Marketing & Branding speakers

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 Sabrina Faramarzi She has written trend reports for The Future Laboratory, Stylus and Canvas8, three of the most-used forecasting houses in consumer strategy, so brand teams get a forecaster who knows how the foresight industry actually works inside. Her sector range covers travel, beauty, fashion, food and drink, wellbeing, money, tech, retail and media, which means a single speaker can address an audience drawn from several consumer-facing categories without losing specificity. She runs Are We Europe, a cross-border editorial operation, so she brings a pan-European read on culture and audience behaviour rather than a default Anglo-American lens. Her data storytelling practice through Dust in Translation is built for organisations that have research and data assets but cannot make them land with a non-technical audience. Biography highlights Managing Director, Are We Europe, a non-profit pan-European media collective. Founder and Editorial Director, Dust in Translation, a creative data storytelling agency. Co-founder, Feminist Internet, a non-profit advancing internet equality through creative practice. Trend reports written for The Future Laboratory, Stylus and Canvas8. Journalism contributions to The Guardian, Wired, Vice and Vogue Business. BA (Hons) First Class in Trend Prediction and Forecasting, University of East London; MA with Distinction in Journalism, University of the Arts London. Biography Most consumer trend conversations in the boardroom collapse into one of two failure modes. They either treat every TikTok spike as a strategic shift, or they ignore weak signals until a competitor has already built around them. Sabrina Faramarzi works in the gap between those two errors. Her practice is reading consumer and cultural signals well enough to tell a brand team which ones to bet on. She has the technical training for it. A First Class degree in Trend Prediction and Forecasting from the University of East London, an MA with Distinction in Journalism from the University of the Arts London, and a working track record writing trend reports for The Future Laboratory, Stylus and Canvas8. That is the inside of the foresight industry, not a commentator’s view of it. The journalism work runs alongside the forecasting. Bylines in The Guardian, Wired, Vice and Vogue Business cover gender, AI, digital rights and internet culture, and that editorial muscle is what lets her translate research into stories that boards and marketing teams actually use. Through Dust in Translation, her data storytelling agency, she does the same job for organisations sitting on data they cannot make legible. She also runs Are We Europe, a non-profit pan-European media collective, and co-founded Feminist Internet. Both give her something most trend speakers do not have: a structural view of how cultural narratives form and travel across borders, which is the part of trend work that matters most when a category is being reshaped rather than refreshed. Key speaking topics Consumer trend forecasting Data storytelling Internet culture and online communities Futures of consumer-facing industries Gender, AI and digital ethics Cross-border European media and audiences Ideal for CMOs, brand directors and category leads in consumer-facing businesses planning the next 18 to 36 months. Innovation and insights teams looking for an outside read on which signals to commit to. Communications and content leaders who need research and data turned into audience-ready stories. Conferences in travel, hospitality, beauty, fashion, food and drink, retail and media that want a sector-specific futures keynote. Audience outcomes A clearer sense of which consumer signals in their category are durable and which are noise. Working language for telling stories with data so research lands with non-technical audiences. A sharper read on how online communities form, mobilise and shape brand reputation. Sector-specific cues for where to look for the next category shift in travel, beauty, fashion, food, retail or media.

Why organisations work with Sally Hogshead She brings a diagnosis, not a theory. The Fascination Advantage assessment gives leadership teams a shared vocabulary for what each person and each brand actually does best, drawn from data on more than a million respondents. Her commercial credibility is built on practice, not commentary. She wrote campaigns at Crispin Porter and Bogusky and her own agencies for MINI Cooper, Nike, Godiva and Harley-Davidson before turning that craft into a research-based system. Two New York Times bestsellers, Fascinate and How the World Sees You, give her arguments a published spine that internal teams can return to after the keynote. She translates the science of attention into work an executive can act on: how a sales team positions itself in nine seconds, how a leader is perceived in the first meeting, how a brand earns memory in a crowded category. Hall of Fame induction by the National Speakers Association places her in the top tier of professional speakers, measured by sustained client demand, not single-event reception. Biography highlights New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of How the World Sees You and Fascinate, the latter translated into more than twelve languages. Creator of the Fascination Advantage assessment, used by over a million professionals to identify communication and brand differentiation traits. Inducted into the CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame by the National Speakers Association. Former managing and creative director who opened the Crispin Porter and Bogusky Venice office in 2001 and previously co-founded Robaire and Hogshead. Built campaigns for MINI Cooper, Nike, Godiva, Coca-Cola and Harley-Davidson; advertising work held in the Smithsonian Museum of American History. Frequently featured by Fortune 500 teams and C-suite leadership groups to apply Fascinate research directly to brand and team positioning. Biography Most markets are not short of communication. They are short of memorable communication. The discipline of identifying what makes one brand, one team, or one senior leader stand out in a category where everyone sounds competent is where Sally Hogshead has spent twenty years