Marketing & Branding

Why organisations work with Matthew Luhn He spent more than 20 years inside Pixar’s story room, working on Toy Story, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, Up and Ratatouille, so the principles he teaches are the ones that actually shipped some of the most commercially successful films ever made. His book The Best Story Wins (Morgan James, 2018) gives buyers a named, documented methodology, not a generic storytelling pitch. Teams leave with a structure they can apply to a keynote, a sales call, or a brand campaign. He is one of very few speakers who has been inside a working creative culture at scale, and can speak credibly to how Pixar’s Braintrust process produces honest creative feedback without breaking trust. His client list on this material includes Apple, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Capital One, Procter and Gamble, Sony and Target, which signals that senior brand, marketing and innovation leaders are the audience he is built for. He treats storytelling as a commercial competency, not a soft skill. The work is aimed at sharper messaging, stronger brand recall, and better internal communication of strategy. Biography highlights Story artist and story supervisor at Pixar Animation Studios across more than two decades, with credits on Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, Cars, Ratatouille, Up, Toy Story 3 and Monsters University. One of the original 12 animators hired on the first Toy Story film in 1995. Youngest animator hired on The Simpsons at age 19, with credits on six 1992 episodes including Kamp Krusty and Lisa’s Pony. Author of The Best Story Wins: How to Leverage Hollywood Storytelling in Business and Beyond, Morgan James Publishing, 2018. TEDx speaker (TEDxUCSB), and corporate keynote speaker for Apple, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Capital One, Procter and Gamble, Sony, Target, Vrbo, Adidas and Lego. Trained at the California Institute of the Arts character animation program; BFA from the Academy of Art University. Biography Pixar built one of the most reliable creative engines in modern business by treating story as a discipline, not a talent. Inside that engine sat a small group of story artists whose job was to find, in every film, the emotional truth a global audience would respond to. Matthew Luhn was one of them, across more than 20 years and films including Toy Story, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, Up and Ratatouille. That work began early. He was the youngest animator hired on The Simpsons at 19, then joined Pixar in 1995 as one of the first 12 animators on Toy Story. He moved into the story room for Toy Story 2 and stayed there, eventually as story supervisor, through some of the most commercially successful animated films ever made. The carry-over to business is direct. The same questions a story artist asks about a film, what does the audience need to feel, what is the change, what is the one thing they should remember, are the questions a leader should be asking about a strategy launch, a sales pitch or a brand campaign. His book, The Best Story Wins (Morgan James, 2018), turns those questions into a working methodology. Buyers tend to find him through a specific tension. Their messages are accurate but not memorable. Their brand is recognised but not loved. Their internal communications inform but do not move people. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Capital One, Procter and Gamble, Sony and Target have used his work to address those gaps. Key speaking topics Business storytelling Brand narrative and customer engagement Creative culture and the Pixar Braintrust process Innovation and creative differentiation Leadership communication Sales and pitch storytelling Ideal for CMOs, brand directors and content leaders rebuilding how the company shows up to customers. Innovation leads and product organisations that need to make new ideas land internally and externally. Sales leadership and revenue teams sharpening pitch craft and customer-facing narrative. Internal communications and HR leaders running large town halls, change programmes or culture launches. Audience outcomes A working structure for building a story around any business message, drawn from the Pixar story process. Sharper sense of what makes a brand or product narrative memorable rather than merely accurate. Tools for giving and receiving honest creative feedback, modelled on the Pixar Braintrust. A clearer separation between information delivery and persuasion, applied to keynotes, pitches and internal comms. Specific, repeatable techniques the team can apply to the next campaign, all-hands or customer presentation.

