
To discuss how GDS Summits can help you solve your project challenges contact us on: 0117 921 4000 or email sayhello@gdsgroup.com.
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