Marketing & Branding

Why organisations work with Courtney Caldwell She has run demand generation at both ends of the company lifecycle: inside Oracle’s worldwide digital marketing group and at RightNow Technologies before its $1.45B sale, and again from zero at ShearShare. Few speakers can argue commercial strategy with that lived range. She built and exited a two-sided marketplace in a $500B services category that most enterprise marketers never touch. Beauty and barbering is not adjacent to enterprise SaaS, and her cross-vertical fluency makes her useful to leaders whose growth playbook is too narrow. She is a credible voice on founder economics from the inside, including raising venture capital as a Black woman, scaling through Google Demo Day, YC Fellowship and 500 Startups, and selling under financial pressure. The exit was not a clean Silicon Valley story. One of a small number of speakers who can move a room from enterprise SaaS marketing to gig-economy workforce dynamics in the same talk, because she has operated in both. Biography highlights Cofounder and former CEO of ShearShare, acquired in November 2024 after scaling to over 1,000 cities. Former global director of Oracle’s Worldwide Digital Marketing Strategy & Innovations Group. Former head of digital demand generation and JAPAC field marketing at RightNow Technologies, acquired by Oracle for $1.45B. Inc. magazine 2019 Female Founders 100 honoree; 2019 Ada Lovelace Female Tech Founder of the Year; 2017 L’Oreal USA Women in Digital NEXT Generation Award finalist. 2024 EY Entrepreneurs Access Network cohort member. BBA, SMU Cox School of Business; MBA in Marketing, UT Dallas. Biography Most enterprise marketers have never had to build supply. Inside a mature SaaS business, the funnel exists, the segments are mapped, and the work is to compound what is already there. Building a two-sided marketplace from zero asks for a different skill: acquiring two customers at once, in different verticals, with different motivations, before either side trusts the platform. Courtney Caldwell has done both. At Oracle she was global director of the Worldwide Digital Marketing Strategy and Innovations Group. Before that, she ran digital demand generation and JAPAC field marketing at RightNow Technologies in the run-up to its $1.45B acquisition by Oracle. The discipline she carried out of enterprise software was demand-gen rigour at scale: segmentation, attribution, funnel ownership. She then applied that discipline to a $500B services category that enterprise marketing usually ignores. ShearShare, the salon and barbershop booth rental marketplace she cofounded with Dr. Tye Caldwell, reached more than 1,000 cities and over 70,000 small businesses before being acquired in November 2024. The platform was a Google Demo Day winner, a YC Fellowship and 500 Startups alum, and a 2022 Fast Company World-Changing Ideas honoree. The exit was not the textbook version. ShearShare was sold to a strategic buyer under financial pressure during a dispute with M&T Bank. Caldwell speaks publicly about both halves of the journey, the recognition lists (Inc. Female Founders 100, Ada Lovelace Founder of the Year, L’Oreal Women in Digital, EY Entrepreneurs Access Network) and the harder economics underneath. That candour, paired with a Fortune 500 marketing pedigree, is the unusual combination she brings to a room. Key speaking topics Marketplace growth and two-sided customer acquisition Demand generation and digital marketing at scale Founder economics and venture-backed scale-up Future of work in the experience and gig economy Black women in technology and founder mental health Local startup ecosystems outside Silicon Valley Partnership, parenthood and entrepreneurship Ideal for CMOs and heads of growth at SaaS and consumer platforms reassessing demand-generation discipline. Founders, CEOs and operating partners building or backing two-sided marketplaces and scale-ups. Corporate innovation leads exploring services-vertical platform opportunities outside core tech. Diversity, leadership and ERG programmes commissioning substantive Black-women-in-tech content rather than generic representation talks. Audience outcomes A clearer view of where enterprise demand-gen discipline applies to early-stage marketplace growth, and where it does not. Specific tactics from inside Google Demo Day, YC Fellowship and 500 Startups that translate to corporate venture and intrapreneurship programmes. A frank account of what scaling and exiting a marketplace looks like when the cap table and operating economics are under pressure. A sharper read on the gig and experience economy from someone who operated a platform inside it, not just analysed it.

