Customer Experience & Marketing

Why organisations work with Duncan Wardle His Theory of Creativity™ is a named, commercially tested framework – not a philosophy but a practical toolkit developed and stress-tested across Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Disney Parks before being applied with post-Disney clients including Apple, the NBA, Coca-Cola, and NBCUniversal. He treats creativity as a repeatable operational habit rather than a talent or a culture programme – giving leadership teams a concrete, tool-based answer to the question of how to make innovation everyone’s job, not a department’s. Specific tools within the framework – the “What If” method and the “Rivers of Thinking” model – address the cognitive and structural barriers that prevent established organisations from generating genuinely new ideas. These are actionable instruments audiences can use immediately, not post-event reading lists. He is one of the few speakers in this space who built an innovation function from the inside of a major global brand, rather than studying one from outside – a distinction that matters to senior audiences who have heard the Disney case study told at second hand. Author of The Imagination Emporium: Creative Recipes for Innovation (2024), a practitioner resource designed to be used independently by organisations after an engagement, extending the shelf life of the session beyond the room. Biography highlights VP of Innovation and Creativity at The Walt Disney Company; previous VP roles include VP Global Public Relations and VP International Marketing and Sales, with postings across London, Paris, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Mumbai, and Shanghai Founded Disney’s Creative Catalyst Team, responsible for embedding innovation across Imagineering, Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Disney Parks Founder and CEO of iD8 & innov8, a design thinking consultancy; clients include Apple, Coca-Cola, NBA, PepsiCo, IBM, NBCUniversal, and Spotify Author of The Imagination Emporium: Creative Recipes for Innovation (Benbella Books, 2024) Contributor to Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Fast Company; member of the Fast Company Executive Board Multiple TEDx speaker, including “The Theory of Creativity” (TEDxAUK) and “Creating Relationship Magic” (TEDxBocaRaton) Honorary Doctorate in Business Administration, Edinburgh Napier University (2014); White House American Citizen Award (2008); Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award; 2022 Nordic Business Forum Speaker Contest Winner Teaches Innovation Masterclasses at Yale and Harvard Biography Duncan Wardle joined The Walt Disney Company as an intern in the London office in 1987. Over the following 30 years he progressed through VP roles in global public relations, international marketing and sales, and ultimately VP of Innovation and Creativity – the function he built from scratch, founding Disney’s Creative Catalyst Team and deploying it across Imagineering, Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Disney Parks. His central argument is that creativity is not a talent distributed unevenly across the workforce. It is a capability that corporate structures systematically suppress – and one that can be restored with the right tools. The framework he developed inside Disney, the Theory of Creativity™, includes specific instruments: the “What If” method, used by Walt Disney himself to pivot the company from an animation studio to an entertainment and theme park pioneer, and the “Rivers of Thinking” model, which identifies the expertise-driven habits that stop large organisations from generating genuinely new ideas. Since founding iD8 & innov8, Wardle has applied these methods with clients including Apple, Coca-Cola, the NBA, PepsiCo, and NBCUniversal – demonstrating that a toolkit built for an entertainment brand translates across sectors where creative problem-solving is structurally harder. His 2024 book, The Imagination Emporium: Creative Recipes for Innovation, packages the methodology as a practical resource organisations can use independently. He also contributes to Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Fast Company, and teaches Innovation Masterclasses at Yale and Harvard. His formal recognition includes a White House American Citizen Award (2008), an Honorary Doctorate in Business Administration from Edinburgh Napier University (2014), a Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award, and the 2022 Nordic Business Forum Speaker Contest. He is a multiple TEDx speaker, with talks including “The Theory of Creativity” and “Creating Relationship Magic.” Key speaking topics Innovation strategy and the Theory of Creativity™ Design thinking and creative problem-solving Organisational barriers to creative thinking Customer experience innovation Human creativity and competitive advantage in the age of AI Building innovation culture at scale Creative leadership and entrepreneurial thinking Ideal for C-suite and senior leadership teams responsible for growth and competitive strategy Chief Innovation Officers, Chief Strategy Officers, and transformation leads Large organisations seeking to embed innovation beyond a dedicated function Conference audiences in technology, consumer, media, and professional services sectors Audience outcomes A named set of practical innovation tools – including the “What If” method and the “Rivers of Thinking” model – that teams can apply immediately A framework for identifying and removing the cognitive and structural barriers that block creative thinking in established organisations Clarity on how to separate the creative process from the operational process, and why the two must be managed differently An understanding of why human creativity is not threatened by AI – and how to build it as a source of commercial competitive advantage Concrete methods for making innovation a daily habit rather than a quarterly initiative

Why organisations work with Peter Cross He has held the customer experience seat at one of the UK’s most service-known retailers. As Customer Experience Director at the John Lewis Partnership, he was responsible for the customer agenda across both John Lewis and Waitrose at a moment of acute pressure on British retail. His thinking is now codified in book form. Start with the Customer, published by Pearson in 2025 and called “the essential text on customer experience” by The Grocer, gives audiences a usable framework, including a “lexicon of customer needs” that distinguishes transactional, interactional, core and higher-level requirements. As Vice President of the Institute of Customer Service, he sits at the centre of the national conversation about service standards, with sight of how the issue plays out across sectors rather than inside a single company. His career holds two seats most operators never combine: ten years inside the Mary Portas consultancy that worked on the 2011 Portas Review, and eight years inside the John Lewis Partnership. He has built the strategy and lived with the consequences. Biography highlights Former Customer Experience Director at the John Lewis Partnership, with the brief extended to cover Waitrose Co-author of Start with the Customer (Pearson, 2025), called “the essential text on customer experience” by The Grocer Vice President of the Institute of Customer Service Ambassador for the Retail Trust and Leader in Residence at Leeds University Business School Ten-year business partnership with Mary Portas at her retail