of practice and research. Hogshead came up through the advertising industry as a copywriter at Fallon, Wieden and Kennedy, and The Martin Agency, then co-founded Robaire and Hogshead in 1998 before opening the Venice, California office of Crispin Porter and Bogusky in 2001 as managing and creative director. The campaigns she wrote for MINI Cooper, Nike, Godiva, Coca-Cola and Harley-Davidson hang in the Smithsonian Museum of American History. By the end of that decade, she had won close to every major international advertising award on record. The work since then has been about turning that craft into a system. Her two New York Times bestsellers, Fascinate and How the World Sees You, set out the research behind the Fascination Advantage assessment, a tool used by more than a million professionals and Fortune 500 teams to map how they are actually perceived rather than how they intend to be perceived. The distinction matters in commercial settings, where positioning is decided by the audience, not the speaker. Her induction into the National Speakers Association CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame placed her among fewer than 200 inductees since 1977. Senior teams hire her when they need to move from generic differentiation language to a specific account of why their organisation, product, or leadership team is the one a customer chooses to remember. Key speaking topics Brand differentiation and positioning Persuasion and attention in saturated markets Personal brand and executive presence Customer experience and marketing Sales communication and pitch effectiveness Team communication and perception Storytelling and business communication Ideal for CMOs, brand directors and marketing leadership teams Sales leaders and customer-facing organisations are rebuilding pitch and positioning CHROs and executive development leads are working on senior leader presence Founders and partners in professional services firms competing on differentiation Audience outcomes A specific, named view of where their brand or leadership team is currently differentiated, and where it is interchangeable A working vocabulary from the Fascination Advantage framework that teams can apply to pitches, profiles and internal communication Concrete examples drawn from MINI Cooper, Nike and other brands of how differentiation is constructed, not asserted A sharper assessment of what their customers and colleagues actually find memorable about them Editorial discipline on cutting filler messaging that is competent but forgettable

Why organisations work with Samuel J Scott He argues the brand-versus-performance trade-off in CFO language, which is the conversation that actually decides marketing budgets in a downturn. He is a current Head of Marketing at a connected TV advertising platform, so the case studies are operating reality, not retrospective consulting. His Promotion Fix column in The Drum has run since 2017, giving senior marketers a reference point on advertising effectiveness most peers in the room already read. He holds a WARC Master of Advertising Effectiveness and Marketing Week Mini-MBAs, which is unusually formal training for a working marketer presenting to boards. He takes a public contrarian line on adtech and AI marketing hype, useful for leadership teams tired of vendor pitches dressed as keynotes. Biography highlights Head of Marketing, Adte, a connected TV advertising platform. Columnist of The Promotion Fix in The Drum since 2017; previously a contributing columnist for TechCrunch and Moz. Master of Advertising Effectiveness, WARC, UK. Mini-MBAs in Marketing and Brand Management, Marketing Week, London. 2019 juror, UK Advertising Association Young Lions, the UK Cannes Lions qualifier. Former Director of Marketing at Logz.io and Head of Marketing at Faddom in the Israeli B2B tech sector. Biography In a downturn, the marketing line is the easiest to cut and the most commonly mis-cut. Performance budgets get protected because they are measurable. Brand budgets get reduced because they are not. Within two years, the performance machine stops compounding because the brand has stopped feeding it. That is the argument Samuel J Scott has been making in The Drum’s Promotion Fix column since 2017, and in keynotes for marketing leadership teams across more than two dozen countries. He is one of the few speakers on this subject who is also a working operator, currently Head of Marketing at the connected TV advertising platform Adte, and previously a marketing director in the Israeli B2B technology sector at companies including Logz.io and Faddom. His credentials sit on the technical side of the discipline. A Master of Advertising Effectiveness from WARC, two Mini-MBAs in marketing and brand management from Marketing Week in London, and CIM certifications across marcom planning, copywriting and AI marketing tools. He served as a jury member for the UK Advertising Association’s 2019 Young Lions, the UK qualifier for Cannes. The editorial register is contrarian. Scott has built a reputation for arguing against marketing fashion, whether that is uncritical AI adoption, attribution theatre, or brand purpose campaigns that cannot survive a CFO’s scrutiny. Audiences leave with a sharper view of how to spend a marketing budget when growth gets harder, not a slide deck of trends. Key speaking topics Brand and performance advertising Marketing effectiveness and measurement Defending marketing budgets in downturns B2B marketing and brand-led growth AI in marketing communications Adtech and connected TV Marketing communications strategy Ideal for CMOs and marketing directors under pressure to justify brand spend to a CFO. B2B technology marketing leaders rebuilding a brand layer above lead-gen. Boards and executive teams reviewing marketing as a commercial function, not a cost line. Marketing communications and agency teams negotiating AI-era budget assumptions. Audience outcomes A working language for arguing brand investment in financial terms. A clearer split between what performance media can do and what only brand work delivers. A sceptic’s filter on AI marketing claims from agencies and adtech vendors. A defensible structure for marketing budgets through a downturn. Specific reference points from current B2B technology marketing practice.

