For more than a century, great brands and great agencies have made ideas together. That partnership is being redrawn. Brands are building their own studios, production that once took weeks now takes hours, and the old ways of scoping, pricing and judging creative work no longer fit the way the work is made.

This opening keynote looks at what a great brand and agency relationship looks like from here. What clients should still ask of their partners, what agencies should ask in return, how to pay for ideas rather than hours, and how to keep the creative spark alive when both sides are learning a new way of working at the same time.

In a world of feeds that vanish with a swipe, there is something powerful about an idea that stays put. A subway station wrapped in a single story, a billboard that answers the news of the morning, a storefront that stops people on their way to work. City streets have always been the stage for this kind of work, and brands are rediscovering how much a shared, physical moment can do.

This panel brings together marketers and creatives who are bringing new life to the streets. How they design ideas for people in motion, how out of home now connects with mobile, social and retail, how to measure a medium people experience together, and why the most photographed ad in the city is often the one that earns the most attention online too.

Every CMO knows the feeling. The quarter ends, the budget conversation begins, and the work that builds a brand over years is the first to be questioned because it does not show up neatly by Friday. Yet investors increasingly treat a strong brand as a real asset, one that lets a company charge a fair price, weather a crisis and grow when others stall.

This keynote offers marketing leaders a clear way to talk about brand in the language of finance. How to connect brand strength to pricing power, loyalty and long term value, how to build a partnership with the CFO rather than a yearly negotiation, and how to protect the investments that only pay off for the leaders patient enough to make them.

Think of the campaigns you still remember years later. Very few stayed with you because of their targeting, their media mix or their efficiency. They stayed because they surprised you, made you laugh, gave you goosebumps or showed you the world from an angle you had never considered. Imagination has always been the part of marketing nobody could fully measure, and the part customers never forget.

This fireside chat is a celebration of creativity and a practical case for protecting it. How the most inventive teams make room for play and curiosity, how they defend a strange idea long enough for it to become a great one, and why, at a time when content has never been easier to make, the brands that dare to imagine are the ones people choose to remember.

For years, a layoff was treated as a private HR matter, handled quietly behind closed doors. That door no longer closes. Severance terms, farewell notes and the CEO's memo now reach LinkedIn within hours, and customers, candidates and investors read every word. When one of the world's best known design platforms announced its first major restructuring in late 2026, much of the public conversation was not about the cuts themselves but about how the company chose to care for the people leaving.

This panel brings marketing, people and communications leaders together to talk about the hardest message a brand ever sends. How to keep words and actions aligned when the news is painful, why the way a company treats people on their way out shapes how customers and future hires see it for years, and how the CMO, the CHRO and the CEO can tell one honest story instead of three.

Customers, employees and investors all want something different from brands when the world feels divided. Some want companies to speak up, some want them to stay out of it, and almost everyone notices when words and actions do not match. A single statement can win loyalty in one community and lose it in another before lunch.

This panel brings together marketing and communications leaders for an honest conversation about one of the hardest calls a CMO makes. How to decide when a brand should speak, how to let actions carry more weight than statements, how to prepare employees and partners before a moment arrives, and how to stay true to the values a company actually lives by.

Some of the most talked about launches of recent years came from two brands that seemed to have nothing in common. A sneaker and a cereal, a luxury house and a streetwear label, a bank and a beloved artist. Done well, a collaboration introduces each brand to a new crowd and gives fans a story worth sharing. Done carelessly, it confuses everyone.

This panel explores the craft behind collaborations that work. How to choose a partner whose values fit even when their style does not, how to share creative control without diluting either name, how to plan for the demand a great drop creates, and how to tell whether a collaboration built the brand or simply borrowed a moment.

New York has always been a city of makers. Illustrators sketching in cafés, photographers waiting on rooftops for the right light, the writers and art directors who gave advertising some of its most famous ideas. Today anyone can produce an ad, a video or a song in seconds, yet the work people stop scrolling for, share with friends and remember for years still tends to carry a fingerprint. Recent holiday seasons have shown the same pattern, as audiences warm to campaigns made with visible human care and push back on work that feels assembled rather than made.

This closing panel brings together marketers, creatives and makers to explore where human craft earns its place in a world full of machine made content. How to show audiences the people behind the work, how to decide where AI helps the craft and where it should step aside, how to give illustrators, writers, photographers and directors the time to do something extraordinary, and why the brands that keep a human hand on the work may be the ones customers trust most.