agency Earlier senior roles at L’Oréal, Burberry and Alfred Dunhill Biography Between 2017 and 2021, two of Britain’s most service-known retailers, John Lewis and Waitrose, were pressured by pure-play online players and a public mood shifting hard toward speed. Holding their character through that period was the customer experience brief, and it sat with Peter Cross. Before John Lewis, he spent ten years as business partner to Mary Portas at her retail agency. Their work together included charity-shop reinvention and the 2011 Portas Review of the British high street, commissioned by government. Earlier still came senior marketing roles at L’Oréal, Burberry and Alfred Dunhill. He has occupied both the operator’s chair and the advisor’s chair. Start with the Customer, his 2025 Pearson book co-written with Institute of Customer Service CEO Jo Causon, was called “the essential text on customer experience” by The Grocer. The book argues that service has been quietly reduced to process, and that technology cannot substitute for the cultural work of building a service organisation from the CEO’s desk down. He now serves as Vice President of the Institute of Customer Service, Ambassador for the Retail Trust, and Leader in Residence at Leeds University Business School. The thinking he brings to senior teams centres on a framework from his book: the “lexicon of customer needs,” which separates requirements into transactional, interactional, core and higher-level categories. The standards he asks organisations to meet are ones he held himself, for eight years, on the customer agenda at the John Lewis Partnership. Key speaking topics Customer experience strategy Service culture The lexicon of customer needs Customer behaviour and expectation Leadership in customer-facing organisations Employee engagement and frontline empowerment The future of retail Ideal for Boards and CEOs setting the customer agenda for the next strategic cycle CMOs, Chief Customer Officers and Customer Experience Directors making the case for cultural investment alongside technology spend Retail and consumer-facing leadership teams under pressure from online competitors HR and people leaders responsible for service culture and frontline engagement Audience outcomes A vocabulary for the different types of customer need (transactional, interactional, core, higher-level) and where each one surfaces across the customer journey The case, evidenced through John Lewis and Mary Portas-era examples, for treating service culture as a board-level discipline A way to test whether technology investment is enabling service or quietly substituting for it The “golden rules and cardinal sins” of service that separate brands customers stay with from brands they leave

Why organisations work with Karl Lillrud He speaks about AI from the seat of someone who has run digital commerce businesses since the late nineties and is currently building one. PodManager AI, his AI-driven podcast production platform, is shipping to paying customers as he speaks about AI to other operators. His work connects AI directly to revenue mechanics: pricing, conversion, retention, and customer acquisition, the parts of the P&L the C-suite is actually accountable for. Nine published books, including «You, Me and AI» and «AI, Your Second Brain: Evolve or Go Extinct», give leadership teams a shared language for the second-order effects of AI on work, governance, and customer trust, beyond the productivity headlines. Membership of the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council and recognition in Thinkers360’s AI thought-leader rankings signal that the perspective travels at board level, not just at the developer conference. The client footprint, including Volvo, Spotify, Klarna, H&M, AstraZeneca, and 3, gives him pattern recognition across regulated and consumer-facing businesses that few AI speakers can match. Biography highlights Founder of PodManager AI, an AI-driven podcast production platform he is currently building. Founder of Pricelizer, a Swedish e-commerce startup named to CNBC’s 20 hottest startups list in 2015. Author of nine books on AI and digital business, including «You, Me and AI» and «AI, Your Second Brain: Evolve or Go Extinct». Member of the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council since August 2024. Two-time TEDx speaker. Recognised across multiple years in Thinkers360’s AI thought-leader rankings and Global Gurus’ Top 30 Motivational Speakers list. Public engagement footprint includes Volvo, Spotify, Klarna, H&M, AstraZeneca, Qliro, 3, Tele2, and TUI. Biography Most AI keynote speakers have never run a checkout flow at scale. Karl Lillrud has. He has been building digital businesses since the late nineties, founded Pricelizer in 2013 to solve the abandoned-cart problem he kept hitting as an operator, and watched it land on CNBC’s 20 hottest startups list in 2015. He is now building PodManager AI, an AI-driven podcast production platform shipping to paying customers. That operator history, still in present tense, is the through-line for everything he says about artificial intelligence. His books reflect the same instinct. «You, Me and AI» treats the technology across 54 chapters covering work, creativity, education, governance, and the human-machine boundary, rather than as a productivity story. «AI, Your Second Brain: Evolve or Go Extinct» focuses on how leaders and their teams should actually integrate the tools day to day. The two sit inside a wider catalogue of nine published books, written for people who have to make decisions, not people studying the field. The institutional signals followed the work. Thinkers360 has recognised him across its AI thought-leader rankings. Global Gurus has placed him repeatedly in its Top 30 Motivational Speakers ranking. In August 2024 he joined the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council. Volvo, Spotify, Klarna, H&M, AstraZeneca, Qliro, and 3 sit on a public client list that runs across consumer retail, telecoms, and pharma. What a buyer is paying for is the translation layer between board ambition and operating reality. Lillrud has been the person trying to ship the next quarter’s numbers, and he is still in the chair, building an AI product while advising executives who have AI strategies they cannot yet execute. The argument lands because he has been on both sides of the table. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence and the C-suite agenda AI in retail and consumer experience Digital commerce and customer acquisition Innovation and business model reinvention Leadership in technology-driven organisations AI ethics and governance Future of work in the AI era Ideal for Boards and executive committees moving from AI strategy approval to execution. CEOs, CMOs, and chief digital or commerce officers in retail, telecoms, and consumer brands. Innovation, transformation, and AI leads inside large enterprises building the operating model for AI. Founder and growth-stage leadership teams using AI as a commercial wedge. Audience outcomes A sharper read on which AI use cases move commercial metrics and which are theatre. A vocabulary for discussing AI’s second-order effects on customers, employees, and brand trust at board level. Concrete reference points from operators who have shipped AI inside consumer-facing businesses. A clearer view of where leadership attention should sit next versus where it can wait. Confidence to challenge vendor narratives and refocus internal AI portfolios on revenue impact.

