25th CMO Insight EU Summit

Superfans are more than an artist’s most engaged listeners: they are cultural multipliers shaping conversation, participation, and influence across the wider fan community. This session explores how UMG identifies and activates these highly engaged audiences across music, content, commerce and experiences, and how the same approach can help brands earn an authentic role within artist worlds.

Building directly on The Catalyst, partner-led working sessions move each stream from diagnosis to design — shaping the practical, prioritised blueprint each theme will carry into execution.

Track 1: Engineering Your GEO Action Plan: Auditing Where Your Brand Stands in AI Search - and How to Fix It
Track 2: Designing the Hybrid Marketing Team: Mapping Where Agents Add Value and Where Humans Must Lead
Track 3: Data-Driven CMO: Turning Marketing Data into Agentic Advantage
Track 4: The Retention Engine: A Lifecycle Personalization Playbook to Beat Rising Acquisition Costs

How does a global brand hold its identity together while making work that feels made for one market? How do local brands secure the right to win in highly competitive global brand contexts? Aleks shares how creative strategy balances a big idea with hyper-local execution, where the line sits between consistency and relevance, and how AI can help adapt work and capture local nuance. The conversation also looks at the AI ethical guardrails that matter, from talent consent and contracts to industry standards, so teams can move faster without crossing the line.

Grind began in the physical world, and when the cafes closed the direct-to-consumer business grew faster than anyone expected. The session looks at how real-world moments turn into customers who come back online, and what that means for where marketing effort goes. Leave with a clearer sense of how physical and digital can feed each other instead of competing.

When your audience can spot a weak claim at a glance, creative work has to be bold enough to be noticed and accurate enough to be believed. The session explores how to earn trust from technical audiences without dumbing the work down, from a web game that turns learning about automation into leads to long-form videos that put engineers, not marketers, at the centre. Leave with a practical way to make creative that excites people and holds up under technical review.

In a world where brands can design, optimize and scale almost every aspect of their identity, authenticity has become one of the most valuable — and elusive — brand assets.

But what does authenticity actually mean when it is deliberately engineered? Is it about what a brand says, what it does, what it is willing to sacrifice, or even what it chooses not to do?

This interactive session explores the tension between authenticity and performance, challenging us to ask whether authenticity can be built as a brand strategy — or whether it can only be earned through consistent choices, meaningful trade-offs and actions that hold true when nobody is watching.

Marketing wants speed: new campaigns, new channels, revenue now. Product wants patience: the platforms, AI, and martech foundations that revenue depends on later. Most companies run this as a tug of war between two leaders. In this seat, both sides land on the same desk, so the tradeoff doesn't get negotiated. It gets decided. One layer on top: digital isn't just an ecommerce channel here, it's a brand engagement one, and it's expected to move sales offline too. Sounds familiar?”

This is a roundtable, not a talk. Come with how your own org handles this balance: where it works, where it quietly costs you. Then let's compare notes: two leaders pulling against each other, or one person holding both sides. Which actually serves the business better, and where does each one break?

In a niche market where two giants control roughly two-thirds of the share, holding a solid #2 position in brand awareness isn't an accident - it's the result of a fight to keep investing in brand when everyone around you wants to treat it as an add-on rather than a strategic growth driver. This roundtable starts from that challenger's position: what does it actually take to protect brand investment when you can't out-spend the market leaders, sales wants leads now, and every quiet quarter looks like an easy budget line to cut? We'll get into the specific trade-offs of being the challenger - where brand is your only real weapon, and where that argument still loses internally despite the logic. Come with your own version of this fight - where it plays out in your organisation, and what's worked (or hasn't) in defending it.

Most marketing thinking stops at the customer. Lina shares how to map audiences across B2B, B2C and B2G, and what changes when your research and thought leadership must also win over policy-makers, regulators and partners. She covers who needs to hear what, in which voice, and how to measure whether it is landing.

As AI commoditises execution, the scarce, premium ingredients are the human ones — taste, creativity and judgment. This session makes the case for protecting and elevating what only people bring, and how to structure teams so the human premium compounds rather than erodes. Leave with a sharper view of where human judgment is your edge, and how to invest in it deliberately.

The culmination of the mission-track journey: streams come together to separate what’s real from what’s noise, and to lock in the concrete commitments each theme carries back to the business. The output every delegate leaves with.

Track 1: Engineering Your GEO Action Plan: Auditing Where Your Brand Stands in AI Search - and How to Fix It
Track 2: Designing the Hybrid Marketing Team: Mapping Where Agents Add Value and Where Humans Must Lead
Track 3: Data-Driven CMO: Turning Marketing Data into Agentic Advantage
Track 4: The Retention Engine: A Lifecycle Personalization Playbook to Beat Rising Acquisition Costs

Marketers today need to be far more technically fluent than ever before - but that raises a genuine design question every organization is wrestling with: which technology goes directly into front-line marketers' hands, and what stays managed centrally? This talk explores how to make that call, and how to build the training and enablement that makes either choice actually work in practice.

In this session, we'll explore how generative AI is reshaping the consumer journey and what this means for brands navigating an attribution landscape where AI's real influence is far bigger than it appears. Drawing on global search, referral, and on-site behaviour data, Similarweb will unpack how AI is quietly reshaping discovery and search behaviour, why most of that influence never shows up as a labelled "AI" referral, and share practical approaches to product page optimisation, content strategy, and visibility in the age of agentic commerce.

Let’s explore some common marketing tensions. We’re producing more marketing content than ever, but people are increasingly reluctant to read it. Agentic AI can replace lots of the repetitive bits of marketing. But do we fully understand the processes to be automated? And as AI takes on more of the execution, what does good judgment look like in a modern marketing organization – and how do you develop it within your team?