Virtual Conference: The Year Ahead in Marketing

Keynote: Key Insights from the 2026 Trends Report

Bennie F. Johnson

CEO, American Marketing Association

Molly Soat

Vice President, Professional Development, American Marketing Association

Closing the Execution Gap: How to Make Marketing a True Revenue Catalyst

The inbound playbook is officially broken. As lead volume declines across industries, marketing teams are under pressure to reinvent their go-to-market strategies. But most are focusing on the wrong problem. The problem isn’t tools or AI adoption. It’s the execution gap: the disconnect between strategy and execution that slows alignment, stalls AI initiatives, and prevents even the best campaigns from launching. Join ZoomInfo’s CMO, Tal Raz, on January 20 for a candid session on how to close the execution gap and make marketing a true revenue catalyst. You’ll learn how to: –Identify execution gaps that quietly undermine marketing performance –Apply AI in practical ways to find, target, and engage the right buyers –Align marketing and sales around coordinated, AI-powered outbound motions –Shift from reactive activity to a repeatable, revenue-focused operating model Walk away with actionable strategies to reduce friction, scale execution, and drive measurable marketing outcomes.

Tal Raz

Chief Marketing Officer, ZoomInfo

Beyond the Bush: How MANSCAPED Uses Mental Availability & Advantage to Sharpen Growth

Innovative brand growth metrics from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute – including Category Entry Points (buying situations that cause consumers to buy a product), Mental Availability (how often a brand is considered in buying situations), and Mental Advantage analysis (which buying situations a brand dominates) – are revolutionizing how Marketers guide Marketing strategies, report growth metrics, and measure ongoing brand health. This revolution is driven by a new approach to brand tracking called Better Brand Health Tracking (BBHT).

In this session, join quantilope’s Senior Solution Consultant, Gianna Saladino, alongside MANSCAPED’s Executive Director, Strategy and Insights, Scott Jensen, for a deep dive into Better Brand Health Tracking. Hear directly from MANSCAPED on how they’ve integrated CEPS, Mental Availability, and Mental Advantage metrics to launch a new brand campaign, break into a new category, and fuel brand growth.

Key Takeaways:

• From Funnels to CEPs: Learn how to identify the specific buying situations (Category Entry Points) that actually drive penetration.
  Building Mental Availability: Understand why Mental Availability is a more reliable predictor of long-term brand health than traditional brand equity scores.
• Measuring Mental Advantage: Discover how to analyze which buying occasions your brand dominates – and where your competitors are vulnerable.
• Data-Driven Creative: See how MANSCAPED translates BBHT insights into high-impact campaigns that fuel brand growth.

Scott Jensen

Executive Director, Strategy and Insights, MANSCAPED

Gianna Saladino

Senior Solutions Consultant, quantilope

Keynote: The Year Ahead - Turning Insights from the Past into Strategies for the Future

In this inspiring keynote address, discover how understanding where we’ve been unlocks the clarity and confidence needed to navigate where we’re going. Drawing from real-world experience turning around major brands at companies like Coca-Cola, Conagra Brands, Walgreens, and Frito-Lay, this session explores the pivotal moment facing marketers today—with all its challenges and possibilities.

You’ll explore:

• Where We Are Now: The complex landscape of modern marketing, from fragmented consumer attention to the transformative impact of AI, and why this moment offers extraordinary opportunities for those ready to adapt.
• Strategic Insights for the Year Ahead: Five critical predictions that will shape marketing success, including hyper-personalization, the power of authenticity, the disappearing middle market, community as competitive advantage, and the primacy of speed over perfection—plus concrete strategies for leaning into each one.
• Your Path Forward: How to transform your unique challenges into superpowers, why excellence in small things builds capacity for big impact, and practical actions you can take immediately to lead with both data and empathy.

Whether you’re managing heritage brands or building new ones, leading teams or contributing as an individual marketer, you’ll leave this session equipped with clear predictions, actionable strategies, and renewed inspiration to do the meaningful work that only you can do.

Ryan Watson

Senior Director of Consumer Strategy and Occasion, The Coca-Cola Company

Designing Content Operations for Velocity, Consistency, and ROI

The new year has hardly begun, and it already feels like the lofty plans to reclaim time, operate efficiently, and create smarter, tailored content at scale are in danger of being jettisoned in the rush to just keep up with daily demands. It’s one thing to set high performance goals; it’s another to develop the operational capacity to achieve them. Fragmented systems, manual approvals, and disconnected martech stacks are quietly undermining efficiency, brand consistency, and ROI — at precisely the moment when marketing teams are trying to achieve more than ever before, with less. Learn how leading marketing organizations are moving from content chaos to operational clarity. Grounded in industry research and real-world performance data, this session will illustrate why scaling content is less about adding tools or headcount, and more about designing integrated content operations that remove friction across the entire lifecycle.

This session proposes a practical, four-layer framework for modern content operations, spanning asset management, production workflows, distribution, and performance measurement. We’ll also explore how AI delivers the greatest impact when embedded into well-architected systems, rather than deployed as isolated point solutions.

Key takeaways include:

• Why content operations (not content creation) are now the true bottleneck
  
• A four-layer framework for building scalable, AI-ready content operations
  
• How to integrate systems to reduce workflow friction, improve reuse, and protect brand consistency
  
• What performance metrics matter (and how to tie them to revenue and pipeline)

Ariana Keil

Senior Growth Marketing Manager, Canto

Lasting Connections in a Digital World...How Branded Merch Creates Loyalty and Real Results

This session explores consumer behavior in a saturated digital marketplace and why physical products consistently outperform other mediums in driving memory, emotional connection and likeability. As consumers face constant digital noise, brands are struggling to create lasting impact. We’ll unpack the psychology behind why people keep certain branded items—and discard others—revealing how touch, utility, and design influence perception and recall. The discussion will also examine the rise of thoughtfully crafted merchandise as a strategic response to digital fatigue to cut through saturation, deepen engagement, and create meaningful, long-term brand impressions in an increasingly virtual world.

Melissa Ralston

Chief Marketing Officer, PPAI (Promotional Products Association International)

How Marketing Teams Actually Collaborate in 2026

Marketing teams are flooded with various tools and communication channels, but speed and alignment are harder to achieve than ever. As AI adoption surges, many organizations are stuck in fragmented workflows, siloed experimentation, and nonstop meetings that create activity, not progress.

In this session, we’ll cut through the hype to show how high-performing marketing teams are actually collaborating in 2026. Drawing on insights from Wrike’s global Age of Connected Intelligence research, you’ll see why collaboration has moved beyond meetings and messages into designed work systems that connect people, priorities, and performance. We’ll explore how AI can finally deliver on its promise, when it’s grounded in shared context, integrated workflows, and human-led creativity.

You’ll walk away with a clear blueprint for modern collaboration and a practical way to move from scattered experimentation to work that’s faster, smarter, and more meaningful.

Key Takeaways

• Why more communication is slowing teams down: Understand how invisible work and disconnected AI tools are creating friction, and what to fix instead.
• What real collaboration looks like in 2026: Learn the three pillars powering high-performing teams: structured context, integrated workflows, and human-powered, AI-assisted work.
• How to design collaboration that scales: See how leading marketing teams are embedding collaboration into their work systems so alignment and speed grow with complexity.
  

Nina Smith

Senior Demand Generation Manager, Wrike