Why organisations work with Thomas Barta He shows organisations where their next growth comes from and, just as importantly, how to get risk-averse teams to actually pursue it. His McKinsey work training over a thousand internal leaders on driving change without formal authority is the engine of his method: growth needs people who can move an organisation they do not control. The behaviours he teaches are drawn from the largest dataset of its kind, more than 68,000 leadership assessments of what separates leaders who shift company performance from those who do not. His McGraw-Hill book with Patrick Barwise of London Business School, The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader, gives the work a research spine rather than another opinion on growth. As leadership dean of the McKinsey and Marketing Academy CMO Fellowship, he prepares senior leaders for the step up to running a business, which keeps his view of growth leadership current. Biography highlights Former partner, McKinsey & Company; advised more than two dozen Fortune 500 organisations across 14 industries and 45 countries. Co-author with Patrick Barwise of The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader (McGraw-Hill). CEO, Marketing Leadership Institute; founder of the Marketing Leadership Masterclass. Leadership dean, CMO Fellowship, run by The Marketing Academy with McKinsey. Honorary Fellow of The Marketing Society. Contributor to Forbes, Marketing Week, Nikkei and the Adobe blog; speaker at events for Adobe, Google, IBM, SAP, Oracle, Amazon and the Financial Times. Biography Most large organisations are structured to protect what already works. That is exactly why so many of them miss the next wave: over half the Fortune 500 from the year 2000, Kodak and Nokia among them, no longer exist. Thomas Barta’s work addresses the gap between the people who can see a growth opportunity and the far smaller number who can move an organisation to back it. His method rests on the largest study of its kind. Built on more than 68,000 leadership assessments, conducted with Patrick Barwise of London Business School, it identified the behaviours that separate leaders who shift their company’s trajectory from those who do not. That research became The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader, published by McGraw-Hill. The behavioural engine came earlier, at McKinsey. As a partner he led growth transformations across 14 industries in 45 countries for more than two dozen Fortune 500 organisations. He was also dean of the firm’s highest-rated internal programme, where he trained over a thousand leaders on one problem: how to drive change when you have responsibility without formal authority. That is the daily reality of anyone trying to start something new inside a large company. He runs the Marketing Leadership Institute, serves as long-standing leadership dean of the McKinsey and Marketing Academy CMO Fellowship, and is an Honorary Fellow of The Marketing Society. An MBA from London Business School sits alongside a Master’s in Organisational Psychology from INSEAD, which is why his keynotes work less as strategy lectures and more as a practical account of how growth actually gets started, championed, and funded inside organisations that would rather play safe. Key speaking topics Finding and acting on new sources of growth Growth leadership and organisational entrepreneurship Driving change without formal authority Why incumbents lose relevance and how to stop it Customer-led growth Marketing leadership and CMO effectiveness Ideal for Executive teams looking for their next source of growth, not just defending the core CEOs and CGOs who want growth owned across the business rather than parked in one function CMOs and senior marketers stepping up to broader commercial and board-level roles Senior leadership offsites and growth or innovation programmes at large organisations Audience outcomes A clear method for spotting growth opportunities their organisation is currently structured to miss. A practical way to get peers and senior leaders to back a growth bet when the lever sits outside your control. The behaviours that research links to leaders who move company performance, not just manage their remit. A read on how to create permission for sensible risk so good ideas stop dying in committee.

