42nd CMO Insight Summit

Growth expectations remain high, but the conditions that once made acquisition more predictable are weakening. Costs are rising, customer journeys are fragmenting and familiar channels are becoming harder to measure, while pressure for immediate returns can lead organizations to underinvest in the brand strength, loyalty and market presence that support future demand. This keynote examines where growth is really coming from now, including retention, expansion, pricing power, demand creation and selective market entry, and what CMOs should protect, reduce, test or stop as conditions shift.

As a continuation of the Catalyst Mission track, these sessions will establish a strategic blueprint to chart the pathway toward identifying a solution.

Track 1: From Campaigns to Co-Pilots: Building the AI-Native Marketing Function
Track 2: Winning Before the Shortlist: Building Brand Authority in an AI-Mediated Market
Track 3: : When Attribution Breaks: Measuring What Actually Drives Revenue Now
Track 4: Owning Demand: Turning First-Party Data Into Competitive Advantage

This keynote challenges the traditional divide between brand building and performance marketing, showing how CMOs can connect short-term demand capture with long-term preference creation. It examines how shared audiences, creative platforms, media planning and measurement can bring both disciplines into one commercial growth system, while helping leaders allocate investment across different time horizons. The session will also explore how immediate optimization can improve performance without weakening the pricing power, brand strength and future demand that sustained growth depends on.

As AI makes content faster and cheaper to produce, this keynote asks whether more output is improving effectiveness or simply creating more noise. Expect a candid discussion on what brands should create, automate, protect and stop rewarding, as attention, trust, memory and commercial impact become the real constraints.

Marketing often argues that the wider business undervalues its contribution, but the function can also damage its own credibility through weak commercial alignment, unclear language, vanity metrics and inconsistent execution. Drawing on Bethany Holloway’s experience rebuilding confidence in an undervalued marketing function, this interactive debate examines both sides of the credibility gap, what marketing must change, and what the wider business must understand and enable for the function to contribute fully.

In today’s fast-moving marketing world, the strongest brands blend digital precision with human touch. KARMA jack and Fenske Media unite to deliver a data-driven, omnichannel system that combines digital innovation with print craftsmanship, guiding customers from awareness to advocacy through one seamless, full-service marketing circuit.

As marketing teams face growing demand with limited specialist capacity, not every request can justify bespoke support. This interactive session examines how leaders decide which work should remain specialist-led, move toward self-service or be supported through automation and AI. Delegates will explore the standards and guardrails required to make those models work without compromising quality, while challenging whether recurring activity is creating genuine commercial value or simply more output.

As businesses expand from retail-led models into owned brands, direct-to-consumer propositions and broader customer relationships, marketing must drive growth across very different commercial realities.

This session explores how CMOs balance brand building, performance and customer experience across portfolios, markets and time horizons without forcing every business into the same playbook. It will also examine how leaders reposition underperforming brands, allocate investment and make confident decisions when loyalty is harder to earn and the path to purchase is increasingly difficult to measure.

As AI interfaces increasingly shape what customers see, trust and consider before they ever reach a brand, visibility is becoming a broader challenge than traditional search. This keynote examines how CMOs can earn mentions, citations, recommendations and authority across AI-powered answers, third-party sources and emerging decision journeys. It will also explore how content, brand credibility and external influence need to work together when discovery is increasingly mediated by systems the organization does not directly control.

Continuing your mission tracks, having built the blueprint we now enter the reckoning – a decisive phase where insights are rigorously challenged and crystallised into solution-led outcomes.

Track 1: From Campaigns to Co-Pilots: Building the AI-Native Marketing Function
Track 2: Winning Before the Shortlist: Building Brand Authority in an AI-Mediated Market
Track 3: : When Attribution Breaks: Measuring What Actually Drives Revenue Now
Track 4: Owning Demand: Turning First-Party Data Into Competitive Advantage

Marketing is moving from automation that follows predefined rules to systems capable of planning, creating, activating and optimizing with limited human direction. This keynote examines what changes when AI begins making marketing decisions, from human approval and accountability to the controls, feedback loops and escalation points required to maintain oversight. It will also explore how leaders can increase speed and autonomy without allowing weak data, flawed assumptions or inconsistent outputs to amplify commercial, regulatory and brand risk.

As customer behavior, technology and competition outpace traditional marketing structures, CMOs are increasingly expected to influence growth beyond the marketing department.

This session explores how leaders align marketing, technology, data, AI and customer experience around shared priorities without creating fragmentation. It will also examine the operating foundations required to support this shift and how established brands can remain trusted, relevant and distinctive as customer choice becomes faster, more automated and more competitive.

Acquisition may win the first transaction, but the experience that follows increasingly determines loyalty, expansion and repeat business. This keynote examines how marketing, product, service, operations and frontline teams can align around a credible customer promise and deliver it consistently across the wider journey. It will also explore how behavioral, service and recovery signals can help leaders identify friction, strengthen retention and uncover growth opportunities before customers silently leave.