42nd CMO Insight Summit

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.

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: GEO at Scale: Building the Operating Model for AI-Powered Local Discovery
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.

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.

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.

For as long as any of us have been marketing, we've operated in a world of maps: consumers searched, compared the routes, opened thirty tabs and closed them one by one, and brands competed to be one of the choices on the way. That world is gone. Today's consumer is searching for the answer, not the path to it, and in a zero-click, AI-mediated landscape the comparison has been abdicated to the models. Brands are no longer competing to be a choice; they're competing to be the answer. Drawing on her work reimagining a 178-year-old brand for this new reality at National Life Group, Linda Goldstein unpacks what it means when your ecosystem is no longer linear and the old playbook no longer works: how to think about every interaction across every channel, what the fundamental building blocks look like depending on your business model, from sales forces to advocacy, and how to navigate the channels you don't control, Reddit included. Attendees will leave with a clear framework for positioning their brand as the answer, a practical lens for auditing their own ecosystem against the GPS world, and a candid view of what the shift really takes from the inside.

As partnerships, creators, cultural moments and emerging channels create new opportunities for growth, CMOs face increasing pressure to determine where limited budgets, resources and leadership attention will deliver the greatest long-term value.

Drawing on BERO’s rapid growth, this session explores how marketing leaders distinguish meaningful commercial opportunities from short-term visibility, balance strategic priorities with the flexibility to act on emerging opportunities, and make confident investment decisions. It will also examine how brands can sustain momentum without spreading resources too thinly or losing the focus and distinctiveness that made them successful.

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.

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.

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: GEO at Scale: Building the Operating Model for AI-Powered Local Discovery
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

As consumer behavior, technology and commercial expectations accelerate, marketing leaders are being asked to create, learn and demonstrate impact in increasingly compressed timeframes.

This session explores how CMOs make better decisions when speed becomes both an advantage and a source of pressure. It will examine how data and new tools can provide earlier signals, how leaders distinguish meaningful evidence from short-term noise, and where faster execution should give way to judgment, patience and the longer-term brand building that future growth still depends on.

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.