Fans are the most valuable audience a brand can reach and the hardest to earn. They have long memories, high standards, and zero patience for brands that show up uninvited. This session brings together a music artist who has spent 20 years watching fan culture evolve from forums to parasocial TikTok relationships, a media company with some of the world’s most passionate fan communities, and a brand marketer navigating what meaningful participation in fandom actually looks like. Together they explore what fans actually want from the brands in their world, what the data says about when brand participation adds value versus kills it, and what a brief that respects a fan community actually looks like in practice.

Speakers:

– Keisha Buchanan, British Singer-Songwriter & Founding Member of Sugababes
– Jasmine Dawson, Senior Vice President, Digital, BBC Studios

IRL experiences are one of the most powerful culture-shaping canvases for brands. They create spaces to build presence, inspire participation, and turn audience attention into lasting cultural memory.
Join this session to explore what it takes not only to make IRL part of your culture marketing toolkit, but also to prove it drives real business impact. Hear how some of the boldest experiential ideas came to life, what they delivered from an ROI and effectiveness perspective. Here’s your guide to making the case for IRL to your CFO.

Speakers:

– Tristan Pineiro, CMO, Grindr
– Louisa Wee, CMO, Strava
– Steve Martell, Chief Innovation Officer, DE-YAN

Moderator:

– Kirsten Ludwig, Co-Founder, IN GOOD CO

Fans pour their heart and soul into the game, with excitement peaking when their heroes score, win, or succeed. The question is: how can brands turn peak moments into maximum marketing effectiveness – and lead the cultural discourse on and offline? In this session, you’ll hear from those close to the action and emotional barometers of fans, and learn how to turn split-second inflection points into long-term positive conversations that pay off.

Speakers:

– Oyin Akiniyi, Global Brand Director, Chivas Brothers
– Małgorzata Lubelska, Category & Global Brands CMO, Asahi Europe & International
– Jess Vultaggio, VP, Creative, Capabilities & Innovation, Kraft Heinz
– Pablo Dopico, Director of Growth, Sportradar ad:s

Moderator:

– Ryan Aspell, VP of Brand Strategy, Morning Brew Inc.

Marketing leaders have never had more data, more channels or more ways to buy attention. Yet breakthrough brand growth is getting harder, not easier.
As consumer trust fragments and algorithms increasingly prioritize human recommendation over brand messaging, the industry is confronting a bigger question: are we optimizing for the wrong things?
Hosted by Andrew Dawson, Vice President at Edelman, this conversation with The Internet’s Creative Director, Oren John, explores how earned signals, creator ecosystems, and cultural trust are reshaping modern growth models.
Together, they’ll examine why the best-performing ideas are often the ones that earn attention before they buy it, how creators function as trust accelerators within the marketing mix, and why measurement systems still fail to capture the true value of earned impact.
This session is for marketers rethinking not just channels – but the system itself.

Speakers:

– Oren John, The internet’s Creative Director

Moderator:

– Andrew Dawson, Vice President, Edelman

The power of influencer marketing has never been just reach; it’s trust. The trust creators have built with their followers is the foundation of what brands want to tap into. As AI tools promise to streamline and scale creator programmes, brands risk automating away the very thing that makes the work resonate: the human connection. This panel uncovers the principles that protect it: long-term creator–brand relationships over one-off activations, intentional cultural resonance, genuine community building, and giving creators the space to tell stories that actually matter. Influencer marketing can’t be fully automated. The brands that win will be the ones that lean into the storytelling power of creators themselves, keeping their work human, relevant, and resonant.

Speakers:

– Ekta Chopra, Chief Technology & AI Officer, e.l.f. Beauty
– Rashad Little, Creator & Creative Director
– Gigi García Russo, Chief Transformation Officer, HUNTER
– Monica Caponigro, Managing Director, Bobbie

The role of brands in gaming has fundamentally changed. It’s no longer about “activating” in games – it’s about earning a place in ecosystems where culture is created, shared and owned by communities. From open-world platforms to competitive esports, gaming is a cultural operating system where attention is earned through participation.
In this session, we’ll explore how brands can navigate this space: building relevance within gaming cultures, co-creating with players and creators, and designing experiences that drive real engagement. Through examples across gaming and esports, we’ll unpack what works, what doesn’t, and how to measure impact in the long game – where community, not campaigns, defines success.

Speakers:

– Sarah Jane Benjamin, Vice President of Global Brand Partnerships, ESL FACEIT Group

In this session, brand leaders move beyond the hype to share how AI is actually being used across the full cultural marketing workflow – from identifying emerging signals and shaping insight, to developing ideas, collaborating with creators, and measuring real impact.
What role should AI play in your strategy? Where does it sharpen thinking – and where does human judgement still matter most? And how can you embed it into your day-to-day to grow cultural relevance?
Expect big-picture thinking, alongside a practical, behind-the-scenes look at how marketers are turning AI into a working tool – not a threat – and building it into their cultural marketing toolkit in ways that drive effectiveness.

Speakers:

– Saul Lopes, Head of Customer Marketing & Engagement, Compare the Market
– Matt Watson, Chief Creative Officer, Sips & Bites & PepsiCo
– Shannon Womack, Head of Global Brand & Creative, Delta Air Lines

Moderator:

– James Kirkham, Founder, ICONIC

Global brands are built for scale. Culture is built on context. That creates one of the biggest challenges in modern brand marketing: how do you create a global brand idea that can travel across markets, channels and experiences, while still feeling locally meaningful, culturally fluent and commercially useful on the ground?
In this panel, brand leaders and cultural thinkers explore what happens when global ambition meets local reality. We look at why some centrally defined strategies fail to land, how local teams can shape relevance rather than simply activating a global plan and what culture-led brands can teach us about showing up with meaning, not just reach.

Speakers:

– Danielle Jin, SVP, Chief Marketing Officer, Asia Pacific, Visa
– Xavier Pérez Farrerons, European Head of Marketing Consumer Experience & Media, Nestlé Purina
– Anna Engel, Director of Brand Relevance: Happy Meal/Family & Adult (US Campaigns), McDonald’s

Moderator:

– Dr Karen Correira Da Silva, Head of Creative Intelligence, Nuevo