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- Location: The Blue BearMonday, 6:00am - 7:00amPass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Networking
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CMI/TMRE Creative Director, JK Kalinowski, will kick off the run down the Cherry Creek Trail. The distance is up to you, but the route picked is around 3 miles (1.5 miles out and back). The club meets by the Big Blue Bear in front of the convention center.
- Location: Four Seasons Ballroom Foyer - Lower LevelMonday, 6:00am - 7:00amPass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Networking
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Meet Your Yoga Instructor: Erin McDougal, founder of Zen Out Yoga
With a heart-centered teaching style and a genuine love for bringing people together, Erin’s classes invite you to slow down, breathe, move, and simply enjoy being present.
Her classes blend mindful movement, juicy stretching, breathwork, meditation, and thoughtfully chosen themes into an experience that leaves you feeling grounded, refreshed, and reconnected.
Whether you’re new to yoga or have been practicing for years, you’re invited exactly as you are. Erin offers plenty of options and modifications throughout class, allowing you to choose what feels best for your body and your level of experience. - Location: Lobby AMonday, 7:00am - 5:00pmPass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Registration
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- Location: Hall A Show FloorMonday, 7:30am - 8:30amPass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Networking
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- Location: Headliner Stage | Hall BMonday, 8:15am - 8:25amKeynote:Paul Coxhill (LIONS)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: KeynoteTrack: General Session
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- Location: Headliner Stage | Hall BMonday, 8:25am - 9:00amKeynotes:Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: KeynoteTrack: General Session
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- Location: Headliner Stage | Hall BMonday, 9:00am - 9:20amKeynote:Hailey Sullivan (Denver Broncos)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: KeynoteTrack: General Session
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An inside look at how the Denver Broncos use insight‑driven marketing—from gameday and beyond—to build brand lore, deepen fan connection, and sustain one of the NFL’s most iconic franchises.
- Location: Hall A Show FloorMonday, 9:20am - 10:00amPass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Networking
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- Location: Insight to Impact StageMonday, 9:25am - 9:35amSpeaker:Michael Herchel (Acquia)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Sponsored SessionTracks: Expert Insights, CMWorld
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You’ve heard of Drupal, but have you seen what it can do lately?
In this short, high-energy session, punctuated by the occasional puppy gif, we’ll explore how Drupal is evolving the way content teams build for the web. You’ll see visual page building in action, with content creators assembling rich, flexible pages directly in the browser, no code required.
Then we’ll take it a step further and explore how AI and agentic workflows can work alongside visual page building to help teams create, refine, and manage content in entirely new ways.
Expect a fast-paced, live look at what’s possible today, and to walk out asking one question: how soon can my team do that? - Location: The Book BuzzMonday, 9:30am - 10:00amSpeaker:Goldie Chan (Warm Robots)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Networking
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Books for the book signing will be available for purchase at The Book Buzz on the Show Floor.
- Location: Insight to Impact StageMonday, 9:40am - 9:50amSpeaker:April Henderson (Optimizely)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Sponsored SessionTracks: Expert Insights, CMWorld
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Personalization has always meant picking the closest fit from a fixed menu of options. That ceiling was never intelligence: it was inventory. A team can only personalize as many experiences as it has time to build and courage to ship. Every variant is another asset someone has to design, test, and maintain by hand, forever, for a menu that's already too small the day it launches. This isn't a content problem: it's an operating model breaking under its own weight. So what happens when the website has to make thousands of small decisions a day, none of which anyone built in advance?
- Location: Four Seasons Ballroom 2Monday, 9:45am - 9:50amSpeakers:Pass Type: All AccessSession Type: Summit (All Access Required)Tracks: Summit | Science & Magic, LIONS
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A new stream that sees the Contagious and WARC teams join forces to explore the most important shifts affecting marketing - and how brands can leverage these creatively to drive business growth. We’ll delve into the most impactful trends in media, strategy and effectiveness, and demonstrate how the world's most creative brands are bringing these insights to life via breakthrough ideas.
Science & Magic will provide an expert overview of the challenges and opportunities in today’s marketing landscape, bolstered by robust data and evidence-based research - sprinkled with examples of award-winning marketing, helping you understand the magical thinking behind effective creative solutions.
- Location: Four Seasons Ballroom 2Monday, 9:50am - 10:20amSpeakers:Pass Type: All AccessSession Type: Summit (All Access Required)Tracks: Summit | Science & Magic, LIONS
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Where the joy of creativity marries the necessity of commercial performance. Contagious and WARC come together to dissect three of the most pressing trends in marketing. The session will combine the breakthrough creative thinking that comes out of these trends, backed up the evidence that shows it works.
- Location: Room 104Monday, 10:00am - 10:30amSpeaker:Nancy Harhut (HBT Marketing)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Content Creation & Storytelling, CMWorld
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Every day behavioral scientists uncover new information that confirms people don’t really think about what they do. Instead, they conserve mental energy and react automatically -- relying on hard-wired decision defaults that influence everything from what they read … to whom they trust … to when they buy.
If you want your emails to persuade people to act, you need to know how to trigger these decision defaults. And you want easy, effective ways to do that.
In this example-jammed presentation, you’ll discover the decision-making shortcuts all humans have, and how you can use them to make sure your emails get opened and clicked. Don’t risk being ignored, overlooked, or forgotten. Gain your competitive advantage by writing to hack people’s brains.
- Location: Room 201Monday, 10:00am - 10:30amSpeaker:Dennis Shiao (Attention Retention LLC)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Marketing Core Concepts, CMWorld
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Most email nurture programs assume that every click or content download is secretly a buyer waiting to be pushed toward a demo.
The result? Sequences that feel more like sales ambushes than actual nurturing. That's right, it's nagging, not nurturing.
With crowded inboxes and AI slop turning buyers more skeptical, typical email nurture sequences destroy trust and turn "you had me at hello" into "no thanks, goodbye."
This session explores why traditional nurture programs fail. It introduces a practical framework for earning trust over time with prospects who aren't ready to buy yet. Using real examples from high-performing programs, they'll show how to design email sequences that deepen credibility, keep prospects engaged, and create the kind of relationship that leads to future pipeline.
Attendees will walk away with fresh ways to think about nurturing, specific email formats they can implement immediately, and a playbook for turning "not ready yet" leads into long-term believers in your brand. - Location: Room 106Monday, 10:00am - 10:25amSpeaker:Hailey Sullivan (Denver Broncos)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Interactive ExperienceTracks: Ask Me Anything, CMWorld
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Intimate conversations with CMWorld's most sought-after experts.
30 seats. 25 minutes. No slides. Just your questions!
Please note: seating is very limited and works on a first-come, first-served basis.
- Location: Room 203Monday, 10:00am - 10:30amSpeakers:Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Brand & Demand Marketing, CMWorld
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Brands are great at talking about themselves. The catch is that the rest of us care about us. We look for clues about how a brand understands our world and what it can do (for us). Long before brands had websites, people gathered to share stories about struggle, discovery, and each other. The rules haven't changed. Our audiences still respond to emotional truth, familiar story arcs, and real people they can relate to. This panel returns to the roots of storytelling to unpack what makes it work: the chemistry that pulls us in, the structures we're wired to follow, and the real people who deliver authentic messages when trust matters most. You'll leave with practical ways to put the audience back at the center of the story.
Join Tod Plotkin, CEO/Founder of Green Buzz Agency, Carolyn Austring, Executive Director of Marketing at Bayer and Greg Reeder, Senior Director, Public Sector Marketing at Datadog for a robust discussion on authentic emotional brand storytelling. - Location: Room 105Monday, 10:00am - 10:30amSpeakers:Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Content Strategy, CMWorld
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This session explores how Marriott Bonvoy Traveler evolved with intention, reinforcing its strategic role in the organization and clarifying its job in the marketplace of travel information. By aligning content strategy to five new message pillars and reassessing performance, the approach shifted away from broad, SEO‑driven content toward more ownable storytelling that better captured the imagination of travelers, provided insight driven information on the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio and supported company priorities. Ensuring these pillars remained flexible made it possible to scale content across broad partners and international boundaries without becoming hyperlocal or fragmented.
The session also examines how rethinking collaboration and shared input across teams created trust, alignment, and better information at global scale. Finally, it demonstrates how intentional frameworks, intake models, and a supporting tech stack made this approach repeatable, resulting in stronger engagement, increased time on site, and higher revenue per customer.
Attendees will leave with practical guidance on how to intentionally evolve content strategy, build predictability through collaboration, and use frameworks to sustain quality and impact. - Location: Room 113Monday, 10:00am - 11:30amSpeaker:Heike Young (Heike Young, Inc.)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Interactive ExperienceTracks: The Content Lab, CMWorld
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This is unlike every other session because it’s all about YOU! Get free advice in your own five-minute coaching session with consultant and creator Heike Young. It’s like urgent care, but for content.
Bring your most pressing content-related pain for personalized coaching from Heike.
In five minutes per attendee, Heike can do whatever’s most helpful: Take a look at your content strategy, brainstorm series ideas with you, give you tips on getting your executives to post more on LinkedIn, give you video editing tool recommendations, and help you navigate all the craziness on your plate.
As former head of content for Salesforce and Microsoft, Heike is ready to help diagnose and treat your biggest content problem together with you!
No reservations required. Just show up! Heike will meet with each person separately. - Location: Room 207Monday, 10:00am - 10:30amSpeakers:Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Visual & Audio Experiences, CMWorld
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The internet is filling up with generic, AI-assisted content. More content, more noise, and less trust. In that environment, visibility is no longer about publishing more. It is about proving there is a real human behind the message.
In this session, Mitch Slater of UBS and Laura Garfield of Idea Decanter will show how UBS advisors are using video to rise above generic content, build trust faster, and turn expertise into audience growth. They'll break down how the right structure, support, and guardrails make it possible for advisors in a highly regulated industry to create video content that feels authentic, useful, and differentiated, without creating unnecessary brand or compliance friction.
Attendees will leave with a practical framework for helping experts use video to stand out in the visibility wars, earn trust in a crowded digital environment, and create content that supports real business growth. - Location: Room 109Monday, 10:00am - 10:30amSpeaker:Tom Mansell (Croud)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Discoverability & Optimization, CMWorld
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The search landscape is undergoing a major transformation. AI, social search, online communities, and digital marketplaces are breaking up the traditional search journey, and audiences are now navigating multiple platforms guided by intent, emotion, and identity.
In this session, Tom Mansell, VP of Organic Performance at Croud, will introduce Croud's SearchAnywhere approach and offer practical insights on how to develop and execute a holistic search strategy, highlighting examples of client success stories. Attendees will learn how to expand brand visibility across the digital ecosystem, optimize for LLM-driven discovery, and combine human expertise with AI-powered tools. Using Croud's proprietary BrandCI and SEOCI tools, Tom will demonstrate how to measure discoverability, align brand signals with audience intent, drive measurable growth, and deliver a true return on intelligence in an increasingly fragmented search world. - Location: Insight to Impact StageMonday, 10:00am - 10:30amPass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Insight to Impact, CMWorld
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A conversation with the winners and finalists from this year's Content Marketing Awards, moderated by Robert Rose.
- Location: Four Seasons Ballroom 2Monday, 10:30am - 11:00amSpeaker:Paul Kemp-Robertson (LIONS)Pass Type: All AccessSession Type: Summit (All Access Required)Tracks: Summit | Science & Magic, LIONS
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The Big Picture! Why the world feels less predictable and more volatile, which companies are successfully riding the shock waves, and what this all means for your brand, your team and you. This is Contagious’ temperature check of the fast-changing world that brands urgently need to navigate.
- Location: Room 106Monday, 10:45am - 11:15amSpeaker:Nancy Harhut (HBT Marketing)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Interactive ExperienceTracks: Ask Me Anything, CMWorld
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Intimate conversations with CMWorld's most sought-after experts.
30 seats. 30 minutes. No slides. Just your questions!
Please note: seating is very limited and works on a first-come, first-served basis.
- Location: Room 203Monday, 10:45am - 11:15amSpeakers:Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Brand & Demand Marketing, CMWorld
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The Zoom Solopreneur 50 is a first-of-its-kind national index celebrating the most innovative businesses of one. The winners receive access to Zoom tools, product experts, and support building workflows to help scale their businesses. The program also became the foundation for one of Zoom's largest storytelling efforts, with the winners themselves at the center.
Our strategy was grounded in a simple belief: people trust people more than they trust brands. So we built non-branded brand content—centered on human stories, not the product. Rather than telling audiences why Zoom matters, we gave the Solopreneur 50 winners a platform to show how they build, grow, and run their businesses.
Using those winners as the subjects, Zoom developed a 10-part, YouTube-first docuseries that made them—not Zoom—the heroes. Zoom remained present not as the subject, but as the technology quietly enabling their success. Their experiences became the proof of how modern businesses get work done.
To bring this vision to life, we made a deliberate creative choice: rather than developing the series through a traditional creative-agency model, we partnered directly with Executive Producer John Henion, whose documentary work include the award-winning Welcome to Wrexham and the popular Netflix shows Chef's Table and The Playbook. This gave the project a documentary lens from the outset, with character, emotion, and lived experience at the center.
In this Brand to Demand session, Zoom’s Head of Content Marla Davies and John Henion will unpack the strategy and storytelling craft behind the docuseries: why human-first content required a different creative model, how authentic stories were found and shaped, and how real value, earned attention, advocacy, and trust can create a path from brand to demand.
Attendees will leave with a practical framework for building content people actually choose to watch, remember, and ultimately take action on. - Location: Room 104Monday, 10:45am - 11:15amSpeaker:Robin Simon Wood (neuemotion)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Content Creation & Storytelling, CMWorld
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Content has never been easier to make… and has also never been easier to forget.
AI tools can generate variations in seconds. Platforms reward volume. Deadlines compress. Budgets don't expand with expectations. And somewhere in all of that, the standard quickly drops.
Robin Simon Wood spends her days at that crossroads.
As SVP of Production at neuemotion, she leads the teams responsible for campaigns for brands like Salesforce, Webflow, Toast, Visa, and LinkedIn. The work has earned Webbys, Shortys, and Collision Awards. In 2025, she was selected as a Cannes Lions Future Gazers panelist for her perspective on where creative production is headed next.