Why organisations work with Thomas Barta He turned the largest dataset on marketing leadership effectiveness, more than 67,000 360-degree assessments, into a specific set of behaviours that separate high-impact CMOs from the rest. His McGraw-Hill book with Patrick Barwise of London Business School, The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader, gives senior marketers a research-grounded playbook rather than another opinion piece on the role. As leadership dean of the CMO Fellowship run by McKinsey and The Marketing Academy, he works each year with a small cohort of CMOs being prepared for CEO roles, which gives him a current view of where the function is going. His McKinsey work training over a thousand internal leaders on driving change without authority translates directly to the central problem CMOs face: delivering growth across functions they do not control. 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 Marketing officers carry the customer agenda but rarely own the levers that drive growth. Thomas Barta’s research, built on more than 67,000 360-degree assessments of marketing and non-marketing leaders, set out to identify what actually separates the CMOs who shift their company’s trajectory from those who do not. The work, conducted with Patrick Barwise of London Business School, became The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader, published by McGraw-Hill. His authority on the subject is grounded in two decades of advisory work. As a partner at McKinsey, Barta led growth transformations across 14 industries in 45 countries, working with 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 McKinsey leaders on a single problem: how to drive change in organisations where you have responsibility without formal authority. That problem is the same one most CMOs face every quarter. He runs the Marketing Leadership Institute and, with The Marketing Academy and McKinsey, serves as long-standing leadership dean of the CMO Fellowship, an annual cohort of marketers being prepared for CEO roles. He is an Honorary Fellow of The Marketing Society and writes for Forbes, Marketing Week and Nikkei. Barta’s training is unusual for the field. An MBA in marketing from London Business School sits alongside a Master’s in Organisational Psychology from INSEAD, which is why his keynotes read less as marketing seminars and more as work on senior influence, board credibility and the behavioural mechanics of leading commercial change. Key speaking topics Marketing leadership and CMO effectiveness Driving change without formal authority Customer-led growth The behavioural shift from marketer to marketing leader Influence at the executive table Building commercial credibility for the marketing function Ideal for CMOs, CGOs and senior marketing leaders preparing for board-level roles CEOs who want the marketing function to set, not chase, the growth agenda Marketing leadership programmes and CMO development cohorts Customer, brand and growth leadership offsites at large organisations Audience outcomes A clear picture of the twelve behaviours research links to high-impact marketing leadership. A practical model for influencing peers and superiors when the lever you need sits outside your function. A sharper read on how senior marketers earn commercial credibility with CFOs and CEOs. A framework for translating customer insight into decisions the rest of the C-suite will fund.

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 Fredrik Eklund He has built and scaled one of the highest-grossing residential real estate teams in the United States, with $4.6B in sales in 2022 and $3.77B in 2023, so his advice on client acquisition and closing is grounded in operator-scale results rather than theory. The Sell, his New York Times bestselling book with Penguin’s Avery imprint, gives audiences a named, testable ten-step framework for personal selling and pitching, which turns the keynote into a tool the team can use on Monday. A decade on Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing New York gave him unusual fluency in performing under pressure and building a personal brand in public, a capability most commercial leaders are now being asked to develop themselves. He speaks from a dual-market perspective, having built businesses in both Stockholm and Manhattan and having worked previously at SEB across London, Singapore, and Tokyo, which plays well with global sales audiences who want more than a US-only view. His core argument, that everyone in a client-facing organisation is already in sales whether they realise it or not, lands with audiences beyond the sales team itself, including founders, partners, and professional-services leaders. Biography highlights Co-founder, with John Gomes, of the Eklund Gomes Team at Douglas Elliman, reported as the top-producing residential real estate team in the US in recent years. Author of The Sell: The Secrets of Selling Anything to Anyone (Avery, 2015), a New York Times bestseller also released in Sweden and the UK. Original cast member of Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing New York from its 2012 launch through 2022, across nine seasons of MDLNY and two seasons of Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles. Co-star of Bravo’s Bethenny and Fredrik spin-off with Bethenny Frankel in 2018. Recipient, with John Gomes, of Douglas Elliman’s 2021 ICON Award for cumulative career sales of over $15B. Background in finance at SEB in Stockholm, London, Singapore, and Tokyo, and studies at the Stockholm School of Economics, before relocating to New York to build his real estate career from scratch. Biography The Eklund Gomes Team at Douglas Elliman closed $4.6B in residential real estate in 2022 and $3.77B in 2023, figures that place it near the top of any serious ranking of US real estate teams. Fredrik Eklund co-founded that business with John Gomes. The scale matters because it is the evidence base for everything he says on stage about sales, client trust, and building a personal brand in a market where every competitor looks equally credible on paper. Eklund arrived in Manhattan in his mid-twenties with a finance CV from SEB in Stockholm, London, Singapore, and Tokyo, and no real estate contacts. Within a year he was nominated for Rookie of the Year by the Real Estate Board of New York. The through line from that start to today’s team is a clear operating idea: in commoditised markets, the product is the seller. The Sell, published by Penguin’s Avery imprint in 2015 and a New York Times bestseller, sets out that idea as a ten-step framework covering authenticity, pitch construction, negotiation, and closing. A decade on Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing New York, from its 2012 premiere through his departure in 2022, turned Eklund into one of the most recognisable sales figures in American business media. It also taught him something less obvious that keynote audiences value. Senior people in client-facing roles, founders, partners, and relationship leaders, are now expected to carry a visible public profile. Eklund has been practising that craft, on camera and at scale, longer than most. For corporate audiences, the argument lands most sharply on two questions leaders are already asking. How do we train our best people to behave like owners of the client relationship rather than executors of a process, and how do we build the kind of personal credibility that moves a deal before the pitch starts. Eklund answers both from inside a live commercial operation, not from a classroom. Key speaking topics Personal selling and the close Personal brand for commercial leaders Client acquisition in commoditised markets Sales culture and high-performance teams Entrepreneurship and business building Negotiation and pitch craft Real estate and luxury markets Ideal for Sales kick-offs and revenue leadership offsites, particularly in financial services, real estate, professional services, and luxury sectors Partner, MD, and client-facing leader events where personal brand and relationship ownership are on the agenda Founder, entrepreneur, and growth-stage audiences building a commercial operation from scratch After-dinner and awards-night formats where a high-recognition keynote with commercial substance is wanted Audience outcomes A named ten-step framework from The Sell that teams can map directly onto their own pitch, pipeline, and closing process A sharper sense of what “personal brand” means in practical, revenue-linked terms, rather than as a social media activity Specific tactics for opening, holding, and closing a high-stakes client conversation in a commoditised market A harder view of what separates a top-tier sales operation from an average one, drawn from inside a team that has closed billions in annual volume Energy and confidence that translates into action the following week, not a feel-good moment that fades

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

Why organisations work with Jana Azizi Her live broadcast range covers hard news, live morning television, entertainment magazines, and lifestyle formats, so she can shift register inside a single event without the audience registering the adjustment. She presents professionally in German, English, French, Spanish, and Russian at television standard, which is unusually rare in a single moderator and genuinely useful for events with multiple language markets in the room. Her Sky Sport News role included editorial team work, not only on-screen presenting. She arrives as a journalist who has already researched the guests and anticipated the angles. Thousands of hours of daily live broadcasting, including live sport, guest drop-outs, and technical failures, mean she has already encountered most of what can go wrong in a live room. A business administration degree from Mainz University of Applied Sciences lets her absorb a corporate brief quickly and translate dense business content for mixed audiences. Biography highlights Presenter at Sky Sport News from 2017 to 2020, working on the editorial team as well as on-screen Presenter across RTL