Why organisations work with Ryan Serhant He built a brokerage that uses its own studio as the primary lead source, giving sales and marketing leaders a working reference for how content-to-commerce actually operates at scale. He has closed close to ten billion dollars in personal real estate sales while running the firm, including the most expensive home ever sold in Florida, so the methodology comes from a practitioner still in the deal flow. His three books, Sell It Like Serhant, Big Money Energy, and Brand It Like Serhant, sequence a coherent commercial argument from individual sales technique to personal brand as a business asset. He is one of the few operators booked at this level whose audience already knows the work through Netflix’s Owning Manhattan and Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing New York, which compresses the credibility step at large commercial events. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of SERHANT., a brokerage with an in-house film studio used as its lead-generation engine. Star and executive producer of Netflix’s Owning Manhattan; star of Bravo’s two-time Emmy-nominated Million Dollar Listing New York. Author of Sell It Like Serhant (2018), Big Money Energy (2021), and Brand It Like Serhant (2024). The Serhant Team ranked top sales team in New York by The Wall Street Journal for three consecutive years and Top 5 nationwide. Closed close to ten billion dollars in personal sales, including record-setting transactions in New York and Florida. Founder of SERHANT. Studios and the SELL IT digital education platform. Biography Most brokerages still treat marketing as a cost centre and the salesforce as the engine. SERHANT., the firm Ryan Serhant founded in September 2020, inverts that. The studio is the engine. The agents convert the demand it generates. Owning Manhattan, the Netflix series Serhant produces and stars in, is part of the same flywheel. That model is the reason commercial leaders book him. Serhant has closed close to ten billion dollars in personal real estate sales, including the most expensive home ever sold in Florida, while running the firm. The point on stage is not the listings. It is what an operating model looks like when content production, personal brand, and sales pipeline are run as a single discipline rather than three departments. His three books trace the same argument at different altitudes. Sell It Like Serhant (2018) is a salesperson’s playbook. Big Money Energy (2021) reframes ambition as a discipline that can be coached. Brand It Like Serhant (2024) treats personal and corporate brand as a measurable commercial asset that produces inbound demand. Together they are the spine of his keynote work and the SELL IT education platform that grew out of the first book. The Serhant Team was ranked the top sales team in New York by The Wall Street Journal for three consecutive years before he launched the brokerage. Million Dollar Listing New York, the two-time Emmy-nominated Bravo series, gave the broader audience the character. Owning Manhattan, now in its second Netflix season, gives them the company. Key speaking topics Content-to-commerce business models Sales methodology and pipeline Personal brand as a commercial asset Entrepreneurship and scale-up Customer acquisition and lead generation Founder mindset and commercial ambition Ideal for Chief revenue officers and heads of sales rebuilding pipeline economics around content Chief marketing officers integrating brand, social, and demand generation into one operating function Founders and CEOs of scale-up businesses building category presence Sales conferences, kickoffs, and partner events for high-ticket and brokerage businesses Audience outcomes A working picture of how an in-house content engine can function as the primary acquisition channel A clearer line between personal brand investment and measurable revenue A sales operating logic drawn from a practitioner who is still closing deals at the top of the market Language and frameworks senior leaders can take back to their commercial teams the next morning

Why organisations work with Ken Schmidt He sat inside the room when Harley-Davidson went from near-collapse to one of the most emotionally bonded brands in American business, and he can describe what changed in the company’s positioning rather than what got written about it afterwards. He frames customer loyalty as an operating decision, not a marketing output. His Noise Cubed Trilogy gives leadership teams a structured way to interrogate how they are heard, remembered and chosen. Make Some Noise: The Unconventional Road to Dominance (Simon and Schuster, 2018) gives leaders a written, reusable method for moving a company from product-first to people-first positioning. He works in the language operators use. Sales teams, dealer networks, franchisees and frontline staff respond to him because he treats reputation as something the whole organisation builds, not a head-office function. He is consistently booked for annual sales kickoffs, dealer conferences and leadership offsites where the brief is to change how a workforce thinks about its own market position, not to deliver a generic motivational talk. Biography highlights Director of Corporate and Financial Communications at Harley-Davidson Motor Company, 1990 to 1997; joined the company in 1985. Primary spokesperson to media and financial communities during Harley-Davidson’s turnaround years. Author of Make Some Noise: The Unconventional Road to Dominance, Simon and Schuster, November 2018. Co-creator of 100 Years of Harley-Davidson, an official centenary motorsports title. Founder of Ken Schmidt Company (1999); co-founder of Torque Sessions Leadership Training. Host of the Tailgating with Geniuses business podcast; previously held an ownership stake in Chicago marketing firm VSA Partners. Biography Harley-Davidson was effectively a dying American manufacturer in the mid-1980s. The bikes had reputation problems, the financials were thin, and the brand was the punchline of its own segment. The work that pulled the company out was not a product fix. It was a deliberate reconstruction of how customers, dealers and the financial community thought and talked about the company, and Ken Schmidt was inside that work from 1985. By 1990 he was Director of Corporate and Financial Communications, working directly with the CEO and CFO and serving as the primary voice to the media and investment community during the years sales and brand equity recovered. That seat gave him a particular vantage on how reputation actually gets engineered inside a company under pressure, and on how leadership decisions about positioning translate into customer behaviour on the ground. After leaving Harley in 1997 he took an ownership position at Chicago marketing firm VSA Partners, then founded Ken Schmidt Company in 1999. Make Some Noise: The Unconventional Road to Dominance (Simon and Schuster, 2018) sets out his method for moving a company from product-first to people-first positioning; his Torque Sessions training format and Tailgating with Geniuses podcast extend the same operating logic. The argument he brings to a leadership room is that competitive advantage built on product specifications is now mostly perishable, and the durable form of advantage is being chosen on purpose by customers who feel something specific about the company. That is a hard claim to make credibly. It is harder to make from the inside of a brand that did it. Key speaking topics Customer loyalty and advocacy Brand positioning and reputation Competitive differentiation People-first organisational culture Storytelling and corporate voice Sales force and dealer-network alignment Ideal for Chief Marketing Officers, Chief Brand Officers and customer-experience leadership teams. Sales leadership at companies running annual kickoffs, dealer conferences or franchise summits. CEO and executive teams in mature categories where product parity is eroding margins. Membership organisations, associations and trade bodies needing to reset how they are perceived. Audience outcomes A sharper internal language for what their company is actually known for, versus what it claims to be known for. Schmidt’s three-question Noise Cubed framework, useable as a working tool on positioning decisions. A concrete view of how the Harley-Davidson turnaround changed customer behaviour, with the operator-side mechanics named. A reframing of customer loyalty as something every part of the business builds, not a marketing or CX function output.