Why organisations work with Scott Deming He ran the agency before he ran the keynote. Deming built Ryan Communications to 70 staff and around USD 30m in revenue, serving clients including Benjamin Moore and The Scotts Company, so his views on brand and customer experience come from operating accountability rather than observation. His thesis in The Brand Who Cried Wolf (Wiley, 2007) is unusually concrete for the category: brand is the cumulative outcome of every customer interaction, and most brands fail because they over-promise in marketing and under-deliver in operations. Powered by Purpose gives leadership teams a working language for connecting individual values to customer-facing behaviour, which is where most culture programmes break down. Client list spans regulated and operationally complex environments: AT&T, Verizon Wireless, General Motors, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Delta Airlines, PwC, U.S. Treasury, McDonald’s of Eastern Europe. Useful when buyers want a speaker who has worked inside their kind of complexity, not adjacent to it. He writes regularly for Entrepreneur on customer experience, leadership and innovation, which keeps the material in active circulation rather than locked to a single book cycle. Biography highlights Author, The Brand Who Cried Wolf: Deliver on Your Company’s Promise and Create Customers for Life (John Wiley & Sons, 2007). Author, Powered by Purpose: Identify Your Values, Discover Your Purpose, and Build Success for Life! Founder of Deming Advertising in 1986, later Ryan Communications Inc.; grew the agency to 70 employees and approximately USD 30m in annual revenue before exit in 2003. Regular contributor to Entrepreneur on customer experience, brand, leadership and innovation. Keynote and training work for AT&T, Verizon Wireless, General Motors, Delta Airlines, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, PricewaterhouseCoopers, U.S. Treasury, Hershey Foods, McDonald’s of Eastern Europe, 3M, Chipotle and Frito-Lay, among others. Founder and former board member, Service Nation / Service Roundtable. Biography Brand promises are written in marketing and broken in operations. The book that captures this most directly is The Brand Who Cried Wolf, published by John Wiley & Sons in 2007. Its argument is that customer loyalty is built or destroyed in the routine interactions that no advertising campaign can paper over. That argument has a particular weight because the author spent seventeen years running the kind of agency that produces those campaigns. Scott Deming founded Deming Advertising in 1986 and rebuilt it as Ryan Communications Inc., growing the agency to around 70 staff and USD 30m in revenue before exiting in 2003. Clients included Benjamin Moore and The Scotts Company. The view of brand as an operating outcome, not a creative output, was formed inside that business. His second book, Powered by Purpose, extends the thesis inward. Customer experience is downstream of culture, and culture is downstream of whether individual employees understand their own values and how those values show up in the work. The book is the basis for his leadership keynote, which leaders use as the language for connecting purpose to customer-facing behaviour. The platform work spans large, operationally complex organisations: AT&T, Verizon Wireless, General Motors, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Delta Airlines, PricewaterhouseCoopers, U.S. Treasury, McDonald’s of Eastern Europe and others. He writes regularly for Entrepreneur on customer experience, brand, leadership and innovation, and he was a founding board member of Service Nation / Service Roundtable, the network for service-business owners in the trades. Key speaking topics Customer experience and brand loyalty Brand strategy and brand promise Purpose-driven leadership and culture Employee engagement and customer-facing behaviour Sales and customer service performance Innovation in customer-led organisations Ideal for CMOs, CXOs and brand leaders looking to close the gap between marketing promise and customer reality. CEOs and operating leaders accountable for culture as a commercial lever, not an HR slogan. Heads of customer service, sales and retail operations in regulated or franchised environments. Franchise networks, dealer groups and service-business associations where the brand is delivered by independently operated front lines. Audience outcomes A clearer test for whether your brand promise survives contact with your actual customer journey. A working model for connecting employee purpose and values to customer-facing decisions. Practical changes to customer service routines, from frontline scripts to escalation policy, that compound into loyalty. Confidence that culture work has a measurable commercial return, not just a wellbeing one. A shared internal language for talking about brand as an operational discipline rather than a creative one.