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.

Key speaking topics Brand messaging clarity Storytelling frameworks for business Marketing strategy and execution Business growth for small and mid-sized organisations Leadership communication Customer-focused messaging Ideal for Marketing leaders and brand teams Founders and business owners Sales and commercial teams Senior leaders responsible for growth strategy Audience outcomes Clear understanding of the StoryBrand messaging framework Practical tools to simplify brand communication Improved alignment between marketing and customer needs Structured approach to business growth messaging Why organisations work with Donald Miller Combines bestselling authorship with practical business application. Provides structured, repeatable frameworks for marketing clarity. Experience leading multiple business education and messaging companies. Delivers commercially relevant insights focused on communication and growth. Biography Donald Miller is the CEO of StoryBrand, a company that works with organisations to clarify their brand messaging through structured storytelling frameworks. His approach is used by leadership, marketing, and commercial teams seeking greater precision in how they communicate value to customers. In addition to leading StoryBrand, he is CEO of Business Made Simple and Coach Builder, platforms focused on business education and practical growth strategy. His work centres on helping organisations simplify complex ideas, align messaging with customer needs, and strengthen the commercial impact of their communication. Miller is the author of multiple books spanning business and personal nonfiction, including Building a StoryBrand, Marketing Made Simple, How to Grow Your Small Business, Blue Like Jazz, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, and Scary Close. He is a New York Times bestselling author, and several of his books have appeared on the New York Times bestseller list. Beyond publishing, he co-wrote the film adaptation of Blue Like Jazz, which premiered at SXSW. He has also been listed as a member of the Fatherhood and Healthy Families taskforce associated with the President’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Across his work, Miller combines authorship, business leadership, and structured methodology to equip organisations with clear, repeatable frameworks for marketing clarity and growth-focused communication.

Why organisations work with Bobby Umar He treats connection as a teachable skill, not a personality trait. The 5 C’s of Connection framework, drawn from his TEDxUWO talk, gives leaders and employees a structured way to build trust, credibility and influence inside and outside the organisation. His background is unusually broad for the topic: engineering at Bombardier, brand marketing at Kraft and Unilever, and Second City improv training. That mix shows up in how the work lands, structured enough for senior audiences, performative enough to hold a room. He is a recognised authority on LinkedIn as a professional channel. Multiple LinkedIn Top Voice designations, including an early Presentation Skills badge, mean leaders learn from someone who has built an audience the way they are being asked to. Inc. Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker and five-time TEDx speaker, which gives senior audiences confidence that the craft and delivery will match the content. Biography highlights Five-time TEDx speaker, including “The 5 C’s of Connection” (TEDxUWO) and “School: Learning to Fly” (TEDxUTSC). Inc. Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker, listed alongside Richard Branson and Brené Brown. LinkedIn Top Voice, with early badges for Presentation Skills, Thought Leadership and Personal Branding. Author of How to Network Anytime, Anywhere, With Anyone (#1 on three Amazon bestseller lists). Founder of DYPB (Discover Your Personal Brand), described as North America’s largest personal branding event, with 60 experts and over 300 delegates. Career background spans Bombardier (engineering), Kraft and Unilever (brand marketing) and Second City (performing arts). B.Eng., McGill University; MBA, McMaster University. Biography Most leadership development still treats connection as a soft skill that either comes naturally or does not. Bobby Umar’s work argues the opposite. His 5 C’s of Connection framework, popularised through a viral TEDxUWO talk, breaks authentic relationship-building into components that can be taught to engineers, sales teams, senior executives and entry-level employees alike. That argument is grounded in an unusual professional path. Before becoming a speaker, Umar trained as an engineer at McGill, ran brand marketing for Kraft and Unilever, took an MBA at McMaster and studied improv at Second City. The result is a practitioner who can move between the analytical and the performative without losing either audience. His credentials inside the speaking and creator economy are deep. Five TEDx talks. Inc. Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker. LinkedIn Top Voice across several categories. Author of How to Network Anytime, Anywhere, With Anyone, a #1 Amazon bestseller. Founder of DYPB, the personal branding conference that became the largest of its kind in North America. What makes him commercially useful to organisations is the translation step. Personal branding, networking, social audio, vulnerable storytelling: these are not pitched as marketing tactics but as the connective infrastructure of modern professional life. For organisations trying to develop influential leaders, engaged employees and externally visible experts, Umar offers a practical, structured account of how connection actually works. Key speaking topics Authentic networking and relationship-building Personal branding for leaders and employees LinkedIn presence and professional digital reputation Vulnerable storytelling and leadership communication Heart-centred leadership Employee advocacy and internal brand-building Connection skills in hybrid and remote teams Ideal for CHROs, talent and L&D leaders investing in employee engagement, advocacy and internal communication. Marketing, communications and executive leaders building external thought leadership programmes for senior teams. Sales and business development functions where individual networking capability drives revenue. Conference organisers building agendas on leadership, future of work, employee experience or culture. Audience outcomes A working language for connection, anchored in the 5 C’s framework, that audiences can apply immediately to internal and external relationships. A clearer view of how personal branding intersects with leadership credibility, especially on LinkedIn. Practical methods for using storytelling, vulnerability and digital channels to build trust at scale. A reframing of networking as a professional discipline, not a transactional activity reserved for extroverts. Confidence to put senior leaders and frontline employees on visible platforms without sounding scripted.

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 Zing Tsjeng A working journalist’s instinct for what an audience actually wants to hear, sharpened across VICE, the BBC and the i newspaper, brought to corporate stages where most speakers sound rehearsed. A four-volume body of work in Forgotten Women that pulls 190 named historical women into business and cultural conversations, giving inclusion content that is specific rather than slogan-driven. Co-hosting Good Bad Billionaire with BBC Business Editor Simon Jack means she can interrogate wealth, power and ambition with a financial-journalism register, not a generic culture take. A presenter’s hosting craft tested on Question Time, Have I Got News For You and Front Row, useful when the brief is moderation, panel chairing or on-stage interview rather than a solo keynote. An Oxford visiting professorship in Creative Media gives the academic credential to anchor talks on media, narrative and identity for senior internal communications and brand audiences. Biography highlights Former Editor-in-Chief, VICE UK and VICE.com; launched Broadly in 2014. Co-host, Good Bad Billionaire, BBC Sounds, with Simon Jack. Author, Forgotten Women series, Octopus Publishing, anthologised by Brazen in 2022. Visiting Professor of Creative Media, University of Oxford, since 2022. Highly commended, British Journalism Awards 2020. Columnist for the i newspaper; contributor to British Vogue, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, Dazed. Biography Inclusion content inside large organisations has a credibility problem. Most of it is either statement-led or driven by external pressure, and very little of it is grounded in the actual content of the histories it claims to recover. That gap is where Tsjeng’s work begins. The Forgotten Women series is a four-volume project that profiles more than 190 women, scientists, leaders, artists, reformers, who shaped fields that later forgot them. Octopus published the books between 2018 and 2019; Brazen reissued the anthology in 2022. The work is research, not advocacy, and it gives senior audiences a vocabulary for inclusion that does not collapse the moment scrutiny arrives. She runs a parallel journalism career that gives her a working register most cultural speakers do not have. As Editor-in-Chief of VICE UK she