We talk about brand purpose as if clarity creates belief. But people don’t experience brands as narratives, they experience them as feelings.

In this opening keynote, Karen Stanton explores why statement‑led branding has lost its power, and why the future belongs to brands that understand identity as an emotional pattern, not a verbal position. Drawing a clear line between what brands claim and what they consistently deliver, she challenges CMOs to confront where emotional experience breaks down across their organizations.

This is not a talk about better messaging.
It’s a call to redesign brands around emotional truth.

Marketing is no longer a campaign factory; it’s an adaptive ecosystem. CMOs are rebuilding their foundations to keep pace with culture, customer expectations, and technology that moves faster than their org charts. In this session we’ll explore how modern marketing teams are designing smarter structures, integrating data and creativity, and turning insight into brand momentum.

Generative and predictive technologies are changing how brands tell stories, target audiences, and test ideas. But creativity can’t be automated, it must be amplified. This workshop will explore how marketing teams are blending data science with storytelling craft to deliver personalization that feels personal, content that connects, and ideas that scale without losing their spark.

AI has transformed buyer decision-making from a drawn-out, multi-step journey into a near-instant, answer-on-demand experience.

That shift means your brand’s AI visibility and representation now have an outsized impact on pipeline.

The problem? Most marketing is still built for an outdated system: scattered campaigns, siloed product lines, and fragmented messaging that dilute your signal in AI-driven discovery. The risk: competitors with clearer positioning and stronger AI visibility win influence and close more deals — even when their expertise is thinner than yours.

This is a rare opportunity to seize competitive advantage. Leaders who understand the AI discovery environment can shape the category narrative itself — earning early preference while competitors chase fading signals.

In this session, we’ll examine where organizations lose early preference, how silos quietly weaken competitive positioning, and what strategic marketing leaders can change now. You’ll leave with a practical framework for strengthening differentiation, influence, and pipeline in an AI-first buying environment.

Marketers are expected to be endlessly creative in an always-on world, this while mastering new tools, managing burnout, and protecting brand integrity. The future of creative leadership is about balance: knowing when to trust AI, when to trust instinct, and how to build teams that can sustain innovation without losing soul. We will discuss how leaders are designing cultures where creativity thrives under pressure.

This session explores the shifting "marketing playbook" for 2026. We will debate whether the traditional "School of Volume"—maximizing reach and frequency through algorithmic efficiency—is still the primary driver of growth, or if we must pivot to the "School of Influence," prioritizing ad receptivity and the subtle art of priming consumer trust in an increasingly automated world.

Marketing is no longer a campaign factory; it’s an adaptive ecosystem. CMOs are rebuilding their foundations to keep pace with culture, customer expectations, and technology that moves faster than their org charts. In this session we’ll explore how modern marketing teams are designing smarter structures, integrating data and creativity, and turning insight into brand momentum.

Generative and predictive technologies are changing how brands tell stories, target audiences, and test ideas. But creativity can’t be automated, it must be amplified. This workshop will explore how marketing teams are blending data science with storytelling craft to deliver personalization that feels personal, content that connects, and ideas that scale without losing their spark.

AI has transformed buyer decision-making from a drawn-out, multi-step journey into a near-instant, answer-on-demand experience.

That shift means your brand’s AI visibility and representation now have an outsized impact on pipeline.

The problem? Most marketing is still built for an outdated system: scattered campaigns, siloed product lines, and fragmented messaging that dilute your signal in AI-driven discovery. The risk: competitors with clearer positioning and stronger AI visibility win influence and close more deals — even when their expertise is thinner than yours.

This is a rare opportunity to seize competitive advantage. Leaders who understand the AI discovery environment can shape the category narrative itself — earning early preference while competitors chase fading signals.

In this session, we’ll examine where organizations lose early preference, how silos quietly weaken competitive positioning, and what strategic marketing leaders can change now. You’ll leave with a practical framework for strengthening differentiation, influence, and pipeline in an AI-first buying environment.

Marketers are expected to be endlessly creative in an always-on world, this while mastering new tools, managing burnout, and protecting brand integrity. The future of creative leadership is about balance: knowing when to trust AI, when to trust instinct, and how to build teams that can sustain innovation without losing soul. We will discuss how leaders are designing cultures where creativity thrives under pressure.