What she's seeing is clear: production is no longer the last step in the process. It's the guardrail. It determines whether ambition survives scale.
Attendees will leave with a clearer framework for protecting creative standards while operating at modern marketing speed and a better understanding of how to structure teams so scale doesn't erode substance. - Location: Room 109Monday, 10:45am - 11:15amSpeaker:Dale Bertrand (Fire&Spark)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Discoverability & Optimization, CMWorld
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Your problem isn't declining organic traffic. It's AI search platforms recommending your competitors because their content answers the questions your customers are asking. AI search platforms, like ChatGPT, AI Overviews and Google's AI mode, filter prospects before they ever reach your website.
Join AI and SEO expert Dale Bertrand as he shares his research-backed insights into how AI pre-qualifies visitors, and the three critical gaps in Understanding, Relevance, and Reputation that stop brands from winning AI search recommendations. - Location: Room 110Monday, 10:45am - 11:15amSpeakers:Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Social Media & Creator Marketing, CMWorld
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Launching a B2B influencer marketing program can feel like a daunting task, especially when your audience is a highly specialized group such as electrical engineers. But what if your biggest challenge – influencers aligned with competitive tools – could actually become your greatest strategic advantage? Join us as we share our approach to building a thriving influencer marketing program for an engineering software company.
We'll share the strategy behind how we successfully identified, engaged, and collaborated with influencers whose audiences consisted primarily of competitive tool users. Learn how we transformed barriers into opportunities, amplifying our message, and expanding awareness of our software solutions. Attendees will gain valuable insights, leaving with a clear understanding of practical next steps to launch or refine their own B2B influencer marketing program within a niche technical market. - Location: Insight to Impact StageMonday, 10:45am - 11:15amModerator:Robert Rose (Content Marketing Institute)Panelists:Tash Walker (The Mix Global), Christian Kurz (Paramount), Dawn Holiday (Taco Bell), Wil Reynolds (Seer Interactive)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Insight to Impact, CMWorld
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Marketing has, historically, run on a simple promise: the more we know, the better the work. Market intelligence sharpens the strategy, insight fuels the idea, and measurement proves it all worked. But that promise is now suspect. When AI hands every brand the same research, the same segmentation, and the same "insights" at the same moment, it's fair to ask whether insight-driven marketing is still an advantage at all — or whether it has quietly become the most sophisticated way ever invented to make the same thing as everyone else.
But before the creative side gets too comfortable, the same question is coming for them too. Distinct, unexpected, even weird work is what breaks through — but originality has never been harder to sustain. Speed-to-market pressure and optimizing to algorithms compresses ideas into literal questions and answers. AI floods every channel with competent content, and as strategist Rita Gunther McGrath has argued, all competitive advantage is transient now. If the numbers are table stakes and the novelty doesn't last, what exactly are we building on?
That's the real question this panel of industry experts will take on — not data versus creativity (we all know it's both), but where durable advantage actually lives when everyone has access to everything.
Come ready to weigh in. The answer may say less about your tech than about your team. - Location: Room 205Monday, 10:45am - 11:15amSpeaker:Goldie Chan (Warm Robots)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Purposeful Marketing, CMWorld
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In today's increasingly digital world, where artificial intelligence (AI) is shaping the landscape of business and marketing, the importance of humanizing your brand cannot be overstated. Join Goldie for a thought-provoking session, "Humanizing Your Brand in the Age of AI: Strategies for Authentic Connection," as she explores how to maintain genuine, meaningful connections with your audience in this tech-driven era. - Location: Room 105Monday, 10:45am - 11:15amSpeaker:Joe Pulizzi (The Tilt)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Content Strategy, CMWorld
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Content is no longer scarce. Trust is.
As generative AI floods every channel with fast, inexpensive, and increasingly indistinguishable content, marketing teams face a new reality: publishing more is no longer a competitive advantage. In fact, volume may be making you invisible.
In this session, Joe Pulizzi introduces the Trust Portfolio: a practical framework for building durable competitive advantage by diversifying human trust signals across your organization. Instead of relying on a single brand voice or chasing algorithmic trends, marketers will learn how to identify internal subject matter experts, align them to strategic trust goals, and operationalize a repeatable system that strengthens authority in an AI-saturated world. - Location: Room 207Monday, 10:45am - 11:15amSpeaker:Andrew Hanelly (Revmade)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Visual & Audio Experiences, CMWorld
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An assignment few marketers would envy. A serious message. And an audience with no obligation to pay attention.
Revmade’s Andrew Hanelly takes you inside the audience insights and unexpected creative decisions behind an award-winning short-form video that earned millions of views. See how his team connected an organizational priority with questions people were already asking, then made the answer something they chose to watch, share, and discuss.
With original research, planning materials, footage, and audience reactions, follow the work from the brief through the shoot and into the comment section. Discover how the team chose the right expert, built an unexpected visual explanation, and used a repeatable editorial format without making formulaic content. Then see how the audience’s response helped shape the next episode.
For marketing and content leaders, this is a practical look at where to focus creative effort, how to make better use of your organization’s expertise, and how to earn attention without compromising credibility. You’ll leave with an approach to building trust through useful content—and a process that uses what you learn from each post to guide what you make next. - Location: Four Seasons Ballroom 2Monday, 11:10am - 11:40amSpeaker:David Tiltman (WARC)Pass Type: All AccessSession Type: Summit (All Access Required)Tracks: Summit | Science & Magic, LIONS
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How can marketers make a better case for creativity to the rest of the C-suite? The WARC team have boiled down the latest thinking, data and examples to show the current trends in creative effectiveness, and offer some clear actions marketers can take to raise the impact of their work. Using insight from the Creative Impact content track at Cannes Lions, we share cutting-edge ideas from the most successful brands on the planet.
- Location: Room 205Monday, 11:30am - 12:00pmSpeakers:Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Sponsored SessionTracks: Partner Case Studies, CMWorld
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The pressure to win AI visibility is on. Yet most of the advice flying at today’s content teams is guesswork, and it's pushing many toward short-sighted tactics that expire the moment the models change.
Roadie, a crowdsourced delivery platform, took a different route. Rather than trying to game the models, they focused on producing content worth quoting.
It worked. Today they out-cite key brands across the topics that matter most to their buyers.
Join Informa TechTarget's Eva Araya and Roadie's Leah Lucisano to unpack how they did it, and what any content team can do right now to build big-picture AI authority that lasts. - Location: Room 106Monday, 11:30am - 12:00pmSpeaker:Joe Pulizzi (The Tilt)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Interactive ExperienceTracks: Ask Me Anything, CMWorld
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Intimate conversations with CMWorld's most sought-after experts.
30 seats. 30 minutes. No slides. Just your questions!
Please note: seating is very limited and works on a first-come, first-served basis.
- Location: Room 109Monday, 11:30am - 12:00pmSpeaker:Santi Clarke (Respondology)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Sponsored SessionTracks: Partner Case Studies, CMWorld
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Did you know 93% of social comments showing purchase intent go unanswered?
Social teams are being asked to produce more content and be present on more platforms than ever before, leaving little time to engage with the communities they're building. Drawing on data from more than 500M social comments, this session shows what brands are leaving on the table and how to capture and convert the demand that's already living in their comments.
Attendees will leave with an understanding of how major brands across industries are using AI to manage, engage, and discover insights from their social comments at scale, while keeping the human touch that builds community. - Location: Room 203Monday, 11:30am - 12:00pmSpeaker:Nathan Holmes (Acquia)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Sponsored SessionTracks: Partner Case Studies, CMWorld
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We want our content to support our audiences and our business. But AI has changed both how people consume information and how our team can work. Applying AI to the way we've always done things hasn't delivered the transformation we keep hearing about. It just made our old process faster.
This session will walk through Acquia's marketing and content transformation over the past year. We had to challenge how we operate as a marketing and content team altogether, rethinking our approach around the outcomes we're actually trying to drive. We've added new metrics, built an AI-ready messaging knowledge base, upskilled the team, and created reusable skills that pull in multiple tools. As a result we've driven over 21% increase in AI citations and decreased idea to publishing time.
You don't have to be able to hold a beat, but we'll drop a few music references to help get your AI and your content playing the same tune. - Location: Room 201Monday, 11:30am - 12:00pmSpeaker:Britt Hall (Optimizely)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Sponsored SessionTracks: Partner Case Studies, CMWorld
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Content marketers have spent years learning to distrust and filter out bot traffic, and mostly, they're right to. Scrapers steal content and fraud bots inflate metrics. Those are bad bots. Then there are neutral bots, quietly crawling and indexing your site for some future use you'll probably never see. But a new kind of bot has shown up, and it breaks the old rules: AI agents acting in real time on behalf of an actual customer, researching, comparing, even buying, right now. They are your customers.
This session gives content marketers a new lens for thinking about the bot traffic already hitting their site and makes the case that treating all three the same might already be costing you real customers. We'll cover the signals worth watching for, why a legitimate agent deserves the benefit of the doubt instead of suspicion, and what marketing teams need to start building to keep up. - Location: Room 110Monday, 11:30am - 12:00pmSpeaker:Dana Arnold (Hiebing)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Sponsored SessionTracks: Partner Case Studies, CMWorld
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Gen Z is one of the most studied generations in history, yet many brands are still working from outdated assumptions about what drives their attention, trust and loyalty.
In this session, Hiebing shares findings from its ongoing national Gen Z research study, tracking how the attitudes and behaviors of consumers ages 16–29 have evolved over time. The research challenges some of marketing's most common beliefs: that influencers are the most trusted voices, that digital-first means digital-only, and that polished content is the fastest path to connection.
Whether you're responsible for content, brand strategy or customer engagement, you'll leave with a clearer understanding of the Gen Z story marketers keep misreading—and what to do differently as a result.
- Location: Room 105Monday, 11:30am - 12:00pmSpeakers:Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Sponsored SessionTracks: Partner Case Studies, CMWorld
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The old B2B playbook has fundamentally broken thanks to the rise of GenAI. With 94% of buyers using AI to synthesize requirements without ever clicking through to a website, what used to be leads are now ghosts until the final stretch of the buying journey. This shift means marketers must challenge past strategies and budget allocations to capture the hearts and minds of buyers. In this session, we’ll walk through our real marketing playbook to show you how we adapted — and what’s working in a world where gated content is dead, brand authority is king, and AI owns the narrative.
- Location: Four Seasons Ballroom 2Monday, 11:50am - 12:20pmSpeaker:Trace Cohen (Stocksy)Pass Type: All AccessSession Type: Summit (All Access Required)Tracks: Summit | Science & Magic, LIONS
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Every image has one job: put a person in relation to something else. A need to a product. A memory to an idea. A stranger to a feeling they didn’t expect to have. Trace Cohen, CEO of Stocksy United, will surface some of the latest thinking from Stocksy’s Visual Insights initiative. It treats connection as structure, built from five small but mighty words in the language: by, for, between, against, with. In this session, Cohen unpacks what that grammar reveals about the work that reached people this year. The premise is simple and uncomfortable: the more precisely you can name what makes something intimately connect, the more power you have to make it happen again.
- Location: Show HallMonday, 12:00pm - 2:00pmPass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Networking
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Looking to find your people? Lunch and Connections is the perfect chance to meet fellow attendees who share your interests and chat over lunch. Whether you're swapping marketing tips or just having fun talking about your favorite hobbies, there’s a spot for everyone. Grab a seat and get ready to dive into some lively conversations!
- Location: Insight to Impact StageMonday, 12:00pm - 1:00pmSpeakers:Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Interactive ExperienceTracks: The Content Lab, CMWorld
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It’s personal branding therapy hour with your live hosts Heike Young and Goldie Chan.
Everybody says you gotta build a personal brand to get opportunities and grow your career in today’s job market… but how, exactly? The details can be fuzzy, especially if you’re an introvert, feel cringe posting, or are simply too busy to create a million LinkedIn posts.
In this therapy hour, you bring your biggest personal branding and career growth challenges. Two proven experts will help you solve them.
Bring your questions, and live on stage, we’ll troubleshoot your personal brand content strategy, help you brainstorm high-performing post types for LinkedIn, give you tips on how to start building a personal brand from scratch, or really… anything else where you need a second opinion.
Meet your therapists:
Heike is former head of content at Salesforce and Microsoft. Over two years, she built her LinkedIn audience to 50k+ through her viral videos, which earned her 78M views last year. Her viral series like “historical tour of a corporate worker’s desk” have made people say “you make me feel so seen” and “you’re like the Lucille Ball of LinkedIn.” Heike now trains Fortune 500 execs and marketers on how to build personal brands they can actually maintain. She is ready to help you smile through your personal branding struggles.
Goldie is named the "Oprah of LinkedIn,” is an original LinkedIn Top Voice for social media, and a global keynote speaker. She's shot over 800 daily videos and hosted the first-ever LinkedIn Creator Summit back in 2018, which means she's watched the platform change from the inside for nearly a decade. She's the author of bestselling “Personal Branding for Introverts” and has coached everyone from first-time posters to execs who'd rather do anything else. Goldie is ready to help you build a brand that sounds like you on your best day. - Location: The Book BuzzMonday, 12:30pm - 1:00pmSpeaker:Nancy Harhut (HBT Marketing)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Networking
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Books for the book signing will be available for purchase at The Book Buzz on the Show Floor.
- Location: Insight to Impact StageMonday, 1:15pm - 1:25pmSpeaker:Garrett Mann (Informa TechTarget)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Sponsored SessionTracks: Expert Insights, CMWorld
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As AI search becomes the first stop in B2B discovery, brands face a new challenge: ensuring AI systems understand, represent, and recommend them accurately. This has become the cornerstone of maintaining brand authority in the AI era and it's only gotten more complicated. In 2026 alone, what it means to be visible to LLMs has seemingly changed its rules overnight, and the authority you might have spent years building now lacks the specificity and uniqueness to stand out with new “synthetic” tastemakers.
