Marketing is no longer just about demand generation — it's about driving sustainable growth, shaping global perception, and delivering end-to-end experiences in real time. Drawing on leading a globally competitive destination, Kim McConnie shares how macro pressures are redefining the CMO role, why the CMO must increasingly operate as a hybrid CMO–CTO, and how agentic AI and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) are changing how brands are discovered and chosen. Critically: how to combine brand and performance as a multiplier — and build the evidence boards actually act on.

Dashboards tell us what happened. Attribution models attempt to tell us where. Neither reliably explains why a decision was made — and without that, strategy is optimised around incomplete truths. This session goes beyond surface metrics to examine what buying data is actually revealing about modern decision-making: the emotional triggers, social proof dynamics, algorithmic influences, and contextual factors that traditional models can't capture. CMOs will leave with a clearer framework for incorporating behavioural and contextual signals — and a harder question about what their current measurement is really telling them.

Most brands chase customers. Pop Mart creates believers — and someone had to build the machine that does it, market by market. As AI homogenises creative output and attention becomes marketing's scarcest resource, Pop Mart has engineered one of the world's fastest-growing cultural phenomena through scarcity, community, and obsession — not media spend. Jeremy Lee, who built Pop Mart's presence from zero across 6 Southeast Asian markets and the Middle East, unpacks the operating mechanics behind the hype: how deliberate product drops, app-first experiences, and omnichannel rituals turn passive consumers into active evangelists — and how that playbook bends (or breaks) across radically different cultures and regulatory environments. The question for every CMO in the room: what would it take to make your brand this hard to ignore

Marketing leaders are running more brands, more channels and leaner teams than the budget was ever built for. Most are doing it while quietly projecting that everything is fine. Here's the uncomfortable truth: in the next decade, a leader will need exactly two capabilities. One is AI. The other is EQ. Everyone at this summit is investing in the first. Almost no one is being trained in the second. Psychology thought leader Mitch Wallis argues the job of a marketing leader is no longer to be the best technician in the room. It's to be the person others feel safe around when the pressure is on. Drawing on his Real Conversations framework, trusted by KPMG, American Express, Lend Lease and 200+ companies on 4 continents, Mitch reveals the five instinctive habits that quietly fracture trust and engagement even when we mean well, and the connected-leadership behaviours that build retention, safety and performance under sustained pressure. You'll leave with the practical moves to lead not just a high-performing marketing team, but a genuinely human one.

AI can now generate campaigns, design assets, write copy, build websites, and optimise media in real time. The tools that once differentiated marketers are widely accessible and increasingly interchangeable. As execution becomes automated and performance becomes a commodity, the question for CMOs is no longer 'can we do this better?' but 'can we still be meaningfully different at all?' This session argues that in a world of technological parity, brand is the only durable moat left — and challenges CMOs to rethink brand not as a creative function but as the core system that determines pricing power, customer preference, conversion efficiency, and resilience in volatile markets.

The boundaries between media, creative, and data are dissolving. In their place, a new operating system for marketing is emerging — one where discovery, targeting, content creation, and optimisation converge into a continuous intelligence loop. This session examines what this shift means for brand visibility when algorithms, not audiences, shape what gets seen and amplified. How leading publishers and brands are adapting: breaking down media, creative, and analytics silos to build fluid, AI-first marketing systems. For CMOs, the challenge is no longer reaching audiences — it is understanding how to be interpreted, ranked, and amplified by machine-driven systems.

As marketing accelerates through its most profound transformation in decades, CMOs are being asked to lead not just functionally — but strategically, technologically, and commercially across the enterprise. Looking toward 2030, this panel examines the forces already reshaping marketing today, and what CMOs must do now to remain relevant, credible, and impactful. Key tensions: marketing's ongoing enterprise credibility challenge; the CMO's evolving identity as a hybrid commercial-technology leader; what future consumers will demand from brands in terms of relevance, trust, and experience. This is not a speculative discussion about distant futures — it is a strategic examination of decisions that must be made in 2026.