Provocation tables are designed to spark sharper, more honest conversations by framing today’s biggest marketing challenges as tensions rather than solutions. Across themes like marketing architecture, predictive creativity, personalization, creator partnerships, and brand measurement, each table poses deliberate questions that surface trade-offs, pressure-test assumptions, and expose where progress is being accelerated. The goal isn’t consensus, but insight: helping leaders identify where they need to rethink structures, tools, and metrics to drive sustainable growth in a fast-moving, fragmented landscape.

Most brands aren't losing to competitors but rather optimizing themselves into irrelevance. It’s a phenomenon Anthony Reeves, VP, Global Creative at Kohler Co., calls the “Convergence Cascade.” Jaguar lost 85% of its sales. Cracker Barrel shed $100M in a week. Neither was disrupted from the outside. Both followed the data, chased best practices, and slowly became indistinguishable. Now, with McKinsey replacing 5,000 strategists with AI agents, the world's largest brands are getting the same advice, from the same models, pointed toward the same middle.

In this session, Anthony draws on 20 years working inside companies like Amazon, Nike, LVMH, Airbnb, and Kohler to show why the brands that endure know exactly who they are and push into new frontiers without ever losing sight of it. It has become the grow slow method: short-term gain versus long-term success.

Using his Foundation Theory framework, he shows how the most distinctive companies build an unchanging core — a set of beliefs, behaviors, and non-negotiables — that no market shift, competitor move, or algorithm can replicate. That foundation is what makes the hardest decisions easier, and what keeps a brand recognizable even as everything else evolves.

AI is becoming the new front door of commerce, reshaping how customers discover and choose brands. In this new reality, “local” becomes strategic: it’s where brand trust is formed and where AI decisions get anchored. This session reframes discoverability in the GEO/AEO era — and what it takes for multi-location brands to lead the conversation.

Marketing is no longer a campaign factory; it’s an adaptive ecosystem. CMOs are rebuilding their foundations to keep pace with culture, customer expectations, and technology that moves faster than their org charts. In this session we’ll explore how modern marketing teams are designing smarter structures, integrating data and creativity, and turning insight into brand momentum.

Generative and predictive technologies are changing how brands tell stories, target audiences, and test ideas. But creativity can’t be automated, it must be amplified. This workshop will explore how marketing teams are blending data science with storytelling craft to deliver personalization that feels personal, content that connects, and ideas that scale without losing their spark.

AI has transformed buyer decision-making from a drawn-out, multi-step journey into a near-instant, answer-on-demand experience.

That shift means your brand’s AI visibility and representation now have an outsized impact on pipeline.

The problem? Most marketing is still built for an outdated system: scattered campaigns, siloed product lines, and fragmented messaging that dilute your signal in AI-driven discovery. The risk: competitors with clearer positioning and stronger AI visibility win influence and close more deals — even when their expertise is thinner than yours.

This is a rare opportunity to seize competitive advantage. Leaders who understand the AI discovery environment can shape the category narrative itself — earning early preference while competitors chase fading signals.

In this session, we’ll examine where organizations lose early preference, how silos quietly weaken competitive positioning, and what strategic marketing leaders can change now. You’ll leave with a practical framework for strengthening differentiation, influence, and pipeline in an AI-first buying environment.

Marketers are expected to be endlessly creative in an always-on world, this while mastering new tools, managing burnout, and protecting brand integrity. The future of creative leadership is about balance: knowing when to trust AI, when to trust instinct, and how to build teams that can sustain innovation without losing soul. We will discuss how leaders are designing cultures where creativity thrives under pressure.

Search is no longer just about rankings — it’s about influence. As AI-powered experiences like Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT reshape how people discover, evaluate, and choose brands, the rules of visibility are changing in real time. Traditional SEO remains foundational — but it’s no longer enough.

In this new era, discoverability means being cited, trusted, and contextually surfaced across AI engines and search platforms. This session explores the shift from SEO to Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), what it means for brand authority and performance, and how CMOs can future-proof their visibility strategy in an AI-driven marketplace.

If you live in any US metropolitan area you will, on any given day, be subjected to anywhere between 5,000 and 10,000 marketing messages. In this age of abundance, our biggest challenge – and opportunity – is to stand out, be noticed and remembered.

For the last 15 years, Kjetil Njoten has helped world-leading brands turn in-house creativity into a growth engine - fueling record results and winning over 200 creative awards along the way.

In this session Kjetil will share the core principles behind how to successfully transform the value of in-house creative teams – and the brands they serve – using two simple and repeatable principles.