In this session, Informa TechTarget will unpack the complicated question of how to influence visibility and authority across today's leading AI platforms. Learn how our combined expertise in audience insights, demand intelligence, editorial excellence, and strategic content creation can provide you with actionable AI-forward strategies and cutting-edge tools to ensure your brand remains impactful and relevant in this transformative era.
- Location: Four Seasons Ballroom 2Monday, 1:30pm - 1:50pmSpeakers:Pass Type: All AccessSession Type: Summit (All Access Required)Tracks: Summit | Science & Magic, LIONS
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Marketers obsess over the beginning and the end of the customer journey. We optimize for awareness. We relentlessly analyze conversion.
Then we overinvest in both.
But what if the industry's biggest growth opportunity isn't at the top or bottom of the funnel? What if it's been hiding in the middle all along? As recently reported by WARC* high-growth companies have 2Xs more robust mid funnels.
To answer those questions, Manifest conducted a significant proprietary research initiative across 250 CMOs & senior marketing leaders/decision-makers, pairing those insights together with full-funnel customer journey analysis from more than 40 household-name brands.
In this first look at their findings, Melissa Bouma and Joe Cassidy will reveal what Manifest's research uncovered about where customer decision criteria are truly formed and influenced, why marketers consistently underestimate the impact of the middle journey, and what the highest-performing brands are doing differently to shape preference and drive growth.
They'll separate perception from reality, uncover the patterns emerging across industries, and identify where orchestrated content has the greatest power to reduce friction, influence customer choice and accelerate growth.*2026 WARC, The ROAS Paradox by Billy Grace
- Location: Insight to Impact StageMonday, 1:35pm - 1:45pmSpeaker:Alina Hotra (Medialister, Inc.)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Sponsored SessionTracks: Expert Insights, CMWorld
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Digital PR measurement usually stops when an article goes live, focusing on reach, traffic, and publisher metrics. This session explores a new way of thinking about what happens after publication: how much attention content receives and how that attention changes over time. We’ll introduce the early-stage Attention Index as a work in progress, share initial findings, and discuss how attention and decay could eventually improve publisher selection, campaign planning, and budget decisions. The goal is to challenge how we measure digital PR today and open the conversation around what better post-publication measurement could look like.
- Location: Room 109Monday, 2:00pm - 2:30pmSpeaker:Devesh Khanal (Grow and Convert)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Discoverability & Optimization, CMWorld
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Most brands are approaching AI search like SEO: track a few prompts, check if you show up, count citations. But AI search has a fundamental difference from SEO: LLMs know far more about the user than Google ever did and they use that information to delivery extremely personalized recommendations to the user.
Google got short keywords from users, and gave everyone more or less the same list of links to read for a given keyword. In SEO, the user did the research and decided which solution was right for their situation.
LLMs, in contrast, have a massive amount of conversation history full of rich nuance about the user and their pain points. They then use this information and do research on behalf of the user and deliver personalized solutions for them and their specific pain points.
Succeeding in this personalized AI search world requires teaching LLMs every scenario where your product or service could be a good solution, then getting that content discovered when they search the web. This talk shares the real customer chats and data behind this argument and walks through how to build this strategy for your own brand. - Location: Room 106Monday, 2:00pm - 2:30pmSpeaker:Dale Bertrand (Fire&Spark)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Interactive ExperienceTracks: Ask Me Anything, CMWorld
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Intimate conversations with CMWorld's most sought-after experts.
30 seats. 30 minutes. No slides. Just your questions!
Please note: seating is very limited and works on a first-come, first-served basis.
- Location: Room 205Monday, 2:00pm - 2:30pmSpeaker:Lola Bakare (be/co)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Purposeful Marketing, CMWorld
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The world stands still. Budgets get scrubbed. Briefs come back softer than they went out.
Meanwhile, Hellmann's took a public beating from an activist investor who FELT like food waste was losing the plot… and grew by roughly a third over the two years that followed. e.l.f. defended its board diversity work on CNN and posted its 26th consecutive quarter of net sales growth. Certified Inclusive beauty brands are growing 1.8x faster for the third year running. Feelings aren't facts.
Lola Bakare, author of Responsible Marketing and creator of the #responsiblemarketing movement, brings the receipts and the practice. Learn the Triple Top-Line Flywheel as a filter for what you make, unlearn the retreat habits dressed up as caution, and relearn how to say the thing… strategically, inside your own organization.
- Location: Four Seasons Ballroom 2Monday, 2:00pm - 2:30pmPass Type: All AccessSession Type: Summit (All Access Required)Tracks: Summit | Science & Magic, LIONS
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What does it take to be a Chief Marketing Officer in 2026? We’re bringing CMOs in the Spotlight – one of the most popular content formats from Cannes Lions – to the Science & Magic stage to find out. Hear from three top brand leaders as they dissect the most challenging issues they face and outline their vision for the future.
- Location: Room 104Monday, 2:00pm - 2:30pmSpeaker:Andy Seibert (Imprint)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Content Creation & Storytelling, CMWorld
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Audiences are consuming more content, in more places, than ever—and as a result, too many brands are starting to sound exactly alike. How do you keep your content marketing program moving forward with genuinely new ideas rather than recycling the same tired playbook? This session shows how to lead, not follow, by designing and launching net-new content formats that will set you apart from the competition
We’ll unpack real examples of new experiences across the audience spectrum, including a new audio magazine in B2B and an interactive education program for student-athletes in B2C. You’ll see how, when you are laser-focused on your audience, creating new content formats and experiences becomes effective. (And fun.) Experimenting can deepen engagement, spotlight subject-matter experts, and carve out a distinctive brand voice in a completely new way.
We’ll walk through the strategy, structure, and production approach behind launching a new format, from insight to pilot to scale.
- Location: Room 105Monday, 2:00pm - 2:30pmSpeakers:Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Content Strategy, CMWorld
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Most content teams aim to be customer-centric, yet campaigns often start with products instead of customer problems, creating fragmented experiences and results that are difficult to scale.
In this session, you’ll learn how to shift that starting point by turning validated customer problems into the foundation of content strategy and creating content that aligns with buyer decisions.
Zari Venhaus and Guzide Ozcan Bacimer will reveal how buyer journey research, industry data, and direct customer conversations helped transform one urgent challenge into a connected, buyer-first content engine.
You’ll leave with a practical framework for identifying the right customer problem, organizing content around buyer decisions, and operationalizing insight across teams, markets, and measurement systems, brought to life through Eaton's Machinery OEM campaign, winner of the 2026 Best Content Marketing Program Award and a Project of the Year finalist. - Location: Room 201Monday, 2:00pm - 2:30pmSpeaker:Grace Miller (Diary of a CEO / Flight Story)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Marketing Core Concepts, CMWorld
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What if failure was one of your biggest competitive advantages? In this session, 'Let's Talk About the F Word' invites you to rethink how failure, experimentation, and learning can drive real business growth. You'll discover why failing fast helps organisations adapt quicker, uncover new opportunities, and stay ahead in an ever-changing market.
This talk explores how to build teams that are constantly experimenting, testing new ideas, and learning what works and what doesn't. You'll also gain practical insight into creating a culture of high psychological safety, where people feel empowered to take risks, speak openly, and learn from mistakes without fear. Attendees will leave with a fresh perspective on failure and clear ideas for fostering innovation, resilience, and sustainable growth in their teams. - Location: Room 207Monday, 2:00pm - 2:30pmSpeaker:Tom Webster (Sounds Profitable)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Visual & Audio Experiences, CMWorld
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As AI-generated content floods every channel, audiences are growing skeptical of what they read and see online. But there's one medium where trust is actually growing: podcasting. In this session, backed by original data from The Advertising Landscape and The Podcast Atlas, you'll learn why the human voice cuts through the noise of machine-made content—and how to make podcasting a cornerstone of your content marketing strategy.
We'll explore the latest research showing that podcast listeners consistently rank their favorite hosts among their most trusted sources of information—outpacing social media influencers, online reviews, and even traditional journalists. You'll see how the intimacy and authenticity of audio create a trust advantage that AI-generated text and video simply cannot replicate, and why that trust translates directly into brand loyalty and purchase intent.
This isn't a session about how to start a podcast. It's a data-driven case for why podcasting deserves a seat at the strategy table—especially now, when trust is the scarcest and most valuable currency in marketing. You'll leave with a clear framework for positioning podcasting as a trust-building channel, metrics to prove its value to leadership, and practical guidance on creating audio content that earns and keeps audience confidence in an era of synthetic media. - Location: Insight to Impact StageMonday, 2:00pm - 2:30pmSpeakers:Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Sponsored SessionTracks: Insight to Impact, CMWorld
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The future of market research isn't just about measuring what already happened, it's about predicting what happens next. As Experience Management and AI converge, the industry is stepping into a new era where teams can simulate high-stakes decisions, predict their impact, and test outcomes before committing. Break down the differences between these tools, understand how they power your research program, and share in the vision for the next generation of research.
- Location: Room 113Monday, 2:00pm - 3:15pmSpeakers:Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Interactive ExperienceTracks: The Content Lab, CMWorld
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Search Has Already Changed. Has Your Marketing Team?
AI search rewards the brands who are consistent in how they talk about themselves and more than ever AI search rewards "receipts" for what you say about yourself. There are more surfaces than ever to get congruence on. The good old days of "SEO it" and I'm good are over. SEO and GEO are NOT the same, and we'll show you why.
Good news: you already have customers leaving you the clues. It lives in your paid search data, reviews, sales calls, support tickets, and customer conversations. It's shared in community forums and on social media. In this working session, Alisa Scharf and Wil Reynolds of Seer Interactive walk through the workflow Seer uses to refine raw data into content strategy: mine what customers say, compare it against what your site says, close the gaps, and measure the lift and win across more surfaces.
You'll also get the funding argument, how to defend and structure a content team in 2026 when leadership is asking why it shouldn't shrink. - Location: Room 110Monday, 2:00pm - 2:30pmSpeaker:Mandee Nguyen (SICK)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Social Media & Creator Marketing, CMWorld
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Engineers don't always tell marketers what they think, but they tell Reddit. For B2B marketers, Reddit offers something most analytics platforms can't: candid conversations, peer recommendations, and real-world insights from buyers actively researching solutions.
Join SICK Sensor Intelligence as we explore how Reddit conversations, Reddit Pro, and Reddit Ads help uncover customer challenges, inspire content strategy, identify emerging trends, and influence buying decisions long before they appear in an attribution report. - Location: Four Seasons Ballroom 2Monday, 2:40pm - 3:10pmSpeaker:Becca Peel (LIONS Advisory)Pass Type: All AccessSession Type: Summit (All Access Required)Tracks: Summit | Science & Magic, LIONS
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At Cannes Lions, the communications industry meets to celebrate the world's best work. It’s where insights from iconic thought leaders, ideas from innovative companies, and inspiration from every corner of the creative marketing community come together. This Contagious session distills the International Festival of Creativity's five days of content into an inspiration-packed briefing. A must-see for all marketers seeking to tap into creativity as a competitive advantage.
- Location: Room 105Monday, 2:45pm - 3:15pmSpeakers:Jessica Serrano (Bagel Brands), Adeta Gayah (Visit Orlando), Isabel Hewgley (Eagle Creek), Katie Kelly (Masthead), Julie Hochheiser ilkovich (Masthead)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Content Strategy, CMWorld
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In this fast-moving session, in partnership with the Women in Content & Marketing Association, three women leading content and marketing inside major brands each share one “What if…” that changed the way they work. Through three real-world case studies, they’ll reveal the insight that sparked a new idea, the action they took to bring it to life, and the impact it had on their audience, brand, business, or team. Along the way, they’ll share what they learned—and what other marketers can take back to their own work.
Three brands. Three ideas. Three lessons. And three examples of what can happen when marketers are willing to question the way it’s always been done—and turn insight into impact.This session is brought to you by the Women in Content Marketing Association (WICMA), a dynamic organization dedicated to celebrating, connecting, and empowering women in content marketing. Through three core pillars—Awards, Community, and WICMA Connect—WICMA fosters recognition, collaboration, and professional growth for women at every stage of their careers.
- Location: Room 201Monday, 2:45pm - 3:15pmSpeaker:Karen Hopper (Precision Strategies)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Marketing Core Concepts, CMWorld
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Content teams are some of the most organized people on the planet, with editorial calendars, production workflows, approval processes all built to keep content flowing across multiple formats and channels. But all that organization is optimized for a funnel that no longer exists.
By the time someone fills out a form on your website, they've already spent weeks inside an ecosystem of content about your brand: Linkedin posts, Reddit, a YouTube video, maybe even a group chat recommendation. The form catches demand that formed somewhere else entirely.
As digital discovery evolves across search, social platforms, communities, and emerging AI interfaces, content programs increasingly need to do more than publish regularly: they need to be designed to reach the right audiences, generate engagement, and support core business outcomes.
This session lays out three shifts, from an asset calendar to a presence map, from lead capture to demand surfacing, and from content metrics to the leading indicators that show an audience is forming, so teams can build programs that drive real, measurable growth. - Location: Room 104Monday, 2:45pm - 3:15pmSpeaker:Brian Cleary (NSF)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Content Creation & Storytelling, CMWorld
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Today's buyers don't consume content the way marketers design it. They join late. They multitask. They switch screens. They drop out and re-enter. Yet many webinars are still built as linear lectures that only work if consumed from beginning to end.
This session explores why traditional webinar design increasingly clashes with modern buyer behavior and introduces a practical framework for designing content around interrupted consumption rather than uninterrupted attention.
Drawing on real-world experience redesigning webinar programs within a global standards and certification organization, attendees will learn how modular structures, strategic recaps, and synthesis-driven content can reduce cognitive load, improve engagement, and create more valuable assets for repurposing and demand generation.
Attendees will leave with a practical framework for building webinars that better reflect how professionals consume information and how modern B2B content should be built. - Location: Room 203Monday, 2:45pm - 3:15pmSpeaker:Melissa Rothchild (Guardian)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Brand & Demand Marketing, CMWorld
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Sales teams are drowning in content — decks, demos, one-pagers, and portals — yet critical messages still fail to stick. What if sales training wasn't something reps sat through, but something they stepped into?