flagship formats including RTL aktuell, Punkt 12, Guten Morgen Deutschland, Extra, Explosiv, and Explosiv Stories Presenter of Deluxe, the n-tv lifestyle and luxury format, from October 2020 Business administration degree from Mainz University of Applied Sciences (Hochschule Mainz) Marketing communications training at Grey Worldwide, Dusseldorf; presenter training at Logo Institut, Frankfurt Works professionally in five languages: German, English, French, Spanish, and Russian Biography Seven years of daily live television at Sky Sport News, RTL, and n-tv shape a specific kind of professional. Jana Azizi reads a room mid-conversation, absorbs the unexpected, and keeps an audience with her through shifts the room never sees. Her Sky Sport News role ran from 2017 to 2020 and included editorial team work alongside on-screen presenting. That side of the job built a journalist’s instinct for interview structure and story preparation, rather than only camera presence. At RTL she presented across the broadcaster’s flagship formats including RTL aktuell, Punkt 12, Guten Morgen Deutschland, Extra, and Explosiv. From October 2020 she also fronted Deluxe, the n-tv lifestyle and luxury programme. Sport, hard news, morning television, entertainment, and lifestyle each demand a different register. A moderator who has worked across all five reads what a corporate audience actually needs in the moment. Azizi works professionally in German, English, French, Spanish, and Russian. The five-language range matters most for events that are genuinely multi-market in the room, not simply bilingual on paper. She holds a business administration degree from Mainz University of Applied Sciences, which gives her the vocabulary to move confidently through a corporate brief and carry dense content for a mixed audience. Key speaking topics Live event moderation and conference hosting Broadcast communication and on-camera presence Interview craft and panel facilitation Storytelling in a business context Multilingual event hosting Women in media and male-dominated industries Ideal for Corporate conferences and leadership summits requiring a professional moderator or host International events where facilitation in multiple languages is needed at broadcast standard Award ceremonies, galas, and high-profile company anniversaries Media, sport, and communications sector organisations that need a credible, broadcast-trained panel moderator Audience outcomes Events that run with broadcast-level control, professionally paced and clearly structured Panels and interviews driven by focused, well-prepared questions rather than generic facilitation Live sessions handled cleanly when guests go off-script, formats slip, or tech fails Multi-language audiences held by a moderator who moves between languages without losing authority

Why organisations work with Timothy Armoo He has actually sold Gen Z attention to the buyers in the room. Fanbytes ran creator campaigns for Apple, McDonald’s, Nike, Samsung, Deliveroo and the UK Government before exiting to Brainlabs. Two exits before 28 give him an operator’s view of scale-up commercial discipline that most Gen Z marketing voices cannot match. His Penguin book What’s Stopping You? gives commercial audiences a structured language for the founder mindset he is asked to transfer into corporate teams. He sits inside Brainlabs as VP Influencer Marketing, which keeps his read on creator platforms, CPMs and Gen Z behaviour current rather than retrospective. He brings a credible answer to the multigenerational question: not a generational stereotype deck, but a working view of how Gen Z employees and customers behave once incentives are on the table. Biography highlights Co-founder and former CEO of Fanbytes; sold to Brainlabs in 2022 in an eight-figure deal. Sold his first business, EntrepreneurXpress, to Horizon Media at 17. Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe 2021, Media & Marketing. Named in the Evening Standard Progress 1000 list of London’s most influential figures in advertising and media. Author of What’s Stopping You? 11 Cheatcodes to Unlock the Life You Want, published by Penguin. Currently Vice President of Influencer Marketing at Brainlabs, the global digital agency that acquired Fanbytes. Biography The hardest commercial question facing many consumer brands is no longer awareness. It is whether the under-30 customer takes them seriously at all. Influencer budgets are climbing, internal teams are stretched between TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube, and most boards have no operator in the room who has actually run those campaigns at scale. Fanbytes was built to sit in that gap. Co-founded by Timothy Armoo in 2017 with Ambrose Cooke and Mitchell Fasanya, the agency ran creator campaigns for Apple, McDonald’s, Nike, Samsung, Deliveroo, Boohoo and the UK Government. In May 2022, Brainlabs acquired the business in an eight-figure deal. Armoo was 27. He stayed on as Vice President of Influencer Marketing at Brainlabs, which keeps his commercial view of Gen Z platforms