Why organisations work with Scott Dikkers A published method for generating creative output at volume, codified in the “How to Write Funny” series and tested over three decades of running The Onion newsroom. The founder’s view of how a $16,000 college newspaper became a national satirical brand worth multiples of that, with a defined argument about mission, culture and creative discipline drawn from “Outrageous Marketing” and “The Onion Story.” Built and runs the “Writing with The Onion” programme at The Second City in Chicago, training comedy writers who have gone on to Emmy-winning television rooms, so the keynote sits on top of a working teaching practice. A practitioner’s perspective on creativity in the age of generative AI, framed around how human writers and editors keep brand voice intact when first drafts are cheap and originality is not. Biography highlights Founder of The Onion and TheOnion.com, the world’s first humour website. Longest-serving editor-in-chief of The Onion across two tenures (1988-1999 and 2005-2008) and former General Manager and VP of Creative Development. Number one New York Times bestselling author of “Our Dumb Century,” winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Author of more than 30 books, including the “How to Write Funny” series, “Outrageous Marketing” and “The Onion Story.” Creator of the “Writing with The Onion” programme at The Second City training centre in Chicago. Syndicated cartoonist of “Jim’s Journal,” distributed to college newspapers across the United States from 1987 to 1997. Biography A satirical college newspaper bought for $16,000 in 1989 became one of the most recognisable brands in American media. The route from there to a national audience, a Peabody-winning news network and a publishing list that has sold millions of copies was not luck. It was a writers’ room run with unusual discipline, and Scott Dikkers ran it for most of its formative years. As editor-in-chief of The Onion across two tenures, and later as General Manager and VP of Creative Development, Dikkers built the editorial process that produced the headlines most readers can still quote. He launched TheOnion.com in 1996, the first humour website on the internet, and went on to edit “Our Dumb Century,” a number one New York Times bestseller that won the Thurber Prize for American Humor and has sold more than half a million copies. The argument behind his commercial work is set out in “How to Write Funny,” “Outrageous Marketing” and “The Onion Story.” Comedy is not magic. It is a method, and brand voice is the operational output of that method. Dikkers codified the process at The Onion, then transferred it into the “Writing with The Onion” programme he created at The Second City training centre in Chicago, where his students have been hired into Emmy-winning television rooms. For corporate audiences, the relevance is direct. Generative AI has made first drafts trivial and originality scarce. Dikkers’ keynote takes the writers’ room discipline that built The Onion and applies it to creative output, brand voice and the question every marketing and product team is now asking: how do you keep what makes your work yours when the cost of imitation has collapsed. Key speaking topics Creativity as an operating discipline Brand voice and editorial culture Humour and storytelling in business communication Building a media brand from a standing start Creative leadership in the age of generative AI Media literacy and the reading of satire Mission-led culture in creative organisations Ideal for CMOs, brand and content leaders managing creative output at scale Innovation, R&D and product leadership teams working alongside generative AI tools Communications, internal comms and L&D leaders rebuilding storytelling capability Entrepreneurship programmes and founder audiences at universities and conferences Audience outcomes A working method for generating original creative material, drawn from the writers’ room that built The Onion A clearer language for what brand voice is and how it survives contact with AI-generated content A founder’s view of how a small editorial team scaled into a national media business without losing its identity A sharper test for distinguishing satire and credible information in a feed-driven media environment A reference set of named examples from three decades of Onion headlines that a team can take back into its own creative reviews

Why organisations work with Scott Galloway A working framework for how platform economics, network effects, and data accumulation concentrate value, drawn from a tenured marketing academic who has also built and sold technology companies inside the same system he analyses. Annual, falsifiable predictions on consumer, technology, and business trends that boards can stress-test against their own capital allocation, rather than abstract futurism. Direct reads on the AI cycle, including where investment is overpriced relative to operating value and where it is not, from a faculty member teaching brand and digital strategy at MBA level. A founder track record across nine companies, including the sale of L2 to Gartner, that grounds the strategic argument in commercial reality rather than commentary. Reach across The Prof G Pod, Pivot with Kara Swisher, and the No Mercy / No Malice newsletter that signals a leader who already shapes how senior audiences think about Big Tech. Biography highlights Professor of Marketing, NYU Stern School of Business; teaches Brand Strategy and Digital Marketing to second-year MBAs. Founder of nine companies including Prophet, RedEnvelope, L2 (sold to Gartner), and Section. New York Times bestselling author of The Four, The Algebra of Happiness, Post Corona, Adrift, and The Algebra of Wealth; books translated into 28 languages. Host of The Prof G Pod and co-host of Pivot with Kara Swisher; publisher of the No Mercy / No Malice newsletter. Board service: The New York Times Company, Urban Outfitters, Panera Bread, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Ledger. Named one of the world’s best business school professors by Poets & Quants; multiple Webby Award winner. Biography A small number of companies now capture a disproportionate share of consumer attention, transaction data, and equity value. The Four set out the mechanics of how Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Google did it, and the argument has only sharpened as AI consolidates around the same incumbents. Galloway treats this as a question of structural economics, not corporate behaviour, and that is the lens he brings to a boardroom. At NYU Stern, he holds a chair in marketing and teaches Brand Strategy and Digital Marketing to second-year MBAs. Poets & Quants has ranked him among the world’s best business professors. The academic position matters because it disciplines the work, but the operating experience is what makes the analysis useful to executives: nine companies founded, including Prophet, RedEnvelope, and L2, the digital intelligence firm acquired by Gartner in 2017. The published record runs from platform economics in The Four to capital and career frameworks in The Algebra of Wealth, with Post Corona and Adrift sitting between as reads on the post-2020 economy and the structural condition of the United States. Across The Prof G Pod, Pivot with Kara Swisher, and No Mercy / No Malice, he makes annual, data-led predictions on consumer, tech, and macro trends that leadership teams can test against their own planning. What distinguishes him in a room of senior buyers is the combination of categories he occupies at once: faculty member, founder, board director at The New York Times Company and Panera, and a public commentator with reach. That stack means the argument is not theoretical, not detached from operating reality, and not delivered with the hedging that usually accompanies academic input. Key speaking topics Big Tech and platform economics Artificial intelligence and the next concentration of value Brand strategy in a digital, winner-take-most economy Consumer and technology trend forecasting Entrepreneurship and company building Higher education and the future of work Capital, careers, and personal financial strategy Ideal for Boards and executive teams setting strategy in sectors exposed to platform incumbents CMOs, CSOs, and digital leaders rebuilding commercial models for a data-concentrated market Investor and capital allocation audiences seeking a structural read on tech and AI cycles Annual leadership offsites looking for a falsifiable trend forecast rather than generic futurism Audience outcomes A clearer view of where platform economics concentrate value and where they do not, applied to the audience’s own sector. Specific reads on the AI cycle, including which categories are overpriced and which are operationally credible. A set of annual predictions that can be stress-tested against the organisation’s planning assumptions. A sharper sense of what brand and customer strategy now have to do to remain defensible.