In this session, you'll see how marketing teams can leverage storytelling, immersive design, and experiential learning to transform sales enablement from information overload into unforgettable experiences. Drawing from real-world examples of large-scale immersive sales training activations, you'll learn how narrative, metaphor, and hands-on engagement can simplify complex offerings, build confidence, and drive real behavior change.
You'll walk away with a practical framework for turning traditional training into story-driven experiences that reps don't just remember — they use. - Location: Insight to Impact StageMonday, 2:45pm - 3:15pmSpeakers:Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Insight to Impact, CMWorld
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Every day, people approaching retirement search online for information before they ever speak to a financial professional. For years, Athene wasn't showing up in searches that were highly relevant to its business and relied heavily on paid media to reach their audience. Athene and their agency, Imprint, will share how they transformed that approach by building a topic-ownership content architecture, turning organic search into a durable growth engine. Attendees of this session will get a real, numbers-backed look at how a heavily regulated financial brand went from went from limited visibility to recognized authority, including landing in Google's AI Overviews for core annuity topics.
- Location: Room 109Monday, 2:45pm - 3:15pmSpeakers:Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Discoverability & Optimization, CMWorld
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Financial brands need to find ways to stand out from their competition and provide value to their audiences. Proprietary research can be that edge in an era of AI-driven search. This session will share real-world examples and tips on how proprietary research can attract eyeballs and how you can use it efficiently to drive results across multiple content mediums.
• Generate better leads: 64% of marketers reported higher conversion rates from leads that came out of proprietary research.
• Improve discoverability: Adding statistics to content improves AI visibility by 41%, and original research earns more citations than derivative work.
• Maximize content ROI: Content repurposing strategies improve ROI by 32%.Pace and Brighthouse Financial will demonstrate how we use Brighthouse Financial's Guaranteed Income research to architect a high impact content ecosystem.
- Location: Room 205Monday, 2:45pm - 3:15pmSpeaker:Ruth Carter (Geek Law Firm)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Purposeful Marketing, CMWorld
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AI tools are creating and publishing content, interacting with your audience, and increasingly signing contracts and making purchases and sales. They're also creating legal risk – and when something goes wrong, "The AI did it," is not a valid defense.
Companies are already paying the price for either what their humans did with AI or what their AI did when a human wasn't there to prevent its AI agent from going beyond the intended limits. Additionally, the law has always lagged behind technology, but it's trying to catch up with new sweeping requirements related to disclosure, transparency, and governance requirements – like the EU AI Act.
Everybody's favorite non-boring content marketing attorney will break down the legal risks that accompany developments in AI and what marketers need to do to avoid these painful and expensive mistakes as well as provide an update on the latest developments related to intellectual property and NIL rights.
You will walk away with practical information that you can immediately use with your team to minimize and mitigate problems that you may not have known were there. - Location: Room 207Monday, 2:45pm - 3:15pmSpeakers:Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Visual & Audio Experiences, CMWorld
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As AI changes the search landscape and video-first platforms like YouTube become primary discovery engines, enterprise marketing teams are facing a new challenge: How do you create high-trust, authoritative content that actually gets found? At Northwestern Mutual, we've found that a strategically managed podcast is the ultimate "content multiplier" for the modern funnel.
In this session, you'll learn how to move beyond launching a show and start using narrative audio as a core driver for business impact. We'll show you how we strategically use our podcast to satisfy rising consumer demand for audio and video, while building a content engine that supports customers from their first search to their final decision.
This is a practical, under-the-hood look at how an enterprise team uses a podcast to navigate tighter budgets and changing consumer expectations. You'll see exactly how one episode turns into a multi-channel asset system—powering YouTube search, social engagement, and high-intent web content—allowing you to show up where consumers are and deliver the ROI that leadership actually cares about. - Location: Room 110Monday, 2:45pm - 3:15pmSpeaker:Brianna Doe (Verbatim)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Social Media & Creator Marketing, CMWorld
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Virality used to mean one thing. Everyone saw it, everyone talked about it, and you could measure it with a single screenshot of a trending page. That version still exists, but it's not the only one anymore — and treating it like the default is why so many brands chase reach that doesn't convert and miss the moments that actually move people.
In this session, Brianna Doe breaks down the three types of virality reshaping how content travels in 2026 and beyond. Through real examples from creators & brands across B2B and B2C, you'll learn how to spot each type, how to build for each one intentionally, and why picking the wrong target is usually what kills a campaign before it starts. - Location: Show FloorMonday, 3:15pm - 3:40pmPass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Networking
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- Location: Four Seasons Ballroom 2Monday, 3:15pm - 3:25pmSpeakers:Pass Type: All AccessSession Type: Summit (All Access Required)Tracks: Summit | Science & Magic, LIONS
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- Location: The Book BuzzMonday, 3:30pm - 4:00pmSpeaker:Tom Webster (Sounds Profitable)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Networking
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Books for the book signing will be available for purchase at The Book Buzz on the Show Floor.
- Location: Headliner Stage | Hall BMonday, 3:40pm - 3:50pmSpeakers:Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: KeynoteTracks: General Session, CMWorld
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- Location: Headliner Stage | Hall BMonday, 3:50pm - 4:25pmSpeakers:Zari Venhaus (Eaton), Opeyemi Oluwole-Sowore (Hackensack Meridian Health), Kathy Kavanaugh (Lincoln Financial), Heather Johnston (New Belgium Brewing), Sarah Baker (DaVita)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: KeynoteTracks: General Session, CMWorld
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5 Marketing Leaders. 5 Strategies. One Powerful Conversation About What’s Working Now.
What does it take to make a meaningful impact in marketing today?
The answer looks different for every organization. In a world of constant change, increasing competition, and more ways than ever to reach an audience, the marketers making an impact are finding new ways to stay relevant, build trust, earn attention, guide audiences, and create meaningful change.
In this high-energy, rapid-fire keynote, five senior marketing leaders will take the Content Marketing World stage to share how they made an impact this year and the strategies they believe marketers should carry forward into 2027.
Each leader will take on a different dimension of modern marketing:- Winning at Relevance with Zari Venhaus, Vice President of Global Marketing Communications, Eaton
- How do you stay relevant when your audience, market, and competitive landscape are constantly changing?
- Winning at Guidance with Sarah Baker, VP of Digital Marketing, DaVita
- How do you help audiences navigate complexity, make decisions, and take meaningful action?
- Winning at Trust with Opeyemi Oluwole-Sowore, SVP & Chief Marketing Officer, Hackensack Meridian Health
- How do you build trust in a world where audiences are increasingly skeptical of brands and institutions?
- Winning at Attention with Kathy Kavanaugh, CMO, SVP Brand & Individual Solutions, Lincoln Financial
- How do you make people care enough to stop, listen, and engage, particularly in categories where attention is notoriously difficult to earn?
- Winning at Innovation with Heather Johnston, VP of Marketing, New Belgium Brewing
- How do you challenge convention, experiment with new approaches, and create marketing that moves the business forward?
Rather than a traditional panel, each leader will have a focused opportunity to share a real strategy, decision, or lesson from the past year and what it taught them about creating impact. Together, these five perspectives offer a candid look at what senior marketers are doing differently right now — and where they believe marketing is headed next.
Come for the perspectives. Leave with ideas you can put to work in 2027. - Winning at Relevance with Zari Venhaus, Vice President of Global Marketing Communications, Eaton
- Location: Headliner Stage | Hall BMonday, 4:25pm - 5:15pmKeynote:Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: KeynoteTracks: General Session, CMWorld
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- Location: Insight to Impact StageMonday, 5:15pm - 6:15pmSpeaker:JK Kalinowski (Content Marketing Institute)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Networking
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Unwind with a beverage of your choice and showcase your artistic side! Hosted by CMI/TMRE Creative Director JK Kalinowski, participants receive a drawing prompt and sketch their interpretation with pencil and paper.
A judging panel selects the best drawing and the winner claims their prize!
- Location: Show FloorMonday, 5:15pm - 6:15pmPass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Networking
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- Location: The Book BuzzMonday, 5:30pm - 6:00pmSpeaker:Joe Lazer (Snow/Lazer)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Networking
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Books for the book signing will be available for purchase at The Book Buzz on the Show Floor.
- Location: The Blue BearTuesday, 6:00am - 7:00amPass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Networking
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CMI/TMRE Creative Director, JK Kalinowski, will kick off the run down the Cherry Creek Trail. The distance is up to you, but the route picked is around 3 miles (1.5 miles out and back). The club meets by the Big Blue Bear in front of the convention center.
- Location: Four Seasons Ballroom Foyer - Lower LevelTuesday, 6:00am - 7:00amPass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Networking
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Meet Your Yoga Instructor: Erin McDougal, founder of Zen Out Yoga
With a heart-centered teaching style and a genuine love for bringing people together, Erin’s classes invite you to slow down, breathe, move, and simply enjoy being present.
Her classes blend mindful movement, juicy stretching, breathwork, meditation, and thoughtfully chosen themes into an experience that leaves you feeling grounded, refreshed, and reconnected.
Whether you’re new to yoga or have been practicing for years, you’re invited exactly as you are. Erin offers plenty of options and modifications throughout class, allowing you to choose what feels best for your body and your level of experience. - Location: Lobby ATuesday, 7:30am - 5:00pmPass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Registration
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- Location: Show FloorTuesday, 7:30am - 8:30amPass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Networking
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- Location: Headliner Stage | Hall BTuesday, 8:20am - 8:30amKeynote:Stephanie Stahl (Informa Festivals)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: KeynoteTracks: General Session, CMWorld
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- Location: Headliner Stage | Hall BTuesday, 8:30am - 8:50amModerator:Paul Coxhill (LIONS)Keynotes:Elizabeth Oates (Molson Coors), Kathy Kavanaugh (Lincoln Financial), Anderson Koeniger (Merkley + Partners)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: KeynoteTracks: General Session, CMWorld
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Learn the secrets from the creators behind some of today’s most innovative – and award-winning marketing campaigns. Discover the strategies, insights, and creative thinking that not only earn awards but also drive real impact. Walk away inspired and equipped with practical takeaways to spark your own award-worthy work.
This panel will feature award-winners from CMI's Content Marketing Awards and Effie Awards. Moderated by Paul Coxhill, Chief Operating Officer & President at LIONS.
- Location: Headliner Stage | Hall BTuesday, 8:50am - 9:05amSpeaker:Matthew Huo (Profound)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: KeynoteTracks: General Session, CMWorld
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In order to be the answer in AI Search, you must be the answer everywhere. This creates an inhuman amount of work for marketing teams, which is why the top brands in the world are hiring Marketing Engineers. This session covers how to win in AI Search, what Marketing Engineers unlock, and why companies like Google are calling them the most important hire of 2026.
- Location: Headliner Stage | Hall BTuesday, 9:05am - 9:25amSpeaker:Karan Dang (DANG)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: KeynoteTracks: General Session, CMWorld
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The brands that stay relevant won’t be the ones that simply post more. They’ll be the ones that learn how to participate.
Brands have the money, but creators increasingly have the attention. I’ll explore why that gap exists, and what modern marketers can learn from the creator mindset about earning relevance, trust, and participation. Drawing from DANG’s proprietary Next-Gen Centricity™ research, including conversations with young consumers across America, I’ll share the emerging principles we believe are rewriting the rules of content, creativity, authenticity, community, and brand relevance. I’ll unpack how brands can move from a broadcast-era mindset to a more creator-style operating system: one that is human, participatory, culturally responsive, and built for the way people actually discover and engage today.
This keynote will be a fast-moving combination of original consumer insights, cultural observations, and practical principles that content marketers can immediately use to rethink how their brands earn attention rather than simply buy it. - Location: Show FloorTuesday, 9:30am - 10:15amPass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Networking
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- Location: Insight to Impact StageTuesday, 10:00am - 10:10amSpeaker:James Luizzi (Campaign Monitor)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Sponsored SessionTracks: Expert Insights, CMWorld
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Every marketer has had this Monday. You open the report, you see the number, you feel something about it, and you close the tab. By Thursday you're building the next campaign and the insight is nowhere in the room. Nothing changes, not because you don't care, but because the report lives in a different place, and a different week, from the work.
The email playbook has been settled for years. Tighten the segment, test the subject line, cut to one call to action. Knowing those tactics has never been the constraint. The constraint is that best practice is written for a marketer who doesn't exist, so it can't tell you which tactics you already lean on and which you've never once tried.
James Luizzi, VP of Product Management at Campaign Monitor, argues that the distance between insight and impact is a logistics problem before it's an analytics one. A recommendation becomes insight when it's conditioned on what you've actually done. It becomes impact when it shows up inside the build, at the moment you could act on it — not in a dashboard you'll have closed by Thursday. - Location: Four Seasons Ballroom 2Tuesday, 10:00am - 10:05amSpeaker:Juliet Haygarth (Effie Worldwide)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Summit (All Access Required)Tracks: Summit | Marketing Effectiveness, LIONS
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- Location: Four Seasons Ballroom 2Tuesday, 10:10am - 10:40amSpeaker:Andrew Tindall (System1)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Summit (All Access Required)Tracks: Summit | Marketing Effectiveness, LIONS
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In a world where marketing budgets are increasingly scrutinized, media is fragmented, and short-term metrics often overshadow long-term growth, marketers require a modern advertising playbook that addresses challenger brands and category leaders alike. “The Creative Dividend” was launched this year to do exactly that and is based on the largest analysis of Effie’s unique dataset for 5 years. In this session, you will hear directly from the author, Andrew Tindall, who will serve up all the practical tips, tools and strategies you need to make your own work more effective today.
- Location: Room 106Tuesday, 10:15am - 10:45amSpeaker:Melanie Deziel (MelanieDeziel.com)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Interactive ExperienceTracks: Ask Me Anything, CMWorld
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Intimate conversations with CMWorld's most sought-after experts.
30 seats. 30 minutes. No slides. Just your questions!
Please note: seating is very limited and works on a first-come, first-served basis.
- Location: Room 110Tuesday, 10:15am - 10:45amSpeaker:Erica Berry (Caterpillar)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Content Operations & Workflow, CMWorld
Matches Found in Session Description:
If your content process feels like a mix of guesswork, scattered files, and last‑minute fixes, you're not alone. Most teams are trying to move quickly inside systems that were never built for the pace they're working. Work gets repeated. Reviews drag on. People invent their own shortcuts because the official process slows everything down. Add AI tools on top of that, and the weak spots show up fast.