current, not retrospective. The track record was not a single lucky exit. He sold his first company, EntrepreneurXpress, to Horizon Media at 17. Forbes named him to its 30 Under 30 Europe list for Media and Marketing in 2021. The Evening Standard Progress 1000 listed him among London’s most influential figures in advertising and media. His Penguin book What’s Stopping You? extends the same operator’s logic into a wider audience of commercial leaders and early-career professionals. For senior buyers, the value is specific. He is the rare voice on Gen Z marketing who can speak to a CMO with the discipline of a founder who had to make a P&L work, sell to a procurement team, and exit to a global agency. That is a different conversation from a panel on creator culture. Key speaking topics Gen Z consumer behaviour and brand decisions Influencer and creator-led marketing strategy Entrepreneurship and scale-up commercial discipline Building, scaling and exiting a venture-backed business The multigenerational customer and workforce Social platforms and the modern media landscape Ideal for CMOs, brand directors and consumer marketing leadership rethinking creator and Gen Z strategy Founders, scale-up CEOs and growth leaders preparing for raise, scale or exit Boards and exec teams of consumer-facing businesses with under-30 customer exposure Talent, employer brand and graduate recruitment leads who need a sharper read on Gen Z employees Audience outcomes A clearer commercial map of how Gen Z actually decides on brand, employer and product Specific operator lessons from building, scaling and selling a creator-economy agency A framework for evaluating influencer and creator spend as a measurable channel, not a content experiment A more honest read on the gap between how senior teams talk about Gen Z and how Gen Z behave Conviction to back internal entrepreneurial bets that conventional governance tends to slow

Why organisations work with John Hall He has built two commercial businesses around the problem he speaks on: Influence & Co., which scaled content as a managed marketing function for senior executives, and Calendar, which monetises the attention his first company taught leaders to capture. Top of Mind (McGraw-Hill) gives sales and marketing teams a named operating model for staying memorable to specific decision-makers, not a generic content playbook. Weekly Forbes and Inc. columns, plus contributions to Harvard Business Review, Fortune and Fast Company, mean his frameworks are tested in public against a senior business readership every week. Influence & Co. was ranked No. 72 on Forbes’ Most Promising Companies in America and won EY Entrepreneur of the Year for Best Emerging Company, so the underlying methodology has commercial proof, not only platform reach. He translates content marketing out of the marketing department and into a CEO and revenue conversation, which is where buying decisions about brand authority actually sit. Biography highlights Co-founder of Calendar, a scheduling platform used by millions of professionals. Co-founder and former CEO of Influence & Co., the content marketing firm ranked No. 72 on Forbes’ Most Promising Companies in America. Author of Top of Mind, published by McGraw-Hill in 2017. Weekly columnist for Forbes and Inc. Contributor to Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Fast Company, Entrepreneur and Mashable. EY Entrepreneur of the Year (Best Emerging Company) and Business Journals’ Top 100 Visionaries. Described by Inc. as “one of the most powerful people in media you’ve never met” and by Forbes as a “must-see keynote speaker”. Biography Most companies treat brand visibility as a marketing line item. Buyers experience it as the shortlist they already had in their heads before procurement opened a process. Closing that gap, between how visibility is funded internally and how it is consumed externally, is the commercial problem John Hall has worked on for more than a decade. Top of Mind, his McGraw-Hill book, sets out the operating logic. Trust is built by useful content delivered consistently to the specific people whose decisions matter, and it compounds. The book is not a content marketing manual. It is a framework for executive and corporate visibility, built from running Influence & Co., the agency that productised the discipline for senior leaders and was ranked No. 72 on Forbes’ Most Promising Companies in America. Hall scaled that thesis into a second business, Calendar, which sits on the other side of the equation. Once a leader has captured attention, time becomes the constraint. Together the two companies bracket the commercial problem his keynotes address: how to be the name buyers reach for, and how to manage the demand that creates. His weekly columns for Forbes and Inc., and contributions to Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Fast Company, Entrepreneur and Mashable, keep the argument public and tested. EY named him Entrepreneur of the Year for Best Emerging Company. The Business Journals listed him among its Top 100 