Why organisations work with Sean Pillot de Chenecey He turned the trust collapse into a working brand discipline. The Post-Truth Business, his Kogan Page bestseller, gives commercial leaders a concrete language for authenticity at a time when most marketing advice is still optimising for awareness. He sits inside formal futures-studies practice, not only commercial consulting. As UK Associate Partner at the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies, he runs the institute’s Foresight-Driven Innovation course, which he applies to client brand and innovation work. He holds office in the global futures-studies field. As Director of Public Affairs at the World Futures Studies Federation, the UNESCO-partnered global body for futures studies scholarship, he operates inside the same institutional network as the academics, policy specialists and foresight practitioners shaping how organisations think about long-range change. He has been doing trends and foresight long enough to know what holds. Co-founding The Future Laboratory in the 1990s, then operating his own consultancy Brand Positive, gives him three decades of pattern recognition across consumer, cultural and commercial cycles. His podcast, The New Abnormal, approaching 300,000 downloads, keeps him in continuous dialogue with academics, operators and activists shaping how organisations are perceived, which feeds directly into client work. Biography highlights Author of The Post-Truth Business (Kogan Page), No. 1 Business Bestseller, on rebuilding brand authenticity in a distrusting world. Author of Influencers and Revolutionaries (Kogan Page), shortlisted for the Business Book of the Year Awards. UK Associate Partner, Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies, leading the Foresight-Driven Innovation course. Director of Public Affairs, World Futures Studies Federation, the UNESCO-partnered global body for futures studies scholarship. Co-founder of trend forecasting agency The Future Laboratory; founder of independent strategy consultancy Brand Positive. Host of The New Abnormal podcast, approaching 300,000 downloads. Agenda contributor to the World Economic Forum; visiting lecturer at University of the Arts London (Central Saint Martins, London College of Fashion), the Royal College of Art, the University of Brighton and other leading creative and business schools for more than two decades. Biography Most brand thinkers stop at narrative. Most futurists stop at the macro picture. Sean Pillot de Chenecey works the join between the two, and that is where his commercial value sits. His Kogan Page bestseller The Post-Truth Business argued that brand authenticity, not louder advertising, is the operating answer to collapsing customer trust, and gave senior marketers a working framework rather than a critique. His career put him in the right place to take that argument seriously. In the 1990s he co-founded The Future Laboratory, the trend forecasting agency, before running his own consultancy Brand Positive for clients across consumer, financial services and technology. The Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies brought him in as UK Associate Partner, and he leads the institute’s Foresight-Driven Innovation course, used by organisations who want innovation work grounded in real scenario method rather than ideation theatre. He also serves as Director of Public Affairs at the World Futures Studies Federation, the UNESCO-partnered global peak body for futures studies scholarship. His second book, Influencers and Revolutionaries, shortlisted for the Business Book of the Year Awards, mapped the founders, technologists and activists actually moving markets. The New Abnormal, his podcast, has crossed 250,000 downloads and now functions as a working research instrument; he is in continuous conversation with the academics, operators and cultural figures who shape how organisations are perceived. He has lectured on strategy and innovation at Central Saint Martins, the Royal College of Art, Chelsea College of Art, LSBU Business School, Miami Ad School, OMNES/INSEEC and the University for the Creative Arts for more than twenty years, and contributes to the World Economic Forum’s agenda. The combination, three decades of trends practice plus a formal futures-studies foothold plus a published thesis on trust, is what brings him into rooms where the brief is brand authenticity, customer trust or innovation strategy under uncertainty. Key speaking topics Brand authenticity and customer trust Foresight-driven innovation Megatrends and scenario planning Consumer behaviour in a post-truth environment Marketing strategy under uncertainty Anticipatory leadership Politics, philosophy and the future of business Ideal for CMOs, brand directors and customer experience leaders rebuilding trust with sceptical audiences. Chief strategy officers and innovation leads who need foresight integrated into commercial planning. Boards and executive committees setting brand and reputation direction in a low-trust environment. Marketing, communications and insight teams refreshing their approach to consumer and cultural change. Audience outcomes A working definition of brand authenticity that holds up against current consumer scepticism. A clearer view of which megatrends actually intersect with the audience’s commercial decisions, and which are noise. A method for moving from trend awareness to innovation choices that survive contact with the operating plan. Sharper questions about where customer trust is being earned, eroded or faked inside the organisation today.