In this session, I'll share a content supply chain model shaped by real experience inside a global B2B enterprise and by building Caterpillar's Component Moment video series, which earned recognition as a Content Marketing Institute Award finalist. The model uses a hub and spoke structure, clear decision points, and AI helpers that take on the routine steps that drain time and attention.
You'll leave with a way to organize your content work so it feels steady instead of chaotic, along with a practical understanding of how AI can support your team without adding noise or complexity. - Location: Insight to Impact StageTuesday, 10:15am - 10:45amSpeaker:Chris Boggs (Overit)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: AI Systems & Content Tech, CMWorld
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AI is rapidly transforming how content work gets done. From drafting and iteration to governance, measurement, and search discovery, teams have new options for speed and leverage. But many content design and content strategy organizations remain stuck in experimentation. A few prompts here, a tool trial there, and then the work snaps back to the old way because the underlying system is still the bottleneck.
This talk is designed for content designers, UX writers, content strategists, and content operations leaders who want a practical framework, not hype. Chris Boggs will begin with one essential question: where are your content systems breaking down?
Most teams can name the symptoms: inconsistent voice, slow reviews, fragmented design system guidance, unclear ownership, duplicate content, and content that is hard to find once it ships. Those friction points are usually the best places to apply AI, not as a replacement for expertise, but as a force multiplier that makes strong content practice easier to execute consistently.
Chris will guide attendees through a step-by-step approach to:
- Audit your current content workflow from intake through publishing and iteration
- Map the highest-cost friction points and identify what is truly automatable versus what requires human judgment
- Choose AI use cases that improve real outcomes, such as faster production with fewer revisions, clearer UI copy, better adherence to content standards, and more resilient content models
- From there, the session will explore practical patterns for integrating AI into content operations, including how to use AI for content reuse and component-based writing, how to support structured content and content design systems, and how to build review loops that protect quality and accessibility.
It will also address findability in an AI-shaped search landscape, including how LLM experiences are changing discovery and what teams can do to make content more legible, retrievable, and trustworthy across both traditional SEO and emerging AI-driven results.
Finally, the session will cover governance: what to standardize, how to document decisions, and how to implement human-in-the-loop checkpoints that respect privacy, intellectual property, and user trust. The goal is not to adopt AI for its own sake, but to improve how content work happens, so teams can ship better experiences with less chaos. - Location: Room 105Tuesday, 10:15am - 10:45amSpeaker:Wil Reynolds (Seer Interactive)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Content Strategy, CMWorld
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Your tightrope to winning in AI and with people is the tightest it has ever been. Gone are the days of low quality text at the bottom of your page, gone is the gaming of domain authority. Optimizing in the world of AI has picked up on some of the bad habits of SEO. We're already starting to see every major AI company coming up with ways to penalize the scaled recommendations.
I'm producing 60–70% less content. My pipeline is growing. I want to help you think about KPIs for AI through a new lens.
One Seer page went from 52 to 1,000 ChatGPT citations, we'll show you how that happened and the strategy behind the tests we deploy and how they've turned out.
Everyone's racing for AI visibility. I want to pressure you to race for visibility that drives credibility.
I'll show you what long term AI success looks like and I'll give you the numbers to back it up.
I'll show how I'm using AI behind the scenes. Not to write more. To think harder about what's worth writing.
- Location: Room 205Tuesday, 10:15am - 10:45amModerator:Ashley Rutstein (Stuff About Advertising)Panelist:Laura Edwards (Viral Talent & Wild Vision)Speaker:Giacomo Zacchia (Pure Genius Protein)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Audience Building, CMWorld
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Social media isn't a broadcast channel anymore, it's where communities form, and brands that treat it like a megaphone get scrolled past. The ones that stand out are giving people a reason to belong.
Gen Z and Gen Alpha grab the headlines, but every generation now lives on social, each with different habits and expectations. In this session, leading voices break down how brands move from chasing attention to earning it, building real community, staying relevant across age groups, and creating connections that outlast any single trend.This session is presented by VidCon x LIONS Creators
- Location: Room 207Tuesday, 10:15am - 10:45amSpeaker:Robert Rose (Content Marketing Institute)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Thought Leadership, CMWorld
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Buyers have seen your thought leadership before. Fifty-nine percent say they've read almost the same piece from two different vendors, and the problem isn't the tool. Thought leadership is a promise that somebody here knows this, and many B2B marketers have built a thought leadership engine that makes that promise faster than anyone can keep it. Robert Rose shows how to earn the promise, write it down, and prove it: a three-question test, a one-page provenance standard, and a way to know your buyer's industry that no competitor's model can copy. Nobody knows? Somebody has to.
- Location: Room 104Tuesday, 10:15am - 10:45amSpeaker:Erin Miller (Yahoo)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Earned Media, PR, & Brand Visibility, CMWorld
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AI is rapidly transforming communications, not just how content is created, but how brands build credibility, engage audiences, and show up in an increasingly AI-mediated world.
In this session, Erin Miller, Vice President of Corporate Communications at Yahoo, will explore how communications teams can move beyond viewing AI as a productivity tool and start treating it as a strategic partner. From executive communications and content development to reputation management, audience intelligence, and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), communicators are being asked to adapt to entirely new ways information is discovered, interpreted, and amplified.
Drawing from Yahoo’s own approach to integrating AI across communications workflows, attendees will learn how leading teams are experimenting with custom AI tools, embedding AI into daily operations, and preparing for a future where communicators help shape not only the messages brands share, but the systems that deliver them.
The session will provide practical frameworks, lessons learned, and actionable strategies for building an AI-ready communications function while maintaining the trust, creativity, and human judgment that remain at the heart of effective storytelling. - Location: Room 109Tuesday, 10:15am - 10:45amSpeaker:Jenn Herrity (Indeed)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Career Building, CMWorld
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AI isn't coming for content marketers - it's already here. The question isn't whether your role will change, but whether you'll be the one leading that change or trying to catch up. In this session, we'll cut through the noise to give content marketers a clear-eyed, coaching-backed framework for staying indispensable by identifying the skills AI can't replicate (based on Indeed data), develop the fluency that makes them more valuable with AI than without it, and build a career posture that holds up regardless of what the next model release brings.
- Location: Room 201Tuesday, 10:15am - 10:45amSpeaker:Jane Qin Medeiros (Informa TechTarget)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: B2B Marketing Impact, CMWorld
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Hype. Panic. And a pile of tactics promising to get your brand cited by ChatGPT tomorrow.
Welcome to the state of AI in B2B marketing, where visibility tunnel vision is leading even the best marketers away from the bigger picture.
But the brands that win know visibility isn’t influence that endures. So they’re not optimizing for LLMs. They're building something LLMs can't take away: unmistakable authority that reverberates through every channel, community, and trusted voice their buyers listen to.
Enter the B2B AI Authority Index: a diagnostic for your brand's ability to influence buyers across AI-mediated journeys — and S.I.G.N.A.L., the framework for closing the gap it exposes. You'll leave knowing where you stand and what to fix first. - Location: Room 203Tuesday, 10:15am - 10:45amSpeaker:Michael Bagalman (Starz)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Marketing Analytics, Data, & ROI, CMWorld
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We love success stories, but results alone can’t tell us whether we made good decisions. A campaign can win because of timing, luck, budget, platform changes, or an audience shift no one predicted. Another can miss its targets even though the strategy was sound and the analysis was rigorous.
In this session, we’ll separate outcome quality from decision quality and show how content teams can evaluate campaigns by the strength of their assumptions, evidence, and reasoning… not just by whether “the line went up.” Attendees will leave with a practical framework for building decision logs, stress-testing assumptions, and running retrospectives that turn both wins and losses into honest learning.
Attendees will not need advanced statistical knowledge, but the session will be designed for marketers, analysts, and content leaders who already work with performance data and want to improve how they interpret results and learn from campaigns.
- Location: Four Seasons Ballroom 2Tuesday, 10:50am - 11:20amPass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Summit (All Access Required)Tracks: Summit | Marketing Effectiveness, LIONS
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What turns a good insight into marketing that truly moves people and delivers results? Through award-winning work from Molson Coors and Mischief, this conversation explores how marketers uncover the human and cultural truths that inspire breakthrough ideas, and how insight, strategy and creativity work together to drive measurable effectiveness. Expect a candid look behind the work, from the initial spark to the decisions that ultimately made the campaigns effective.
- Location: Room 106Tuesday, 11:00am - 11:30amSpeaker:Wil Reynolds (Seer Interactive)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Interactive ExperienceTracks: Ask Me Anything, CMWorld
Matches Found in Session Description:
Intimate conversations with CMWorld's most sought-after experts.
30 seats. 30 minutes. No slides. Just your questions!
Please note: seating is very limited and works on a first-come, first-served basis.
- Location: Room 104Tuesday, 11:00am - 11:30amSpeaker:Michael Weiss (Big Valley Marketing)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Earned Media, PR, & Brand Visibility, CMWorld
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Data can tell you what happened. The real opportunity is using it to decide what story to tell next. In this session, Michael Weiss of Big Valley Marketing, using real examples from actual clients, will show how PR and content teams can use audience insights, media intelligence, social signals and performance data to uncover stronger stories and make smarter decisions. He’ll share Big Valley’s approach to Story Mining, where content and media teams work together to identify the ideas, issues and opportunities that will earn attention.
This isn’t about creating more reports. It’s about turning data into stories that are relevant, credible and built to perform. - Location: Insight to Impact StageTuesday, 11:00am - 11:30amSpeaker:Amy Balliett (Material)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: AI Systems & Content Tech, CMWorld
Matches Found in Session Description:
The biggest hurdle to marketing innovation isn't a lack of ideas—it's the internal "IT Bottleneck." For years, marketers have been at the mercy of developer backlogs, waiting months for simple calculators, lead-gen tools, or data dashboards. That era is over. We have entered the age of Natural Language Infrastructure (familiarly known as "Vibe Coding").
Amy Balliett demonstrates how content leaders are now using conversational AI to build functional software on demand. This session is not for developers; it is for the strategist who wants to "describe" a tool into existence. Amy will showcase how to use tools like Replit Agent, Claude Code, and more to build custom, brand-safe marketing applications in minutes without writing a single line of traditional code. Learn how to transform your team from "tool users" to "tool builders," drastically reducing your technical debt while increasing your speed to market. - Location: Room 205Tuesday, 11:00am - 11:30amSpeaker:Jacqueline Loch (BetaKit)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Audience Building, CMWorld
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What can you learn from marketing leaders from fintech to automotive to legal and CPG who create content for top-tier brands seeking deep engagement with niche audiences? This session explores how content strategies focused on quality and engagement metrics drives results, builds brand trust, brand sentiment, customer engagement and ROI. What matters to your audiences and how do you create content that's worth their time?
Through a series of case study examples, this session explores content that is targeted and specific, follows publisher's best-practices and focuses on content formats that work, SEO and GEO strategies and engagement metrics and is visually immersive exploring digital storytelling formats from long-form content to images, animations, infographics, video and events. - Location: Room 203Tuesday, 11:00am - 11:30amSpeaker:Gigi Peccolo (HammerTech)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Marketing Analytics, Data, & ROI, CMWorld
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Have you ever wondered if the content you create is actually moving the needle? If so, you’re not alone. Content teams usually have access to top-of-funnel metrics, but less so the numbers your CMO cares about: leads, MQLs, and pipeline. The good news is, with a little curiosity and data savvy, you can prove your impact on these metrics, too.
In this session, I’ll go over the exact methods I’ve used to measure content’s impact at startups and Fortune 1000 companies, including $6M in pipeline sourced for an original research report campaign. I’ll also share how you can immediately increase your content’s impact on leads and pipeline with virtually no paid budget, plus which red flags to look out for when reporting on the pipeline impact. And last but not least, I’ll go over why getting support from MOPs is critical for this kind of reporting.
Whether you’re optimizing blogs, drafting eBooks, or leading an entire content team, this session is for anyone who wants to show how the content they’re making helps make your business money.
- Location: Room 109Tuesday, 11:00am - 11:30amSpeaker:Daniel Hooven (Squire)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Career Building, CMWorld
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Many marketing careers begin with tactical work: coordinating projects, updating websites, managing spreadsheets, and supporting campaigns behind the scenes. Mine started with taking lunch orders and organizing stacks of marketing collateral in a supply closet.
Over time, those early responsibilities turned into larger opportunities. Along the way, I learned that career growth rarely follows a straight line. The things you think will define your career early on are often not the things that ultimately move you forward.
This session shares lessons from nearly two decades in B2B marketing across technology, cybersecurity, fintech, and professional services, including my path from marketing practitioner to Vice President of Marketing at Schneider Downs and now Chief Revenue Officer at Squire. Through honest stories and practical insights, we will explore how marketers can identify where they create the most value, build influence inside their organizations, and use a marketing-first mindset to grow into broader revenue, growth, and leadership roles.
For marketers who want to keep growing, this session focuses on defining what success looks like for you and building the skills, credibility, confidence, and perspective needed to reach the next level of your career, wherever that may lead.
- Location: Room 207Tuesday, 11:00am - 11:30amSpeakers:Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Thought Leadership, CMWorld
Matches Found in Session Description:
Content marketers everywhere face a familiar challenge: being told what to create instead of leading the strategic narrative. This session shows how the marketing team at DHL Supply Chain flipped the script.
In a world where brands are under increasing pressure to articulate a credible, future focused point of view, the team built Insight 2030 — a large-scale, research-backed outlook that informed a flagship report, aligned internal stakeholders, strengthened sales conversations, helped customers justify investments and established a unified narrative for the year.
We'll share how the report was built, how its themes were structured for clarity and impact and how this research became a credible foundation for influencing content direction across marketing and the broader business.
Attendees will learn how Insight 2030 transformed into a multi-tiered content engine, with modular storytelling that broke high-level findings into a series of focused mini-campaigns designed to sustain engagement over time. We'll also walk through how launching the report as a tent pole initiative at a major industry event created instant momentum, expanded reach and activated micro-storytelling across channels.