Visionaries. Key speaking topics Building executive and corporate visibility Content as a trust-building system Sales influence and decision-maker engagement Top-of-mind brand strategy Time management and executive productivity Talent attraction through company culture and content Ideal for CMOs, CROs and heads of brand reassessing how content drives pipeline CEOs and founders building personal and corporate authority in a contested market Sales leadership teams measuring trust as a leading indicator of revenue Marketing and communications functions inside professional services, B2B technology and financial services Audience outcomes A working definition of top-of-mind status and the specific behaviours that produce it inside their organisation Named criteria for deciding which content earns attention from senior buyers and which dilutes it A clearer line between brand spend and revenue contribution, framed for finance and board conversations Tactics for converting executive expertise into published authority without consuming executive time

Why organisations work with Bill Tolany He has run brand and marketing inside a category-defining grocer and operations inside Amazon’s ultra-fast delivery business, so he can talk about customer experience as both a marketing problem and a logistics problem. As Senior Director of Marketing at Whole Foods Market, he launched the integrated marketing team and grew alternative commerce sales by hundreds of millions of dollars; a specific commercial result, not a theme. His Amazon Prime Now experience as Regional General Manager gives him direct exposure to the operating model that consumer brands are now being benchmarked against. As Turnaround CEO of Greenling, he has carried the cost discipline and unit economics of a venture-stage e-commerce business, not just commentary on it. He moves easily between corporate transformation conversations and start-up advisory work, useful for buyers whose internal teams need to understand both worlds. Biography highlights Senior Director of Marketing, Whole Foods Market; founding leader of its integrated media team. Regional General Manager, Amazon Prime Now, during its launch and expansion phase. Turnaround CEO, Greenling, Inc., a mission-driven local food e-commerce business. Board Director, The Very Good Food Company Inc., appointed December 2020. Advisor to multiple consumer and technology start-ups. US patent holder. Biography Whole Foods Market and Amazon were two of the most studied consumer businesses of the last decade. Bill Tolany held senior roles at both before they merged, which is unusual for any operator working in modern retail. At Whole Foods Market he served as Senior Director of Marketing and founding leader of the integrated media team. The brief covered brand, social and mobile; the result, according to the company’s own later disclosures, was the launch of an integrated marketing function and growth of alternative commerce sales by hundreds of millions of dollars. His public commentary on Whole Foods’ social strategy, where roughly 85% of corporate tweets were customer responses, became a reference point for retailers thinking about brand as service. Amazon then recruited him as Regional General Manager for Prime Now, the ultra-fast local delivery business that pushed Amazon into the consumer experience grocers had previously owned. That role gave him direct exposure to how marketing, logistics and store operations have to be re-wired when a customer expects a one-hour window. He later ran Greenling, Inc. as Turnaround CEO, taking on the unit economics of a mission-driven local food platform rather than commenting on them. He sits on the Board of The Very Good Food Company Inc., a plant-based food business, and advises start-ups in media, education and e-commerce. The throughline is practical: how a consumer brand sustains a relationship with its customer when the delivery model, the marketing channel and the competitor set all change at once. Key speaking topics Customer experience in modern retail Marketing and commerce integration Digital transformation in grocery and food E-commerce operating models Brand building through service and social Start-up and corporate innovation Plant-based and mission-driven consumer businesses Ideal for CMOs and customer experience leaders in retail, grocery and consumer brands Heads of digital, e-commerce and omnichannel inside consumer businesses Leadership teams at food, beverage and mission-driven consumer companies Corporate innovation and venture teams working with consumer start-ups Audience outcomes A clearer view of how marketing, operations and logistics combine to produce customer experience in modern retail. Specific reference points from Whole Foods Market and Amazon Prime Now on how brand and commerce can be run as one system. Sharper questions to ask about the unit economics of e-commerce and ultra-fast delivery models. Perspective on how legacy consumer brands can work with and learn from start-up operators.

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