These are our Keynote Speakers for 2023

AmnaKarra-Hassan

Amna Karra-Hassan

Founder and President of the Auburn Giants Australian Football club

Imagine starting an AFL team with no funding, no coach and no experience. It takes a strong woman who’s not afraid to break all the rules to tackle a task this insurmountable. It takes Amna Karra-Hassan.
The Founder and President of the Auburn Giants Australian Football Club, Amna has pioneered programs for women of minority communities in Western Sydney. As a woman and a Muslim, her road to greatness wasn’t an easy one. But Amna derives her strength from adversity and uses her influence to change the conversation on intersectionality, inclusion and gender parity.
An active leader in the community, she’s also worked for the Australian Federal Police and previously served on numerous government boards. Amna’s presentation style is candid and cheeky - a true inspiration with a wicked sense of humour. She pulls no punches and says it like it is and will engage you at every level, opening your eyes to what can be done when everyone says that it can’t.

 

JessHatzis

 

Jess Hatzis

CMO/Co-Founder Frank Body and Founder of Willow & Blake

Jess Hatzis is the co-founder and CEO of Willow & Blake, an agency that specialises in creating and building brands from scratch.
She is also the co-founder and CMO of the iconic and disruptive global skincare brand, frank body.
 Willow & Blake has played a pivotal role in building some of the world’s best-known start-ups and direct-to-consumer brands and works in a studio capacity with some of the world’s best-known organisations.
 Frank body was born three years later as an experiment to see what could be achieved when they retained full end-to-end control of a brand, enabling them to build a strong and cohesive experience for consumers with a strong focus on language; knowing too well the capacity words and tone have to make or break a brand. The rest as they say is history; frank body now has offices throughout the world and a recent valuation of over $100m.
 Jess is passionate about supporting women in the workplace and proudly sits at the helm of two businesses whose board of directors consists of a minimum 50% female seats. This, to Jess, is crucial to leading a strong, female-led workforce and the next generation of women in leadership.

mark-matthews-bw

 

Mark Mathews

Award Winning Speaker

As a world class big wave surfer, Red Bull Athlete and Surf Contest Director Mark Mathews has become obsessed with the relationship between personal growth, high performance and fulfilment.
Winner of an unprecedented 3 back to back Oakley Big Wave Awards, Mark has cemented himself as one of the best big wave surfers in the world.
As a highly sought after international speaker, Mathews’ surfer chill vibe and magnetic charisma, has graced the stages of leading companies worldwide.
From Google, Sony, Intel, to MasterCard, he instantly captures audiences with his epic tales and spectacular big wave surf vision.
His compelling story offers game changing tips to adapt to stress, harness resilience and perform when it counts. He has deconstructed, fine-tuned, and personalised emotional resilience techniques to successfully strengthen ones mindset and sustain long term performance.

 

Pure Play Marketplace Panel

nimrod kalman lazar emmagarland

Nimrod Ganon
Co-Founder at KG Electronic

Kalman Polak
CEO at MYSALE Group

Lazar Monin
Director of Marketplace at Kogan.com

Emma Garland
Director at The Block Shop

 




Faris Yakob


Co-founder
Genius Steals

Faris began his career as a strategy consultant for digital businesses during the first dot com explosion. He moved into the agency world, eventually joining Naked Communications as their 20th employee. Faris worked for Naked in London, Sydney and New York, during their heyday, as a communication strategist and later as global head of digital. 

Faris went on to be EVP Chief Technology Strategist at McCann Erickson NYC, tasked with ushering in their digital transformation, which led to them wining their first ever Cyber Lion at Cannes. Subsequently he was appointed Chief Innovation Officer of MDC Partners, a network of best in breed agencies, including CPB, Anomaly, 72 & Sunny and kbs+.

Deployed within kbs+, he established a social team and developed the social products and services, helped start the content team, and co-founded creative technology boutique Spies&Assassins.

Faris was a founding member of the IPA Social Committee, is on the global advisory board of Social Media Week, and has judged numerous award shows, including the social category for the Effies. He helped the London International Awards to create and define the NEW category to reflect and highlight innovation in the industry. He has been blogging and involved in the ongoing discussions around social in the industry for almost a decade.

He has written about social media and marketing for Campaign, Fast Company, Forbes, Contagious, Canvas8 and Age of Conversation books. He has spoken on social, digital and innovative marketing all over the world and his thesis on the future of brands won the inaugural IPA President’s Prize.