This session offers a practical, repeatable framework for turning deep research into compelling, scalable content that drives both internal alignment and external impact. B2B marketers will walk away with actionable steps to build insight-led storytelling programs within their own organizations — and to claim a more strategic role in shaping what their business is talking about. - Location: Room 110Tuesday, 11:00am - 11:30amSpeaker:David Tran (Neumo)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Content Operations & Workflow, CMWorld
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What if one piece of content could power your social media, fuel your sales team, generate leads, and build your brand—all quarter long? For a small marketing team, that's not a goal. It's a survival strategy.
In this session, you'll learn how a small marketing team built a repeatable content system anchored by one simple but powerful principle: quality over quantity. Instead of churning out content to keep up, the focus shifted to creating fewer, better assets built to last and designed to stretch. One well-crafted cornerstone piece (whatever format fits your brand) can be thoughtfully extended into social proof quotes, RFP references, targeted ad creative, gated lead generators, and syndicated campaigns. The result is a content library that grows smarter over time, not just bigger.
You'll also learn how to weave AI smartly into your workflow, not as a crutch or a content generator, but as a behind-the-scenes efficiency tool. From setting up repeatable processes to automating a library of social media copy variations your team can pull from and refine, AI becomes the assistant that cuts development time down so your team can focus on what matters: creating content that's authentically yours.
Walk away with a clear blueprint for identifying your own cornerstone content, building it efficiently with a small team, and scaling it into a campaign series that grows with you quarter over quarter. No massive budget required. No big team needed. Just the right content, built with intention—and the right tools working quietly in the background. - Location: Room 201Tuesday, 11:00am - 11:30amSpeaker:Alejandro Garcia Medina (LinkedIn)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: B2B Marketing Impact, CMWorld
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The rules of B2B marketing have changed. Decision-makers don't want to be sold to; they want to be educated by people they trust. In this session, we'll explore how the rise of B2B creators is reshaping demand generation and making credibility the new currency. Based on a data-driven creative audit of creator-led B2B ads across platforms, join us to rethink what great B2B content looks like, and who should be making it. - Location: Room 105Tuesday, 11:00am - 11:30amSpeaker:Andrew Hanelly (Revmade)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Content Strategy, CMWorld
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- Location: Four Seasons Ballroom 2Tuesday, 11:30am - 12:00pmSpeakers:Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Summit (All Access Required)Tracks: Summit | Marketing Effectiveness, LIONS
Matches Found in Session Description:
- Location: Room 105Tuesday, 11:45am - 12:15pmSpeakers:Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Sponsored SessionTracks: Partner Case Studies, CMWorld
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Your audience's attention has never been so contested — or so fickle. 78% of consumers want to see more brand video in 2026, but 75% of them are multitasking while they watch, splitting focus across two screens at once. The takeaway: making more video isn't enough anymore. You need to make the right video, in the right way, at the right moment.
In this masterclass, we break down the 4 trends shaping who wins attention today and who gets scrolled past — from searchable video (search is going visual) to smart short-form, production speed, and the balance between AI and human authenticity. These aren't abstract predictions — they're concrete, data-backed, immediately actionable levers your team can put to work, no matter your size.
If you want to leave this show with a clear playbook for your 2027 video strategy — not just another list of trends — this session is for you - Location: Room 203Tuesday, 11:45am - 12:15pmSpeaker:Darren Chait (beehiiv)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Sponsored SessionTracks: Partner Case Studies, CMWorld
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Your content marketing program has been thrown on its head. AI answers borrow your best ideas without your name. Algorithms decide who sees your posts. And search only reaches the 5% of buyers who are already looking. The problem is where it lives. The brands winning right now have something better: the right to show up in front of the same people every single week, without asking an algorithm first. This session shows you how to build content your audience looks forward to, with the team and budget you already have, and how to prove it's working.
- Location: Room 106Tuesday, 11:45am - 12:15pmSpeaker:Robert Rose (Content Marketing Institute)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Interactive ExperienceTracks: Ask Me Anything, CMWorld
Matches Found in Session Description:
Intimate conversations with CMWorld's most sought-after experts.
30 seats. 30 minutes. No slides. Just your questions!
Please note: seating is very limited and works on a first-come, first-served basis.
- Location: Insight to Impact StageTuesday, 11:45am - 12:15pmSpeaker:Megan Gilhooly (OneTrust)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: AI Systems & Content Tech, CMWorld
Matches Found in Session Description:
Scaling content operations with agentic AI is a leadership problem, not a tooling problem: prepare the whole team so you are not the bottleneck, start with one real workflow instead of waiting for a perfect stack, and put human judgment only where it changes risk and value—regulatory interpretation, technical accuracy, and marketing narrative. Agents and knowledge graphs can draft, retrieve, and assemble at scale across GRC, product, and campaign content, but they pull from a finite budget just as people do, so leaders must grow talent that can adapt and place brains where they accelerate bots rather than compete with them. The operators who make that hybrid system work are curious under discomfort, obsessed with one concrete problem, and able to prove results stakeholders will fund.
- Location: Room 104Tuesday, 11:45am - 12:15pmSpeaker:Alli Berry (MarketWise)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Earned Media, PR, & Brand Visibility, CMWorld
Matches Found in Session Description:
Brand marketing and performance marketing are often treated as separate disciplines, but the strongest marketing strategies recognize that each makes the other more effective. Brand builds the awareness, familiarity, and trust that influence whether audiences search, click, engage, and ultimately convert. As AI-powered search and LLMs reshape how people discover information, brand authority and recognition will become even more critical to visibility and growth.
In this session, Alli Berry will share a practical framework for measuring brand marketing across the customer journey and connecting it to performance outcomes. Attendees will learn how to combine search, website, social, survey, and CRM data to demonstrate how brand investment supports acquisition, conversion, retention, and long-term business growth. - Location: Room 109Tuesday, 11:45am - 12:15pmSpeakers:Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Sponsored SessionTracks: Partner Case Studies, CMWorld
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AI is transforming enterprise marketing faster than most organizations can adapt. New tools promise faster content creation, deeper personalization and greater efficiency – but many teams are finding their marketing technology stack isn't built to support them. Legacy platforms, disconnected systems, content governance challenges and vendor lock-in make it difficult to integrate AI into existing workflows and scale innovation across brands.
In this session, leaders from Janus Henderson and WordPress VIP will explore what it really takes to build an AI-ready marketing foundation. Drawing on real-world experience modernizing enterprise marketing technology, they'll discuss how open, interoperable platforms help marketing teams experiment faster, integrate emerging AI capabilities without rebuilding their stack, and maintain control over their content and data. - Location: Room 110Tuesday, 11:45am - 12:15pmSpeakers:Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Sponsored SessionTracks: Partner Case Studies, CMWorld
Matches Found in Session Description:
Marketers know that a folder full of assets is not a creative brief. Yet many organizations expect AI to produce useful marketing by giving it access to a content library and writing a better prompt.
The missing ingredient is context: who the audience is, what outcome matters, which facts are authoritative, which assets are approved, and what is valid right now.
Through a single product-launch example, this 10-minute session will show the difference between AI working from disconnected content and AI receiving a curated brief assembled from brand, audience, product, and asset information. You’ll leave with a simple test for your next AI initiative: does it merely have access to your content, or does it have the context required to use it? - Location: Room 207Tuesday, 11:45am - 12:15pmSpeakers:Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Sponsored SessionTracks: Partner Case Studies, CMWorld
Matches Found in Session Description:
AI has made it easier than ever for subject matter experts to generate content, but easier to generate isn't the same as easier to trust. For service providers and technical organizations, the real bottleneck was never ideas; it was getting expert knowledge into a form that's on-brand, audience-ready, and safe to publish.
In this session, Holly Enneking, VP Marketing at Markup AI, and Bri Jones, VP Marketing at Stitch, break down how Stitch built a repeatable system to turn internal expertise into a core content and pipeline channel without marketing becoming a bottleneck or a rubber stamp. - Location: The Book BuzzTuesday, 12:00pm - 12:30pmSpeaker:Amy Balliett (Reelrandom, LLC)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Networking
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Books for the book signing will be available for purchase at The Book Buzz on the Show Floor.
- Location: Show FloorTuesday, 12:15pm - 1:15pmPass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Networking
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Looking to find your people? Lunch and Connections is the perfect chance to meet fellow attendees who share your interests and chat over lunch. Whether you're swapping marketing tips or just having fun talking about your favorite hobbies, there’s a spot for everyone. Grab a seat and get ready to dive into some lively conversations!
- Location: Insight to Impact StageTuesday, 12:30pm - 1:30pmSpeaker:Melanie Deziel (MelanieDeziel.com)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Interactive ExperienceTracks: The Content Lab, CMWorld
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Got a content problem keeping you up at night? Strategy stressing you out? Conflict in your content team? Bring it to Content Therapy!
In this live, interactive AMA- style session, attendees will have the chance to anonymously submit their sensitive content marketing questions, challenges, frustrations, and “is it just me?” moments, and a highly qualified MD (that’s “Melanie Deziel”) will talk through the solution on stage, in real time. From creative blocks, resource challenges, and content strategy dilemmas to AI overwhelm, management mayhem, and “what the heck should I post?” problems, no question is too big, too small, or too weird for Content Therapy.
Come with questions. Leave with practical advice and probably a few answers to problems you didn’t realize you had.
- Location: Room 106Tuesday, 2:00pm - 2:30pmSpeaker:Bennie Johnson (American Marketing Association)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Interactive ExperienceTracks: Ask Me Anything, CMWorld
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Intimate conversations with CMWorld's most sought-after experts.
30 seats. 30 minutes. No slides. Just your questions!
Please note: seating is very limited and works on a first-come, first-served basis.
- Location: Room 207Tuesday, 2:00pm - 2:30pmSpeaker:Lee Odden (TopRank Marketing)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Thought Leadership, CMWorld
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When everyone has the same AI tools for marketing, how does anyone stand out?
AI has created many benefits but it has also boosted efficiency and scale - of mediocrity. Feeds and inboxes are now flooded with low-quality emails, social media posts, and content chasing conversions while lacking credibility and failing to engage. B2B business leaders don’t want more content — they want answers. They want credible information from sources they can believe in.
In this presentation, Lee Odden will share the latest research on B2B thought leadership and a framework for helping B2B brands create a system of data-informed, multi-channel content experiences that build trust and drive full-funnel results. - Location: Room 105Tuesday, 2:00pm - 2:30pmSpeaker:Amanda Natividad (Zero Click Marketing)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Content Strategy, CMWorld
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Clicks are harder to earn, harder to attribute, and less representative of how audiences actually discover, trust, and choose brands. Search engines answer questions directly. Social platforms reward native content. AI tools summarize, cite, and recommend without sending predictable traffic. And audiences increasingly make decisions based on what they see, hear, and remember before they ever visit your website.
In this hands-on workshop, Amanda Natividad will show marketers how to build a Zero Click Marketing strategy: a practical approach to creating content that delivers value where the audience already is, while still creating meaningful paths to deeper engagement, trust, and conversion.
Attendees will choose one existing campaign, content pillar, report, webinar, podcast episode, or thought leadership asset and transform it into a zero-click distribution plan. Together, we'll map the audience, identify the core idea worth spreading, package that idea into platform-native formats, and define what to measure when clicks are no longer the whole story.
- Location: Room 201Tuesday, 2:00pm - 2:30pmSpeaker:Derek Yueh (LinkedIn)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: B2B Marketing Impact, CMWorld
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Buyability is ensuring your business is the right choice for the buying group by being discoverable, credible, and winnable. But what does it take to become the choice everyone can say yes to?
Customers are navigating a very different buying environment than they were a few years ago. AI is reshaping discovery, buying groups are expanding, executive scrutiny is increasing, and buyers complete more research before talking to sales. How can brands influence decisions that increasingly happen before they enter the conversation?
As buying journeys become more complex, Buyability provides a framework for helping brands earn attention, build trust, and drive consensus across the buying group, increasing the likelihood they become the chosen solution. Join this session to explore what makes a brand discoverable, credible, and winnable—and where your marketing can make it easier for the whole buying group to say yes. - Location: Four Seasons Ballroom 2Tuesday, 2:00pm - 2:35pmPass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Summit (All Access Required)Tracks: Summit | Marketing Effectiveness, LIONS
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What do Connecticut pizza and breast health have in common? More than you might think.
Through two Effie Gold-winning campaigns - Connecticut Tourism’s bold claim to pizza supremacy and Novartis’ Your Attention Please - this conversation explores how brands can turn unexpected subjects into culturally relevant content that earns attention and drives meaningful impact. We’ll go behind the work to uncover the insights, creative choices and calculated risks that helped these ideas break through, and what they reveal about content marketing’s growing role in making effectiveness happen. - Location: Room 110Tuesday, 2:00pm - 2:30pmSpeaker:Drew Swain (Amazon)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Content Operations & Workflow, CMWorld
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You know what nobody tells you about content marketing? Writing is the easy part. The hard part is everything that comes before and after: getting ghosted by your subject matter experts, creating insights (with no budget), correcting senior leaders on what content actually is, and more. Content marketers today need the tenacity of an investigative journalist and the curiosity of a detective. In this session, you'll get a crash course in what it takes to be a content marketer within a large organization. You'll learn how to master the messy, human, and essential groundwork that turns internal roadblocks into content that sings for customers. - Location: Room 113Tuesday, 2:00pm - 3:00pmSpeakers:Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Interactive ExperienceTracks: The Content Lab, CMWorld
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Content marketers wear many hats. We can be strategists, writers, editors, producers, analysts, and collaborators. But when it’s time to articulate that value in a job search, a performance review, or a salary conversation, many of us default to vague descriptors that don’t capture impact or unique value. This workshop addresses that value head-on, turning lived experience into a compelling, evidence-backed narrative. Attendees will leave the session with vocabulary to articulate the breadth of their skills, whether they are a jack-of-all-trades or a specialist.