Why organisations work with SeenThroughGlass He brings a working creator’s audience instinct into the room. Brands get a host who has spent a decade testing what holds attention on a phone screen, not a presenter reading a script. Direct access to the supercar and motorsport world. His interview series Behind The Glass has put him opposite Sebastian Vettel, Jenson Button and Max Chilton, which translates into credible panel chemistry with senior automotive guests. Proven commercial partnerships with Shell, Pirelli and Harman Kardon. He has worked inside major brand activations, not just commented on them. Recognised reach. Named in The Sunday Times Top 50 UK Influencers list, with cumulative video views in the tens of millions across an audience that car, lifestyle and luxury marketers spend heavily to reach. A founder’s view of the creator economy. He has built, monetised and scaled the channel himself, which lands well with marketing leadership trying to make sense of where their influencer spend actually goes. Biography highlights Founder of Seen Through Glass, an automotive YouTube channel launched in 2014 that reached 100,000 subscribers in its first year and has accumulated tens of millions of views. Named in The Sunday Times Top 50 UK Influencers. Host of Behind The Glass, a weekly automotive podcast and interview series featuring senior figures from motorsport and the supercar community. Brand collaborations with Shell, Pirelli and Harman Kardon. On-camera work with Formula 1 drivers including Sebastian Vettel, Jenson Button and Max Chilton. Creator of Drive The World, a 2019 six-continent road trip series documenting global car culture. Biography Most car brands are still organised around the assumption that the buyer walks into a showroom. The buying decision now happens on a phone, mediated by a small group of creators whose audiences spend hours a week watching them drive, review and argue about cars. Sam Fane is one of them. He founded Seen Through Glass in 2014, after a stint in PR in Mayfair and early experiments shooting point-of-view footage on Google Glass. The channel reached 100,000 subscribers in its first year. A decade on, it has accumulated tens of millions of views across road trips, ownership videos, motorsport coverage and long-form interviews. His interview platform, Behind The Glass, has hosted Sebastian Vettel, Jenson Button and Max Chilton, alongside dealers, designers and other figures inside the supercar economy. Brand work with Shell, Pirelli and Harman Kardon has put him on the commercial side of automotive content as well as the editorial side. The Sunday Times named him in its Top 50 UK Influencers list. For events, that combination matters in a practical way. Automotive, luxury and lifestyle brands often need a host who can interview a Formula 1 driver, moderate a panel of marketing leaders and hold an audience that has spent the day on its phones. Fane has done all three for a living for ten years. Key speaking topics Automotive content and the creator economy The supercar and luxury car market Building a media brand on YouTube Brand partnerships and influencer commerce Motorsport and Formula 1 culture Awards hosting and on-stage interviewing Ideal for Automotive OEMs, dealerships and aftermarket brands running customer or trade events Luxury, lifestyle and watch brand marketing leadership Motorsport and motoring industry awards CMOs and brand directors reviewing influencer and content strategy Audience outcomes A clearer view of how automotive buying attention has shifted from showroom to screen. A working sense of what makes a brand partnership land with a creator audience and what makes it fail. Direct, on-stage insight from a creator who has built a business on the platform marketers most often misunderstand. A confident, well-paced event with a host who is comfortable opposite senior automotive and motorsport figures.