Why organisations work with Marcus Collins He translates cultural anthropology into commercial decisions, turning ideas that usually live in academic departments into practical inputs for brand, product, and growth strategy. His book For the Culture provides a single thesis with named mechanisms for how meaning, identity, and belonging move markets. Buyers get an argument they can hand to a team, not a set of trend observations. He has run the work he teaches. Apple’s iTunes and Nike sport music, Beyonce’s digital strategy, Wieden+Kennedy New York, and named campaigns for Google, Brooklyn Nets, and State Farm sit behind every claim. Thinkers50 named him to the 2023 Radar with the Distinguished Achievement Award for the idea most likely to shape the future of business management. That puts him among a small group of new voices the global management community has formally endorsed. He sits inside the platform side of culture as Professor in Residence at TikTok, which means his read on how brand meaning forms and spreads is current, not retrospective. Biography highlights Clinical Professor of Marketing, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan Professor in Residence, TikTok Former Chief Strategy Officer, Wieden+Kennedy New York Author, For the Culture (PublicAffairs, 2023); Thinkers50 2023 Best New Management Booklist Thinkers50 Radar Distinguished Achievement Award, 2023 American Advertising Federation Advertising Hall of Achievement; Ad Age and Crain’s 40 Under 40 Columnist, Adweek and Forbes Biography Culture, not demographics, decides what consumers buy and what they refuse. Marcus Collins built a career inside that observation. He ran digital strategy for Beyonce, worked on iTunes and Nike sport music at Apple, and went on to serve as Chief Strategy Officer at Wieden+Kennedy New York, the agency behind Nike’s most enduring brand work. His doctorate at Temple University was in cultural contagion and meaning-making, the academic foundation that now sits behind his book For the Culture. Published in 2023, it landed on the Thinkers50 Best New Management Booklist and won him the Radar Distinguished Achievement Award the same year, naming his thinking as the idea most likely to shape the future of business management. He teaches marketing at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, holds a Professor in Residence role at TikTok, and writes columns for Adweek and Forbes. His commercial fingerprints are on Google’s Real Tone, the relaunch of the Brooklyn Nets, the Made In America festival, and State Farm’s Cliff Paul campaign. For senior commercial audiences, his value is specific. He gives marketing, growth, and brand teams a working theory of why some ideas move through a culture and most do not, and he ties that theory to operating choices about positioning, audience, and product. Key speaking topics Cultural contagion and consumer behaviour Brand strategy and meaning-making Marketing in a fragmented media environment The role of identity in consumption Building brands that earn cultural relevance Storytelling and business communication Customer experience and brand Ideal for CMOs and brand leaders rebuilding marketing strategy for a post-demographic environment Growth and commercial leadership teams trying to understand why their category narrative has stopped working Creative agencies and in-house brand teams looking for an applied framework on cultural relevance Consumer-facing businesses, retail, media, sport, technology, where brand meaning is a competitive variable Audience outcomes A working definition of culture that explains why messages succeed or fail, beyond demographic targeting A clear view of how meaning, identity, and belonging move audiences toward or away from a brand Named mechanisms from For the Culture that brand and marketing teams can apply to live campaigns Examples drawn from Apple, Nike, Beyonce, Brooklyn Nets, Google, and State Farm, showing how cultural strategy operates inside real commercial work A sharper sense of why most brand and growth strategies underperform in fragmented markets, and what changes when culture becomes the unit of analysis

Why organisations work with John Ellis He ran Ford’s developer program and the team behind SmartDeviceLink. He has direct operating experience of building a connected-product platform inside a global manufacturer, not a consultant’s view of one. His central thesis, set out in The Zero Dollar Car, gives boards a sharp frame for a question most are still avoiding: when sensor data is worth more than the product that generates it, what business are we actually in? He works across automotive, insurance, smart home, mobile and public infrastructure. Leaders get a view of how the same data economics are restructuring multiple sectors at once, not a single-industry case study. Through Ellis & Associates he advises companies on the commercial reality of connected-product strategy. The keynote content is grounded in current client work, not retrospective career stories. Biography highlights Former Global Technologist and Head of the Ford Developer Program, Ford Motor Company Author, The Zero Dollar Car: How the Revolution in Big Data will Change Your Life (#1 Amazon Best Seller, Auto Industry) Founder and Managing Director, Ellis & Associates, management consultancy at the automotive, consumer, connectivity and software intersection Led the team that delivered SmartDeviceLink, the open-source platform now used by Toyota, Mazda, Subaru and others Prior senior leadership roles at Motorola across engineering, product management, software, services and strategy Featured on NBC’s TODAY Show on the future of connected vehicles and data Biography The cars on the road today produce more usable data per mile than the entire commercial internet did a decade ago. Most of that data still ends up captured by the manufacturer, the platform owner, or the insurer, rarely by the customer who generated it. That asymmetry is the operating question behind John Ellis’s work. As Global Technologist and Head of the Ford Developer Program, Ellis ran the team that delivered SmartDeviceLink, the open-source platform underneath Ford’s AppLink and now adopted by Toyota, Mazda and Subaru. He saw, from inside, how a global manufacturer turns a vehicle into a software platform and what that does to the economics of the product. His book The Zero Dollar Car takes that operating insight and pushes it to its logical end. If sensor data is valuable enough, the vehicle itself becomes a loss leader, financed by what it tells the world while it moves. The argument is now playing out across insurance, smart home, mobility infrastructure and public-space management, each sector that Ellis & Associates currently advises. What Ellis brings to a senior audience is the rare combination of having built one of the early connected-product platforms at scale