managed teams across the US and UK, launched Broadly, and oversaw video work that drew tens of millions of views. With Simon Jack on the BBC’s Good Bad Billionaire she now interrogates wealth, power and ambition for a mainstream business audience, with the show topping UK audio charts in 2024. The credential anchor is real. Oxford appointed her Visiting Professor of Creative Media in 2022; she lectures in journalism at City, University of London; she was highly commended at the British Journalism Awards 2020. Question Time, Have I Got News For You and Front Row have all used her as a contributor, which is why corporate clients including SXSW, Web Summit, Netflix and Sky tend to book her to chair, moderate or interview at the moments where the room expects a working broadcaster, not a motivational voice. Key speaking topics Hidden histories of women in business, science and leadership Wealth, power and the lives of billionaires Media, journalism and the modern news industry Inclusion, identity and cultural narrative LGBTQ+ representation in public life On-stage hosting, moderation and panel chairing Ideal for CHROs, heads of DEI and internal communications leaders briefing audiences on inclusion with substance Brand, marketing and editorial leaders working on culture-led storytelling Conference programmers needing a senior journalist to chair, moderate or interview on the main stage Leadership teams hosting International Women’s Day, Pride or cultural anniversary events that need a credible voice rather than a generic one Audience outcomes Specific historical reference points that make inclusion content land with executive audiences A clearer view of how wealth, power and ambition are reported and judged in mainstream media today Confidence in handling identity and cultural topics from a journalist’s evidence base, not a political register Practical reading on how stories travel in modern media, drawn from VICE, the BBC and national press A sharper sense of what audiences want to hear from leaders speaking about inclusion and culture

Key speaking topics Luxury brand partnerships and long-term brand alignment Menswear design and commercial product collaboration Personal brand development in global markets Fashion, lifestyle and wellbeing positioning From modelling career to entrepreneurship Brand storytelling in premium consumer markets Media visibility and reputation management Ideal for Fashion, retail and luxury brand conferences Marketing and brand leadership teams Consumer lifestyle and wellbeing sector events Entrepreneurship and founder-focused forums Audience outcomes Clear understanding of building and sustaining premium brand partnerships Insight into transitioning from talent to entrepreneur Perspective on aligning product design with lifestyle positioning Practical lessons on maintaining brand relevance across markets Why organisations work with David Gandy Recognised global profile with first-hand experience of luxury brand campaigns. Direct experience launching and leading a consumer lifestyle brand. Commercial insight into menswear, licensing and product collaboration. Credibility across fashion, media and consumer wellbeing sectors. Biography David Gandy is internationally recognised for his long-standing association with Dolce & Gabbana, including high-profile global campaigns for the brand’s Light Blue fragrance. His work with leading names such as Hugo Boss and Marks & Spencer has positioned him at the centre of premium menswear and lifestyle branding. Beyond modelling, Gandy has built a commercially focused portfolio spanning product collaboration and brand development. His capsule collections with Marks & Spencer’s Autograph line covered underwear, swimwear and loungewear, translating personal brand equity into scalable retail partnerships. He also partnered with Aspinal of London on a limited Aerodrome-themed collaboration, extending his influence into travel and accessories. As founder and creative lead of David Gandy Wellwear, he has moved from brand ambassador to brand builder. The apparel and lifestyle venture is positioned around comfort, fabric performance and wellbeing, reflecting a clear commercial understanding of shifting consumer priorities. Gandy’s media work further reinforces his authority in the premium consumer space. He has written for GQ, including motoring content under the “David Gandy Drives” column, demonstrating insight into brand storytelling, lifestyle positioning and audience engagement. Alongside his commercial work, he serves as an ambassador for Battersea Dogs & Cats Home and for Vitabiotics’ Wellman range, reflecting established partnerships across charity and consumer health sectors.