Why organisations work with Seth Godin The permission marketing framework, first articulated in 1999, anticipated the mechanics now encoded in GDPR, email consent law, and the inbound marketing movement. Organisations working with Godin are drawing on the original source, not a derivative Purple Cow provides a genuinely testable argument: remarkability must be designed into the product or service from the outset, not applied as a marketing layer afterwards: a direct challenge to most organisations’ R&D and go-to-market sequencing His body of work spans 21 bestsellers over three decades with a consistent intellectual thread; buyers are not engaging with a single-thesis speaker, but with someone whose thinking has proved durable across multiple market cycles Inducted into the Marketing Hall of Fame (2018), the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame (2013), and the Guerrilla Marketing Hall of Fame – the only person known to hold all three – giving him third-party validation across the full spectrum of marketing practice His daily blog, running for over 25 years without interruption, is itself a proof point for the compounding value of consistent, permission-based communication: a lived demonstration of the principle he teaches Biography highlights Author of 21 international bestsellers translated into 38+ languages, including Permission Marketing, Purple Cow, Tribes, Linchpin, This Is Marketing, and This Is Strategy (2024 National Bestseller) Originator of the «permission marketing» and «interruption marketing» frameworks (1999), now foundational to digital marketing, CRM practice, and consent regulation worldwide Founder of Yoyodyne, a pioneering permission-marketing company sold to Yahoo! in 1998; served as Yahoo!’s VP of Direct Marketing post-acquisition Inducted into the Marketing Hall of Fame (AMA New York, 2018), the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame (2013), and the Guerrilla Marketing Hall of Fame MBA, Stanford Graduate School of Business; BA in computer science and philosophy, Tufts University Founder of the altMBA, an intensive online leadership and decision-making workshop Five TED Talks; author of one of the most-read daily business blogs in the world Biography Seth Godin sold his first company, Yoyodyne, to Yahoo! in 1998 for $29.6 million. It was a permission marketing business: built around the then-contrarian argument that reaching people who had consented to hear from you was worth more than reaching vastly more people who had not. That argument is now the structural basis of email marketing, CRM, and data consent regulation across most markets. His 1999 book Permission Marketing named the framework and introduced its counterpart: interruption marketing, the logic of buying attention from people who did not want to give it. The book’s central claim – that anticipated, personal, relevant communication outperforms volume-based reach at every commercial stage – has proved more durable than most marketing theory of its era. HubSpot built a software category around a version of it. GDPR made it legally mandatory. The same structural argument runs through his subsequent work. Purple Cow made the case that a product worth noticing is the precondition for marketing worth running. Tribes reframed leadership as community-building rather than hierarchy. This Is Strategy, published in 2024 and a US National Bestseller, gives organisations a practical framework for distinguishing between long-term systems thinking and reactive planning. Each book refines the same underlying question: what does it actually take to earn the attention and trust of people who have a choice? He holds an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a degree in computer science and philosophy from Tufts University. Inducted into three marketing halls of fame and the author of 21 international bestsellers, Godin writes a daily blog that has run without interruption for over 25 years; a compounding body of public intellectual work that few business writers at any level have matched. Key speaking topics Permission-based marketing and opt-in engagement Market differentiation and the logic of remarkability Strategy, systems thinking, and long-term planning Tribe leadership and community-driven growth Creative practice and the discipline of shipping work The economics of attention in overcrowded markets Climate communication and collaborative action Ideal for CMOs and brand leadership teams rethinking acquisition and retention strategy CEOs and senior strategy leads pressure-testing their differentiation logic Founders and growth-stage leaders building category identity Boards and executive teams resetting planning frameworks in volatile conditions Audience outcomes A working understanding of the permission marketing framework and how it applies to current customer acquisition and retention strategy A testable argument for why remarkability must precede marketing investment, not follow it Practical framing for the difference between short-term attention tactics and long-term trust-building Exposure to the systems-thinking approach in This Is Strategy, useful for teams that confuse tactics with strategy A challenge to default assumptions about reach, volume, and interruption as commercial levers

Why organisations work with Sharmadean Reid She has built three businesses from scratch, WAH Nails, Beautystack and The Stack World, and raised venture capital as one of a small number of Black women globally to close a seven-figure seed round. Her work on the gender wealth gap is operational, not rhetorical: The Stack World is a paid community and financial education platform with over 20,000 members, not a campaign or content brand. Penguin Life published her first book, New Methods for Women, in June 2024, giving her a coherent and citable thesis on independence and economic agency that buyers can hand to their teams. She speaks from inside the founder experience that most corporate diversity programmes are trying to influence, with credibility on capital access, community building and brand creation that few other speakers in this category carry. UAL conferred an Honorary Fellowship at Central Saint Martins in 2024, recognising her contribution to creative entrepreneurship and community. Biography highlights Founder, The Stack World, a community and financial education platform with a global membership focused on women’s wealth building. Founder of Beautystack (2017), an image-based booking platform for beauty professionals that raised over £1m in seed funding in 2018. Founder of WAH Nails (2009), the Dalston-born salon that built a global cultural brand and a product line distributed through Boots. MBE for services to the nail and beauty industry, 2015 Queen’s Birthday Honours. Author of New Methods for Women: A Manifesto for Independence, Penguin Life, 2024. Honorary Fellow, University of the Arts London, 2024; graduate of Central Saint Martins, BA Fashion Communication and Promotion. Biography Few women raise seven-figure seed rounds in the UK. Fewer Black women do. Sharmadean Reid did it in 2018 for Beautystack, the image-based booking platform she founded after a decade running WAH