Most skill-building exercises ask you to reflect on what you think you're good at. This one goes further. Attendees will map their skills against Indeed's proprietary labor market data, which provides real intelligence on what employers are actually searching for right now. That means participants leave with more than self-awareness: they leave with language that's been validated against the market, and a skill portfolio they can use with confidence in any career conversation.
- Location: Room 109Tuesday, 2:00pm - 2:30pmSpeaker:Michelle Ngome (African American Marketing Association)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Career Building, CMWorld
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Marketing leaders today face relentless pressure to deliver results while navigating rapid change due to technological advancement, talent challenges, and shifting customer expectations. Many teams are busy completing projects, but not truly advancing.
The Elevation Cycle™ is a leadership framework designed to help marketing leaders move from reactive execution to intentional, sustainable growth. Rather than chasing tactics, the TEC framework focuses on strengthening people, strategy, and organizational capability in a continuous cycle of improvement. - Location: Room 104Tuesday, 2:00pm - 2:30pmSpeakers:Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Earned Media, PR, & Brand Visibility, CMWorld
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How AI is changing what content gets seen, trusted and acted on
The presentation will explore how generative AI is fundamentally changing the way content gets discovered, evaluated and acted upon. For decades, content marketers have optimized for human readers, search engines and measurable engagement. Now, AI systems increasingly stand between brands and the people making purchasing, investment, hiring and partnership decisions, interpreting content, determining what is credible and shaping the answers audiences receive.
Curtis & Emily will show why this shift requires a new approach to content strategy: one that builds credibility beyond individual pieces of content, actively manages what AI systems understand about a brand, recognizes that different AI platforms have different “audiences” and sourcing behaviors, and measures not only who consumes content but what AI says because of it. - Location: Room 203Tuesday, 2:00pm - 2:30pmSpeaker:A. Lee Judge (Content Monsta)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Marketing Analytics, Data, & ROI, CMWorld
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You're measuring by a stick you can't possibly win with. Content marketing has been measured like a paid ad for years, judged on a single asset, a single campaign, or a single quarter. Content does not work that way. Content ROI is a system metric, and you cannot measure a system one piece at a time.
This session hands attendees a working replacement: five KPIs that show whether the content engine is actually running, grouped into a scoreboard that sales and leadership will read without being asked. Hear how one insurance brand proved content's ROI through a metric no one was tracking.
Who is ready to ditch the scorecards that are impossible to bank on? Leave with new ways to prove your content's worth that your boss will actually believe in.
- Location: Room 106Tuesday, 2:45pm - 3:15pmSpeaker:Amanda Natividad (Zero Click Marketing)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Interactive ExperienceTracks: Ask Me Anything, CMWorld
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Intimate conversations with CMWorld's most sought-after experts.
30 seats. 30 minutes. No slides. Just your questions!
Please note: seating is very limited and works on a first-come, first-served basis.
- From Content to Care: How HMH Built a Human-Centered Content Ecosystem That Moves Patients to ActionLocation: Room 105Tuesday, 2:45pm - 3:15pmSpeakers:Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Content Strategy, CMWorld
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Healthcare decisions begin long before a patient enters a physician’s office. People search for symptoms, weigh options, seek reassurance and look for guidance they can trust. For Hackensack Meridian Health, that created an opportunity to rethink the role content could play across the entire patient journey. Rather than treating print, digital, email and social as separate channels, HMH built a connected, human-centered content ecosystem designed around real audience needs and measurable action. Audience research and behavioral insights helped identify what consumers wanted most—clarity, reassurance and guidance—and informed a new editorial framework built to Simplify, Demystify, Humanize, Educate and Mobilize.
The transformation came to life through the evolution of HealthU into Healthier You, a warmer, more personalized content experience supported by audience segmentation, regional relevance, accessible storytelling and clearer pathways to care.
In this session, Hackensack Meridian Health will share how it shifted content from an institutional publishing model into a strategic growth engine—one that builds trust, increases relevance and connects engagement to appointments, patient acquisition and business impact. - Location: Insight to Impact StageTuesday, 2:45pm - 3:15pmSpeaker:Ellen Houston (Qualtrics)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Sponsored SessionTracks: Insight to Impact, CMWorld
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AI democratized research, putting powerful tools in the hands of nearly everyone while pushing traditional processes to the breaking point. As the volume and sources for research grow, distinguishing genuine insight from AI-generated noise is harder than ever. Drawing on 18 months of ground-level conversations with teams navigating this transformation, this session reveals how research processes broke, what modern insights teams actually need, and how to build resilient systems for cross-functional collaboration.Uncover where traditional collaboration fails as research tools spread to new teams.
Learn shared, actionable tactics to detect flawed, AI-hallucinated, or low-quality research before it drives business decisions.
Implement updated frameworks that align insights leaders with business partners for trustworthy, high-impact decisions. - Location: Room 203Tuesday, 2:45pm - 3:15pmSpeaker:Gavin Austin (Salesforce)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Marketing Analytics, Data, & ROI, CMWorld
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Most content teams decide what to retire, rewrite, or build next on gut feel or whoever complained the loudest. Here's a different way to run it: skip the dashboard. Work the data directly using a headless approach built on the hard metrics you can actually audit, and the AI that's digging through the feedback no dashboard can ever surface. See how this content triage process actually works, and what changed once we stopped waiting for the next product release to catch up on outdated content.
- Location: Room 110Tuesday, 2:45pm - 3:15pmSpeakers:Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Content Operations & Workflow, CMWorld
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The highest-performing B2B content is a mix of industry-specific thought leadership articles, case studies and data sheets — but the SMEs who know these details best have the least time to crank out the information that content marketers desperately want. If you work in the B2B space, your products and/or services are likely complicated and highly technical, but some information gets lost in translation from the language of engineers down to what actual buyers need to hear. Your content should bridge the gap between technical details and value differentiation for decision-makers.
How does a small marketing team efficiently leverage company-specific expertise to build a content pipeline that leads to a results-driven marketing and sales funnel?
Get an inside look at how Nucor, a Fortune 500 B2B steel manufacturer, and its content writing consultant, Abigail Grace Writing, tackled this issue. Learn how they leveraged SMEs and partners to streamline technical information gathering, then translated that process into effective brand-driven storytelling to drive engagement. - Location: Room 201Tuesday, 2:45pm - 3:15pmModerator:Jared Kleinstein (Gondola)Panelists:Heike Young (Heike Young, Inc.), Zoe Hartsfield (The Little Ghost), Obaid Durrani (the craft and the code)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: B2B Marketing Impact, CMWorld
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The creator economy is transforming B2B marketing, and LinkedIn is at the center of it. With over 1 billion members and surging engagement, it's become the go-to platform for B2B creators turning thought leadership into business growth.
This session features top LinkedIn creators sharing sharp, practical insights on what's driving results right now, and why your business can't afford to sit on the sidelines. - Location: Four Seasons Ballroom 2Tuesday, 2:45pm - 3:10pmSpeaker:Danielle Tenconi (Effie Worldwide)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Summit (All Access Required)Tracks: Summit | Marketing Effectiveness, LIONS
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Effectiveness isn't reserved for the biggest brands - anyone can make it happen. This session busts myths about what effectiveness is and isn't, and reveals the building blocks of success. You'll discover the Effie Framework, a deceptively simple, step-by-step tool for any kind of marketing. Then we'll lift the lid on eos, crowned the world's most effective at the Effie Best of the Best. This US-born, insight- and content-led challenger combined a small budget with big ambitions to become market leader - and stay there. Expect an entertaining session packed with practical ideas you can put to work on your next project
- Location: Room 104Tuesday, 2:45pm - 3:15pmSpeaker:JP Lespinasse (Lightcast)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Earned Media, PR, & Brand Visibility, CMWorld
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Long-form content earns attention when it connects an organization’s distinctive expertise to a conversation people already care about. In this session, JP Lespinasse will unpack how Lightcast aligned proprietary insights with a looming global crisis to create The Rising Storm, winner of the 2025 Content Marketing Institute Award for Best Use of Original Research; which got pick-up in the NY Times, Newsweek, Forbes, NPR and more. Attendees will learn how to pressure-test ideas against the zeitgeist, transform complex topics into an accessible and newsworthy narrative, and involve PR from the beginning so a report generates stronger headlines, more media angles, and sustained earned attention.
- Location: Room 205Tuesday, 2:45pm - 3:15pmSpeakers:Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Audience Building, CMWorld
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Your content is being seen. Your dashboards say so. And yet in the next planning meeting, someone will ask why none of it is moving the business. This is the defining tension of content marketing in 2026: we've optimised for reach and lost influence. AI has made insight generation fast and cheap, which means every competitor is briefing from the same observations, producing the same content, chasing the same audience signals and copying each others playbooks. The result is a flood of content that performs at people rather than connecting with them and a growing inability to explain to the CFO why any of it matters.
Robin Karakash and Tash Walker have spent a combined three decades helping brands like Mozilla, ASICS, Coca-Cola and Diageo do something different by connecting and building content that owns cultural ground.
In this session they'll show how the brands winning right now start from understanding a cultural tension, the real friction their audience is living inside and build and own a narrative system around resolving it. They'll show you how to measure it: from cultural conversation share and narrative adoption to the two brand markers that predict long-term growth but often forgotten on dashboard.
You'll leave with a diagnostic, a narrative leadership framework and a measurement system you can take back to your team on Monday. - Location: Room 109Tuesday, 2:45pm - 3:15pmSpeaker:Laura Brown (Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: SessionTracks: Career Building, CMWorld
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- Location: Room 113Tuesday, 3:00pm - 3:30pmSpeakers:Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Interactive ExperienceTracks: Ask Me Anything, CMWorld
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Intimate conversations with CMWorld's most sought-after experts.
30 seats. 30 minutes. No slides. Just your questions!
Please note: seating is very limited and works on a first-come, first-served basis.
- Location: Four Seasons Ballroom 2Tuesday, 3:10pm - 3:20pmSpeaker:Juliet Haygarth (Effie Worldwide)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Summit (All Access Required)Tracks: Summit | Marketing Effectiveness, LIONS
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- Location: Headliner Stage | Hall BTuesday, 3:30pm - 3:45pmSpeaker:Jake Karls (Mid-Day Squares)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: KeynoteTracks: General Session, CMWorld
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In a world where so many brands and people look, sound, and communicate the same, the ability to tell your story and show who you really are has become a real competitive advantage.
Jake Karls shares how storytelling and authenticity helped Mid Day Squares stand out in one of the most crowded industries in the world, built around one simple idea: if you want an unaverage outcome, you have to be willing to make unaverage decisions.
In a world increasingly shaped by AI, one of the last unfair advantages we have is simply being human. Showing the real story behind the business, the emotion, personality, risks, failures, uncomfortable moments, and people behind it, is becoming more valuable, not less.
You'll leave wanting to take bigger risks, stand out from the crowd, tell your story more openly, and use authenticity to make people actually feel something. - Location: Headliner Stage | Hall BTuesday, 3:45pm - 4:05pmKeynotes:Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: KeynoteTracks: General Session, CMWorld
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In a culture obsessed with what’s new and what’s next, brands are under constant pressure to reinvent themselves and be at the center of culture. But in the pursuit of relevance, it’s easy to lose sight of what made people care about you in the first place.
For Crocs, the answer wasn’t to become something new. It was to lean further into what had always made Crocs, Crocs – a brand that has never quite fit the mold, and gives its wearers permission not to either.
In this session, Crocs CMO Carly Gomez and Flower Shop Founder & CCO Alastair Merry will unpack how they uncovered a brand truth hiding in plain sight, turned it into a platform with the power to drive the business, and used it to continue to ignite cultural relevance. - Location: Headliner Stage | Hall BTuesday, 4:15pm - 5:15pmKeynote:Gabrielle Union (Flawless By Gabrielle Union, Bitsy's and Proudly)Pass Types: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: KeynoteTrack: General Session
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- Location: Show FloorTuesday, 5:15pm - 6:00pmPass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Networking
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- Location: Coors FieldTuesday, 7:00pm - 10:00pmPass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Networking
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Your conference badge is your ticket to an unforgettable evening at Coors Field, home of the Colorado Rockies. After a full day of ideas and inspiration, keep the momentum going under the stadium lights with great conversations and new connections.
Shuttle buses will depart from the Welton Drive Shuttle Pickup in Lobby B of the Colorado Convention Center and loop continuously from 6:45 pm to 10:30 pm.
Get into the spirit and represent your favorite sports team by wearing a hat, shirt, or jersey!
Find more details here: https://www.contentmarketingworld.com/extra-innings-party/ - Location: Lobby AWednesday, 8:00am - 12:00pmPass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Registration
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- Location: Lobby AWednesday, 8:00am - 9:00amPass Types: All Access, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Networking
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- Location: Room 109Wednesday, 9:00am - 10:30amSpeaker:Cathy McKnight (Seventh Bear)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: WorkshopTracks: Workshops, CMWorld
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90%+ of teams use AI. Less than 40% can prove ROI. That gap isn’t a tool or tech problem. It’s a foundational systems problem that existed long before the team’s first prompt.
This is a working session, not a lecture. You’ll run diagnostics on your own content operations and leave knowing where the cracks are. Then we’ll talk about the fixes, the same ones used by teams actually winning with AI, that puts foundational systems first and adding intelligence second.
If your content feel generic, your channels feel noisy, and the C-Suite keeps asking about returns you can’t show, this is the session that will help you understand why, and what to do Monday morning to change all that.
- Location: Room 104Wednesday, 9:00am - 12:45pmSpeakers:Robert Rose (Content Marketing Institute), Molly Soat (American Marketing Association), Bennie Johnson (American Marketing Association), Jen O'Brien (American Marketing Association)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: WorkshopTracks: Workshops, CMWorld
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Are you looking for an overall introduction into the best practices strategy of modern content marketing? We have a full 12-hour course that we’ve partnered with the American Marketing Association for a complete certification program. But for Content Marketing World, we’ve assembled a fast and furious – but thoughtful and practical – 3-hour workshop to dive into the best practices of modern content marketing strategy and how to future proof your career.