and then translating that experience into a clear commercial argument that boards in any sector can apply to their own products. The Motorola years sit underneath: two decades inside a company that learned, expensively, what happens when a hardware business misreads a software shift. Key speaking topics Connected vehicles and the future of mobility Data monetisation and the economics of sensor data Business model disruption in hardware industries Software platforms inside traditional manufacturing Smart cities and public-space management Technology disruption across automotive, insurance and smart home Ideal for Boards and executive teams in automotive, mobility, insurance and infrastructure CTOs, CDOs and Chief Digital Officers in product and manufacturing businesses Heads of strategy and corporate development assessing platform and connected-product plays City, transport and public-sector leaders managing connected infrastructure decisions Audience outcomes A clear view of how value migrates from the connected product to the data it generates, and what that does to incumbent business models A working frame, drawn from The Zero Dollar Car, for assessing where their own products sit on that curve Concrete examples from automotive, insurance and public infrastructure of who is winning and losing the data argument A sharper question set for board and executive conversations on connected-product strategy

Why organisations work with Mark Adams He has run the operating side of digital change at scale, leading innovation inside VICE Media as it grew from print magazine into a multi-billion-dollar global youth media group. That is a sharply different vantage point from consultants who advise on transformation without running it. His earliest clients were Hollywood A-listers and global public figures, then global consumer brands. The result is a working understanding of how audiences, talent, and brand authority interact in algorithmic markets, which most digital strategists do not have. As Chairman of the AI Leadership Council, he spends his time fielding live questions from the public and senior leaders on how to use AI responsibly and commercially. The result is content built around the questions executives are actually asking, not the ones a slide deck assumes. He converts AI hype into specific operating choices: which capabilities to build internally, which to buy, which to ignore, and how to set the cultural conditions for adoption. Useful for boards and executive teams that feel busy on AI but not yet decisive. Biography highlights Senior Vice President and Head of Innovation, VICE Media, following the 2015 acquisition of his consumer-brand digital transformation business. Founder of the first digital transformation consultancy for celebrities and public figures, acquired by William Morris Endeavor. First Chief Digital Officer in the entertainment industry, appointed at WME. Chairman of the AI Leadership Council, convening senior AI practitioners to answer public and executive questions on AI. Named to the Sunday Times Top People in Britain, The Drum Digerati List, Debrett’s Top 10 Digital List, and the Silicon 60 Global Tech Entrepreneurs list. Profiled by The Guardian as a “Star of Tech City”. TEDx speaker with a TED talk reaching millions of views; forthcoming book Enter the Cult of Extreme Innovation, Penguin, 2026. Biography The first wave of AI in the enterprise was about pilots. The second is about whether large organisations can absorb the technology into the way they actually work. That gap, between AI capability and AI as operating reality, is the territory Mark Adams now spends most of his time inside. His route to that work is unusual. In 2003 he built the first digital transformation consultancy aimed at celebrities and public figures, advising A-list talent on how to operate in an internet-shaped media economy. The business was acquired by William Morris Endeavor, where he was installed as the entertainment industry’s first Chief Digital Officer. He then built a second business focused on consumer brand digital transformation, which VICE Media acquired in 2015. As Senior Vice President and Head of Innovation, he helped run the company through its expansion from a print title into a global youth media group. Today he chairs the AI Leadership Council, a panel of senior digital and AI practitioners who field questions from the public and from executives trying to make sense of the technology. The model is deliberate. Most AI commentary is one-directional. The Council works the other way, starting with the question the leader is asking and building the answer from operating practice. His forthcoming book with Penguin, Enter the Cult of Extreme Innovation, sits in the same territory: AI treated as a creative and commercial discipline rather than a topic. He has been named to the Sunday Times Top People in Britain, the Silicon 60 Global Tech Entrepreneurs list, The Drum Digerati and Debrett’s Top 10 Digital lists, and profiled by The Guardian as a “Star of Tech City”. The recognition matters less than the through-line: he has spent his career inside the institutions that have had to absorb digital change first, from celebrity talent to youth media, and is now working the same problem in AI. Key speaking topics AI adoption inside large organisations Digital transformation as operating change Brand building in algorithmic and AI-shaped markets Innovation as a managed practice Engaging younger audiences and youth-culture brands The cultural conditions for digital and AI change Ideal for Boards and executive committees moving from AI pilots to operating deployment Chief Marketing Officers and brand leaders rethinking brand in an AI and algorithm-led environment Chief Innovation, Digital and Transformation Officers responsible for execution, not just strategy Consumer-facing businesses trying to reach and retain younger audiences Audience outcomes A sharper read on which AI capabilities to build internally and which to buy or ignore Working language for translating AI between technical teams and senior decision-makers A practical sense of the cultural and operating conditions that determine whether AI investment pays back Specific reference points from inside VICE Media and from advising A-list talent on digital and AI shifts A frame for thinking about brand and audience in an algorithmically mediated market