Nails, the Dalston salon that turned a youth-culture zine into a cult retail brand and a product line in Boots. That trajectory matters because it gives her something most speakers on women’s leadership do not have: lived experience of the operating constraints, from access to capital to brand building to customer acquisition, that determine whether women actually end up running and owning businesses at scale. Her work is rooted in commercial reality, not advocacy. The Stack World, which she founded in 2021, is the logical next step. It is a paid community and financial education platform with more than 20,000 members, designed to close the gender wealth gap through literacy, networks and collective investment rather than corporate sponsorship. The thesis is published: Penguin Life released her book, New Methods for Women: A Manifesto for Independence, in June 2024. Her credentials sit behind the argument, not in front of it. MBE in 2015 for services to the nail and beauty industry. Honorary Fellowship from University of the Arts London in 2024, conferred at her alma mater Central Saint Martins. For organisations serious about moving gender equity from policy into commercial outcome, she is the rare voice who can speak to founders, executives and policy audiences from the same body of work. Key speaking topics The gender wealth gap and women’s economic empowerment Entrepreneurship, founder journeys and raising venture capital Community as a commercial strategy Building and scaling consumer brands Closing the gender leadership gap Creative entrepreneurship and the creator economy Ideal for CHROs, DEI leads and chief sustainability officers translating gender commitments into measurable outcomes Founders, investors and venture teams focused on backing women-led businesses Marketing, brand and customer leaders building community-led growth models Boards and executive committees setting policy on women’s progression and supplier diversity Audience outcomes A clear-eyed account of what it takes to fund, build and scale a venture-backed business as a woman founder A working definition of the gender wealth gap, and the levers organisations can pull on it Concrete examples of community as a commercial mechanism, not a marketing layer A more honest internal language for discussing gender equity beyond pipeline metrics

Why organisations work with Simon Anholt Twenty years of direct advisory work with Presidents, Prime Ministers, monarchs and governments across more than 60 countries gives him a breadth of comparative case material that no academic or agency can match. The Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands Index, one of the largest social surveys ever conducted and running since 2005, gives his analysis a measured baseline rather than an anecdotal one. The Good Country Index reframed nation performance from domestic output to global contribution and has become a reference point for governments, NGOs and multilateral institutions. His book The Good Country Equation was described by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights as «a masterpiece», and his earlier books Competitive Identity, Brand America and Brand New Justice are among the standard texts on place branding and its implications. He founded the Journal of Place Brand and Public Diplomacy, anchoring him inside the academic community that now studies the field he defined. Biography highlights Independent policy advisor; Anholt & Co. has worked with governments of more than 60 countries Coined the term «nation brand» in 1998; founder of the field of place branding Founder of the Good Country Index (2014) and the Global Vote (2016) Founder of the Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands Index (2005-); 300 billion+ data points analysed Honorary Professor at the University of East Anglia Author of Brand New Justice, Brand America, Competitive Identity, Places and The Good Country Equation Founding and emeritus editor of the Journal of Place Brand and Public Diplomacy Biography National reputation is one of the most consequential and least-understood assets a country owns, and Simon Anholt has spent more than two decades making it measurable. He coined the term «nation brand» in 1998, founded the Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands Index in 2005, and has since advised more than sixty governments, Presidents, Prime Ministers and monarchs on how to build the kind of international reputation that actually shifts investment, talent and political influence. His central argument is that reputation is earned through what a country does, not what it says. That thesis became the Good Country Index in 2014, an annual ranking of how much each country contributes to humanity and the planet, built from 35 indicators drawn largely from United Nations and World Bank datasets. It has since become a reference point in international policy discussions, and a rare example of a league table that leaders take seriously. The Global Vote project, which he launched in 2016, extends the same argument into electoral politics, allowing international participation in national elections on the basis of candidates’ potential contribution to humanity. His books, Brand New Justice, Brand America, Competitive Identity, Places and The Good Country Equation, set out the academic and practical foundations of the field, with the latter described by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights as «a masterpiece». He holds an Honorary Professorship at the University of East Anglia and founded the Journal of Place Brand and Public Diplomacy, the academic journal that now carries the field he defined. For governments, national agencies, multilateral institutions and multinationals working on the intersection of reputation, policy and global cooperation, Anholt offers a combination of comparative advisory experience, independent data and a coherent ethical frame that is difficult to find elsewhere. Key speaking topics The Good Country Index and the case for global cooperation Nation branding and place branding Reputation, policy and national competitiveness Governance and the global consequences of domestic decisions Big data and national identity Tourism, trade and investment promotion strategy Ideal for Governments, heads of state offices, ministries and national agencies working on reputation, investment and tourism Multilateral institutions, NGOs and policy forums focused on international cooperation and the SDG agenda Multinationals with significant place-branding or country-of-origin exposure International conferences on geopolitics, development and public diplomacy Audience outcomes A measurable framework for national reputation drawn from the Nation Brands Index and the Good Country Index A clearer view of the policy decisions that genuinely move international perception, versus those that do not Comparative case material from more than 60 countries advised by Anholt & Co. Reference texts in Competitive Identity and The Good Country Equation for internal and programme follow-up A framing of national strategy that integrates reputation, policy and global contribution rather than treating them as separate agendas