This workshop is designed to bridge your knowledge, and elevate your career as a strategic content marketer. This isn’t a workshop on how to write more creatively, or rank higher in search, or apply AI in your strategy (though we’ll touch on ALL of those things). This is a workshop designed to illuminate the strategic approach to modern content marketing and prepare you for the next wave of change to jobs, roles, and skills.
Attendees will receive 3 AMA Continuing Education Units (CEUs) and a special discount for the full online training program. - Location: Room 110Wednesday, 9:00am - 10:30amSpeakers:Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: WorkshopTracks: Workshops, CMWorld
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AI can write a competent blog post in 30 seconds. What it can't replicate is real expertise from real people with real opinions. But most brands leave their subject matter experts on the bench, or ask them to "just post on LinkedIn" with zero infrastructure.
This workshop is a blueprint for building a brand advocacy program that turns the humans behind your company into a content and distribution engine. We'll walk through the real operational model that scaled our LinkedIn and YouTube presence 20x — thought-leader enablement, phased company-wide rollout, and video production at every budget level.
You'll hear both sides of it: What it takes to stand up a program like this (Traci Ruether), and what it's like to participate as an employee thought leader (Jen Cornwell). - Location: Room 113Wednesday, 9:00am - 10:30amSpeaker:Ray Martinez (Archer Education)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: WorkshopTracks: Workshops, CMWorld
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In 1993, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) peaked at #41 and sold 30,000 copies its first week. Four years later, Wu-Tang Forever debuted at #1 with more than 600,000. The music didn’t get more commercial. The structure around it changed.
RZA signed nine artists to five different major labels, kept them under one name, then put them on each other’s records over and over. Every solo album stood on its own, and every one made the other eight worth more. That’s a graph.
Most content libraries are the opposite. Hundreds of pages, each standing alone, none making the rest stronger. Answer engines don’t reward the page. They reward the entity, and an entity is its relationships.
We’ll take RZA’s architecture apart and rebuild it as a working method for entity-led content strategy.
- Location: Room 105Wednesday, 9:00am - 10:30amSpeaker:Lev Mazin (aytm)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: WorkshopTracks: Summit | Marketing Effectiveness, LIONS
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You know the questions that decide a campaign. Will this creative land? Is this the message that moves people? Which idea deserves the budget? Getting real consumer answers to those used to mean a research request, a queue, and a timeline that outlived the decision. AI changed that.
In this hands-on workshop, aytm co-founder and CEO Lev Mazin walks you through the Bridge by aytm, an AI-powered insights platform built for marketers and brand managers. You'll take one real campaign scenario start to finish: the question you're actually trying to answer, the consumer test the Bridge builds around it, the answer that comes back, and the campaign call you make because of it. You bring what you know about your brand and your category. The Bridge handles the research mechanics.
You'll leave with the whole through-line, from a question on Monday to a campaign decision you can put in front of your leadership.
- Location: Room 203Wednesday, 9:00am - 10:30amSpeakers:Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: WorkshopTracks: Workshops, CMWorld
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AI search has changed how content gets discovered, but discoverability alone is not enough. Content also has to earn attention, build trust, and move people to act. In this 90-minute workshop, we'll break down the two systems every content program now needs: relevance for search engines and AI systems, and resonance for the humans on the other side. Attendees will work through a practical framework for evaluating existing content, finding gaps, and turning those gaps into stronger briefs and updates. We'll use real examples to show where technical SEO, information gain, audience insight, and creative execution come together.
- Location: Room 201Wednesday, 9:00am - 10:30amSpeaker:Jake Karls (Mid-Day Squares)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: WorkshopTracks: Workshops, CMWorld
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In a world where people are constantly being marketed to, the brands and people that stand out are usually the ones that feel the most human.
In this interactive workshop, Jake Karls breaks down how to find the stories already happening inside your business and turn them into content, messaging, and communication that people actually connect with.
Using real examples from Mid Day Squares, participants will learn how to identify what makes a story worth telling, how to communicate with more personality and emotion, and how to avoid sounding overly polished, corporate, or like everyone else.
The workshop is built around a simple idea: your story is only valuable if people can feel it. - Location: Room 205Wednesday, 9:00am - 10:30amSpeaker:Andy Crestodina (Orbit Media Studios, Inc.)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: WorkshopTracks: Workshops, CMWorld
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From the first moment inspiration strikes to the final performance reports, this session reveals a comprehensive process for producing high performing content.
After 15+ years of experience writing and promoting 600+ articles that attract 3M+ views per year, we’ve put all of the best aspects of our content creation process into a single set of best practices.
It might be an inspired point of view. It might be a detailed how-to. Whatever the topic and format, this process sheds new light on the potential for performance. Even the most experienced content writers editors will leave with a new idea or two. Be ready to adjust your workflow …and maybe your content strategy.
“Sometimes, magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.” - Teller - Location: Room 113Wednesday, 10:45am - 1:45pmSpeakers:Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: WorkshopTracks: Workshops, CMWorld
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- Location: Room 203Wednesday, 10:45am - 12:15pmSpeaker:Melanie Deziel (MelanieDeziel.com)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: WorkshopTracks: Workshops, CMWorld
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Whether you're part of an enterprise content team, or a solo marketers, we're all tasked with making the best possible content with the resources that we have. We look for every opportunity to reduce the time, money, and manpower wasted during production and distribution, so it's no wonder so many marketers are turning to AI to generate content ideas (or even the content itself!) There's no question that GenAI can work fast, but struggles with the originality and humanity that make our content resonate with our real human prospects and customers.
In this session, you'll learn systems and processes that can replace your reliance on AI-generated content ideas, enabling you to confidently and efficiently generate more ideas—and better ideas—all on your own. This session will get your creative juices flowing and help you generate a seemingly endless number of unique content ideas for your brand on the spot, and these workflows can be brought back to your team and replicated time and again, whenever you need more content ideas to feed the machine. - Location: Room 105Wednesday, 10:45am - 2:00pmSpeaker:Danielle Tenconi (Effie Worldwide)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: WorkshopTracks: Summit | Marketing Effectiveness, LIONS
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Effie has training courses for marketers at every stage of their career. The objective of them all is simple: to give participants the confidence, courage, and judgement they need to create truly effective work.
We can’t promise to achieve all of that in a single workshop, but we will set you firmly on the path to becoming a more effective marketer.
Part 1: The Anatomy of Effectiveness
90 minutes | 10:45 to 12:15
We will guide you through the core principles of marketing effectiveness and share the practical ways you can apply them to your own challenges.
Using the Effie Framework as our foundational tool to anchor your strategic thinking, we will turn theory into practice by unpacking some of the world's best Effie award-winning cases. Together, we will dissect how these principles were applied at every critical milestone—from objective setting and insights to the final creative ideas and results.
Part 2: The Effectiveness Evaluator
90 minutes (including a working lunch) | 12:15 to 2:00
Evaluating effectiveness is a distinct skill, and this session focuses on building that muscle by placing you directly in the chair of an Effie Judge.
Two real Effie-winning cases, the actual scoresheet, and 75 minutes to decide what they are worth. You will score alone, debate your numbers at your table, and then hear exactly what the real jury said—including where they agreed (or disagreed!) with you.
It is the fastest strategic calibration we know. Once you have debated real-world work at this level of detail, you cannot look at your own work the same way again.
- Location: Room 205Wednesday, 10:45am - 12:15pmSpeaker:Dale Bertrand (Fire&Spark)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: WorkshopTracks: Workshops, CMWorld
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We approached AI search optimization the same way we approached SEO, with time-consuming research and content planning. Then we learned that AI search optimization at scale requires AI. This case study details how we built proactive, AI-powered workflows for AI search. Learn how we use AI to identify trending micro-topics, automate content refreshes, and monitor campaign performance. - Location: Room 201Wednesday, 10:45am - 12:15pmSpeaker:Amy Balliett (Material)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: WorkshopTracks: Workshops, CMWorld
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The traditional journey from a raw concept to a market-ready brand is usually a fragmented, multi-month ordeal involving expensive research, slow prototyping, and disconnected campaign production. In 2026, these silos are a choice, not a necessity. We have entered the era of Agentic Orchestration, where a single strategist can lead a digital workforce to research, build, and launch a complete brand ecosystem in a fraction of the time.
In this 90-minute hands-on workshop, Amy Balliett provides the definitive blueprint for the "AI-First Playbook." Through a real-world case study of a mobile application brought to market exclusively through AI solutions, Amy demonstrates how to orchestrate the full launch lifecycle. This session provides hands-on, step-by-step training for the exact tools that allowed this project to bypass traditional development and production teams entirely. We begin by automating deep-market research, persona validation, and rapid prototyping. From there, we move into execution: applying Natural Language Creation to build a go-to-market product, leveraging Generative AI for high-fidelity advertising assets, and utilizing workflow automation to orchestrate a sophisticated distribution network.
Whether you are an agency leader looking to offer "Rapid Innovation" services or a corporate marketer tasked with launching an internal sub-brand, you will leave with a structural map for an AI-first launch and the skills to execute it immediately. Bring your laptops—we're moving from "idea" to "market-ready" in a single session. - Location: Room 110Wednesday, 10:45am - 12:15pmSpeaker:Joe Lazer (Snow/Lazer)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: WorkshopTracks: Workshops, CMWorld
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If you transported a marketer from 2016 to today, they’d barely recognize the world they’re in.
The Discover algorithm has taken over, turning social media into interest media and rendering followers irrelevant. Google has killed the old world of search in favor of a strange, AI-powered future. Company pages have flatlined as social platforms embrace a simple truth: People want to follow people, not brands.
These changes can be panic-inducing, but they also present an opportunity: To create ownable IP that capitalizes that wins the new world of social and search while standing out from the sea of AI slop.
In this workshop, Joe Lazer—best-selling author of Super Skill, LinkedIn Top Voice, and the creator of the popular Storytelling Edge newsletter (185K subscribers)—reveals the forces remaking how you build an audience today, and the craft of creating storytelling IP that wins the new world of content.
In this hands-on workshop, you'll learn how to create differentiated, original IP and leave with a playbook to do it for your own brand.
- Location: Room 109Wednesday, 10:45am - 12:15pmSpeaker:Ann Gynn (G Force Communication)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: WorkshopTracks: Workshops, CMWorld
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Great content requires great ingredients. And you need to gather them before typing the first sentence. Learn the recipe for turning an assignment into a stronger draft, with AI as your sous chef. You’ll make the decisions that give your writing direction, develop the ideas and insights that make it original, and put them together in ways your audience wants to consume.
Take this session on its own or pair it with The Writing Recipe: Make a Good Draft Better for the complete writing recipe.
- Location: Room 703Wednesday, 12:15pm - 12:45pmPass Types: All Access, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: Networking
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- Location: Room 110Wednesday, 12:45pm - 2:15pmSpeakers:Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: WorkshopTracks: Workshops, CMWorld
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- Location: Room 201Wednesday, 12:45pm - 2:15pmSpeaker:Ahava Leibtag (Aha Media Group)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: WorkshopTracks: Workshops, CMWorld
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Healthcare marketers are feeling the shift: traditional SEO tactics aren't delivering the same results, AI search experiences are reshaping how patients find care, and "great content" alone isn't enough anymore.
In this session, Ahava Leibtag teaches the CRISP framework, a practical system for turning your content into a trusted data layer that search engines, AI tools, and large language models rely on to understand and surface your expertise. We'll reframe content as a strategic asset that must be Conversational, Retrievable, Interoperable, Structured, and Personalized to survive and thrive in an AI-first world.
From a content strategy and digital leadership perspective, we'll break down how editorial content, structured data (schema), and GEO work together to reduce ambiguity and strengthen the trust signals AI engines require. You'll discover why many healthcare websites unintentionally hide their best expertise from search engines and how applying the CRISP framework can help content teams reclaim their authority.
You'll also learn why this work is the ultimate "silo wrecker." Implementing CRISP requires bringing content, digital marketing, IT, and web teams together to align on shared definitions, governance, and page intent. Using real-world examples, we'll show how small structural changes informed by CRISP principles can unlock better performance and prepare your content for agentic AI, without the need to buy new platforms or rewrite every page. - Location: Room 203Wednesday, 12:45pm - 2:15pmSpeaker:Morgan Norris (TREW Marketing)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: WorkshopTracks: Workshops, CMWorld
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Many manufacturing marketing teams receive campaign briefs filled with product specs, target industries, application details, and internal expectations, but don’t have a clear path for turning that information into a focused campaign idea and execution plan.
In this hands-on workshop, attendees will learn a repeatable campaign development framework that helps transform complex manufacturing briefs into clear campaign concepts and practical marketing programs. Using real B2B manufacturing examples, participants will see how messaging frameworks, audience insights, technical proof points, and content formats come together to create measurable campaigns that work across ads, landing pages, PR, social media, sales enablement, and nurture programs.
Participants will work through a practical campaign framework that includes:
Clarifying the Problem
Distilling technical product information, market context, and internal business goals into a clear customer problem and campaign objective.Defining the Audience and Insight
Identifying the specific audience segment — such as engineers, operations leaders, plant managers, procurement teams, or channel partners — along with their pain points, buying criteria, and the core insight that will drive the campaign idea.Developing the Big Idea
Turning messaging, audience insight, and market differentiators into a single campaign concept that can unify creative, content, and promotion.Building the Campaign Toolkit
Translating the big idea into practical campaign assets: landing pages, trade media PR stories, social content, webinars, video, email nurture, and sales enablement materials — along with the AI tools that can help build and scale them.Launching and Measuring Impact
Selecting the right KPIs and aligning marketing and sales around measurable campaign outcomes such as engagement, qualified pipeline, sales conversations, and market visibility. - Location: Room 109Wednesday, 12:45pm - 2:15pmSpeaker:Ann Gynn (G Force Communication)Pass Types: All Access, CMWorld 3-DaySession Type: WorkshopTracks: Workshops, CMWorld
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Your finished draft isn’t ready to serve. It is ready for the polish phase. Make sure it delivers for the audience and the business. Learn a repeatable process for editing your own work, with AI as your sous chef. You’ll discover how to strengthen your content without trying to fix everything at once — and how to decide which changes actually make the writing better.
Take this session on its own or pair it with The Writing Recipe: Build a Better Draft for the complete writing recipe.