Why organisations work with Talya Miron-Shatz Trained directly under Daniel Kahneman at Princeton, with a research output of more than 60 peer-reviewed papers anchoring every commercial recommendation in published evidence. Translates behavioural science into specific design decisions on consent forms, patient journeys, adherence programmes and customer communications, not abstract nudges. Operating credibility with global pharma and consumer brands including Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, Novartis, BMS, AbbVie, Boehringer Ingelheim and Samsung, where she has worked on advisory boards, customer outreach and behaviour-change programmes. Author of Your Life Depends on It (Basic Books, 2021), a book-length argument for why even motivated customers fail to act on the information they are given, and what producers of products and information can do about it. Biography highlights Full Professor, Ono Academic College, Faculty of Business Administration. Visiting Researcher, Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, University of Cambridge. Postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University with Daniel Kahneman; former adjunct lecturer in consumer behaviour at the Wharton School. Author of Your Life Depends on It (Basic Books, 2021); over 60 peer-reviewed publications on decision-making and behaviour change. CEO of CureMyWay, advising pharmaceutical companies, insurers and digital health firms on patient and customer behaviour. Senior Fellow, Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, New York. Biography Most customer decisions are not made the way product strategy assumes. People skim consent forms, default to inaction, misread probabilities and disengage at the precise points a business model depends on them showing up. Closing that gap is the practical job of behavioural science in commercial settings, and it is the question Talya Miron-Shatz has spent two decades answering. Her research training came from inside the field that defined the question. After a PhD in psychology at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, she spent four years at Princeton as a postdoctoral fellow under Daniel Kahneman, then taught consumer behaviour at the Wharton School. She is now a full professor at Ono Academic College and a visiting researcher at the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge, with more than 60 peer-reviewed publications on decision-making, risk communication and patient comprehension. The applied work matters as much as the academic record. As CEO of CureMyWay she has advised Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, Novartis, BMS, AbbVie, Boehringer Ingelheim and Samsung on how to design products, communications and customer pathways that line up with how people actually process information. Her 2021 book Your Life Depends on It (Basic Books) sets out the underlying argument: even highly motivated customers fail to act when the choice architecture is wrong, and the responsibility sits with the organisation that designed it. What this gives a leadership team is a behavioural lens with operating teeth. Pricing, product, marketing and customer experience decisions get tested against published evidence on attention, comprehension and choice, and the recommendations come back as specific design changes a team can ship. Key speaking topics Behavioural economics in commercial decision-making Choice architecture and customer experience Risk communication and information design Patient and consumer behaviour in healthcare Decision-making under uncertainty Behaviour change and adherence Wellbeing and the science of life satisfaction Ideal for Pharmaceutical, medtech and health insurance leadership teams designing patient and physician journeys CMOs, CX leaders and product heads in regulated consumer markets Strategy and innovation teams using behavioural insight to shape pricing, communication and service design Boards and executive committees commissioning customer behaviour-change programmes Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for diagnosing where customer decisions break down and why Specific design moves to apply to communications, consent flows, choice menus and adherence programmes A clear separation between behavioural insight that holds up in published research and the looser claims of the broader nudge industry Evidence-based ways to align product, marketing and operations around real customer cognition rather than assumed rationality

Why organisations work with Peter Siljerud Engineering training combined with twenty years in trend analysis and futures work. His AI commentary runs deeper than headline level into how machine learning and neural networks behave, and what that means for deployment risk. Author of AI för offentlig sektor (Liber, 2023, foreword by Professor Fredrik Heintz of Linköping University), with case studies of Bolagsverket, Riksarkivet, and Hallands sjukhus. One of the few futurists with substantive applied work on public-sector AI. Co-author of Supertrends (ProSales Institute, English edition 2020), a framework of fifty structural shifts in commercial strategy. The book is built for sales and marketing leaders running real planning cycles. Long-running client work with Nordea, ICA, the Church of Sweden, LRF, SPP, and Teracom. The LRF programme reached 12,000 people across a two-year external-analysis curriculum. Biography highlights CEO and founder of Futurewise, a Stockholm-based trend research firm operating since 2008 Author of four books: 100 trender (2011), Bryt normerna (2015), Supertrenderna (2018), and AI för offentlig sektor (Liber, 2023) Two books nominated for Marketing Book of the Year by Sveriges Marknadsförbund (Swedish Marketing Federation) Named one of Sweden’s most creative people by media group IDG in 2012 Former future strategist at Kairos Future and world analyst at Intel Clients include Nordea, ICA, the Church of Sweden, LRF, SPP, and Teracom Biography Sweden’s public-sector AI investment sits at around three percent of national AI spending. The figure is small enough to embarrass policymakers and large enough to matter. Peter Siljerud’s 2023 book AI för offentlig sektor (Liber, foreword by Professor Fredrik Heintz of Linköping University) is the practical response: case studies of Bolagsverket, Riksarkivet, and Hallands sjukhus, written for the leadership teams making the actual deployment decisions. That instinct, work backwards from organisational reality, has shaped twenty years of his practice. He trained as a civil engineer before moving into futures work as a strategist at Kairos Future and a world analyst at Intel. Futurewise, the firm he founded in 2008, helps leadership teams turn external-analysis signals into specific budget and capability calls. The earlier books trace the same arc. 100 trender (2011) was nominated for Sweden’s Marketing Book of the Year and mapped structural shifts hitting Swedish business. Bryt normerna (2015) attacked the assumption that the working day and the employment contract are settled categories. Supertrenderna (2018), co-authored with Henrik Larsson-Broman and Markus Ejenäs of the ProSales Institute, distilled fifty shifts in commercial strategy into operating advice for sales and marketing leaders. What separates him from the broader futurist circuit is the engineering instinct. The talks press past signal identification into what the audience should do next quarter. AI is treated as a specific technology with specific behavioural patterns that leadership teams need to understand at working level. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence and generative AI Strategic foresight and trend analysis Future of work Future of sales and marketing AI in the public sector Consumer behaviour and retail trends Ideal for C-suite and senior leadership teams in Nordic and European businesses making AI investment decisions Public-sector leadership in regions, municipalities, and central agencies working out where AI investment pays back Heads of marketing, sales, and customer experience facing structural change in how customers buy Boards and executive committees in mature industries (real estate, retail, financial services) where trend response is overdue Audience outcomes A clear-eyed view of AI development that goes past press-cycle headlines A short list of trends worth genuine board attention this cycle, separated from the noise Specific case studies from Nordic public and private sector AI deployments, including Bolagsverket and Hallands sjukhus A method for translating external signals into capital and capability decisions Ideas they can put into a board paper inside a fortnight

Why organisations work with Nathalie Nahai Her psychological model for how digital persuasion builds or erodes consumer trust is grounded in a decade of published research, not reactions to recent AI headlines, which gives marketing and strategy teams a diagnostic framework rather than a new concern to manage. Business Unusual directly addresses the commercial consequences of values misalignment, applying the frameworks of self-determination theory and eudaimonic consumerism to the question of why consumers switch, stay and trust: with practical implications for brand, marketing and leadership strategy. She co-created TheValuesMap.com with Dr Kiki Leutner of Goldsmiths University, a scientifically grounded instrument that organisations can use to measure and communicate the values they actually hold, converting a strategic abstraction into a usable tool that survives the board conversation. She translates the ethics of AI and persuasive technology into a commercially legible argument that boards can act on, rather than a compliance burden that legal teams manage. Webs of Influence, published by Pearson and translated into seven languages, is used by universities and Fortune 500 companies as a foundational text on digital consumer behaviour, meaning her frameworks are often already the shared language of the audiences she addresses. Biography highlights Author of Webs of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion (Pearson), translated into seven languages and adopted by universities and Fortune 500 companies as a standard text on digital consumer behaviour Author of Business Unusual: Values, Uncertainty and the Psychology of Brand Resilience, with named contributors including Dan Pink, Cindy Gallop and Amy C. Edmondson Co-created TheValuesMap.com (2021) with Dr Kiki Leutner of Goldsmiths University, a scientific values-assessment instrument available to organisations Guest faculty at ELISAVA’s Masters programme in Human Interaction and AI, teaching “Transversal Vision of Artificial Intelligence” Member of the BIMA Human Insights Council, the representative body for digital and tech in the UK Covered in and contributed to the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, Forbes, The Guardian and The Telegraph; hosted the Guardian Changing Media Summit Biography Nathalie Nahai coined the term web psychology in 2011, defining it as the empirical study of how online environments influence human attitudes and behaviours. At the time, most organisations had powerful digital tools and no psychological framework for understanding what those tools were doing to the people using them. Her book Webs of Influence (Pearson), translated into seven languages, built that framework into a practical text adopted by universities and Fortune 500 companies as a standard reference on digital consumer behaviour. Her follow-up, Business Unusual: Values, Uncertainty and the Psychology of Brand Resilience, extended the argument into harder commercial territory – specifically, how organisations sustain consumer trust when digital markets, values and expectations all shift at once. The book drew contributions from Dan Pink, Cindy Gallop and Amy C. Edmondson, and applies self-determination theory and eudaimonic consumerism to the practical question of what makes brands resilient rather than brittle. In 2021 she co-created TheValuesMap.com with Dr Kiki Leutner of Goldsmiths University, a scientifically grounded instrument that organisations can use to measure and communicate their actual values. The ability to deploy psychology as a practical tool – not just a conceptual frame – distinguishes her approach from most advisory work in this space. Her analysis has been covered in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, Forbes, The Guardian and The Telegraph. She has lectured at Cambridge, UCL, Lund and Hult business schools and addressed major platforms including SXSW, the Web Summit and the Guardian Changing Media Summit. She serves as guest faculty at ELISAVA’s Masters programme in Human Interaction and AI and is a member of the BIMA Human Insights Council. Key speaking topics Consumer psychology and digital influence Ethics of AI and persuasive technology Values-led brand resilience Human behaviour and digital trust Eudaimonic consumerism and shifting consumer expectations Web psychology and online decision-making Behavioural science applied to marketing and product design Ideal for CMOs and marketing leadership teams navigating the ethics and commercial implications of AI-driven personalisation Boards and senior leadership teams seeking a psychological framework for brand resilience and consumer trust strategy Digital product and technology teams applying persuasive design with ethical accountability Transformation and strategy leads working to align organisational values with commercial outcomes Audience outcomes A working model for understanding how AI and persuasive technology affect consumer trust and decision-making, grounded in published research rather than trend observation Practical application of self-determination theory and eudaimonic consumerism frameworks to brand, marketing and customer experience strategy A diagnostic approach to identifying where persuasive technology is eroding rather than building customer relationships Clarity on the commercial case for values-led strategy, with evidence from consumer behaviour research A set of questions to carry back into product, marketing and leadership conversations about how technology is actually affecting the people it is designed to serve