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 Freddy Wexler A working hit-maker, not a commentator. Ten Billboard number ones with Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Post Malone, BLACKPINK and others give him a verifiable claim on how popular taste actually moves. The Billy Joel case study. Coaxing a thirty-year creative silence into a Grammy-stage single, including the full marketing rollout and an AI-directed music video, is a rare example of cultural reactivation that buyers can study end to end. Talent identification with a track record. Wexler scouted and pitched Stefani Germanotta as a future Madonna while she was still unsigned, and signed Rachel Platten before “Fight Song”. Useful for audiences thinking about how to spot signal early. A view on AI and creative work shaped by shipping product. The “Turn the Lights Back On” video was a Webby-winning AI-led production, which gives him a practitioner’s read on where machine generation helps and where it does not. Commercial track record across formats. Founder of The Brain Music with joint ventures involving Disney, Scooter Braun Projects, Warner Chappell and Prescription Songs, plus a first-look television deal with Disney. Biography highlights Grammy-nominated songwriter and producer with ten Billboard number one contributions Co-writer and producer of Billy Joel’s “Turn the Lights Back On” (Columbia Records, 2024), the artist’s first new pop single in roughly thirty years Album of the Year Grammy nomination for Justin Bieber’s Justice (2022); credited contributor on Laufey’s Bewitched, a 2024 Grammy-winning album Co-wrote “Stuck with U” by Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande, a Billboard Hot 100 number one that raised over five million dollars for first responders’ families Founder of The Brain Music, with joint ventures involving Disney, Scooter Braun Projects, Warner Chappell and Prescription Songs; first-look television deal with Disney Webby Award (2024) for direction of the AI-led “Turn the Lights Back On” music video; Golden Globe nomination for “Forbidden Road” from the Robbie Williams biopic Better Man Biography Billy Joel had not released a new pop single for thirty years when “Turn the Lights Back On” arrived in February 2024 on Columbia Records. The song was co-written and produced by Freddy Wexler, who spent more than a year developing the material with Joel from a CD of unfinished sketches. The track debuted at number one on classic hits and classic rock radio, picked up a Grammy-stage performance, and was packaged with an AI-directed music video that later won a Webby. As a worked example of how a dormant creative voice gets reactivated and brought back to market, it is unusually complete. That collaboration sits inside a longer hit-making record. Wexler has ten Billboard number one contributions and Grammy nominations across three consecutive years, including Album of the Year for Justin Bieber’s Justice and contributor credit on Laufey’s Bewitched. He co-wrote “Stuck with U” for Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande, a Hot 100 number one that raised more than five million dollars for first responders’ families during the early pandemic. His writing and production credits span Post Malone, BLACKPINK, Selena Gomez, Halsey, Diana Ross and Celine Dion. He is also a builder of companies. The Brain Music, founded in 2012, runs joint ventures with Disney, Scooter Braun Projects, Warner Chappell and Prescription Songs. The Freddy Wexler Company holds a first-look television deal with Disney and a slate spanning Nickelodeon’s Kid Cowboy, a Broadway production of The Last Five Years, and a Hulu special with Sebastian Maniscalco. The Variety Family Entertainment Impact Report has recognised the operation. For organisations, the relevant point is access to a practitioner who can describe how a cultural moment actually gets made, including the writing room, the artist relationship, the rollout, and the use of AI in production. Few speakers on creativity can point to a specific commercial artefact and walk a senior audience through the craft behind it. Wexler can. Key speaking topics Creativity as a working practice Storytelling across music, film and brand AI in creative production and music video direction Talent identification and early-signal spotting Cultural moments and the commercial rollout behind them Resilience and creative reinvention Philanthropy embedded in creative product Ideal for Marketing, brand and CMO leadership teams thinking about cultural relevance Creative and content function heads inside media, entertainment and consumer companies Innovation and product groups exploring AI-assisted creative production Senior offsites and leadership conferences looking for a practitioner perspective on craft Audience outcomes A working framework for how cultural moments are constructed, drawn from a specific recent case A practitioner’s read on AI in creative production, anchored in a Webby-winning video A more concrete sense of what early signal looks like in talent and ideas, before they are obvious Reference points from a hit-making catalogue that audiences can apply to their own creative briefs

Why organisations work with Tom Fishburne His Marketoonist series has run weekly since 2002 and reaches 500,000 business readers – giving him a live, continuously updated signal on where marketing and organisational thinking is currently stuck, rather than a fixed body of research. His argument is structural, not motivational: that customer engagement fails and innovation stalls for cultural reasons, and that humour is a functional tool for surfacing those reasons – not a tone choice, not entertainment. This gives leadership teams a lever that most change programmes do not include. His Marketoonist studio has built campaigns for over 200 organisations including Google, Adobe, DBS Bank, and PwC – meaning every argument he makes on stage is backed by commercial execution, not only observation. He provides a shared visual vocabulary that allows cross-functional teams to discuss what is actually blocking performance – poor customer experience, idea killers, AI adoption gaps – without triggering defensiveness. As Stanford GSB’s Cartoonist-in-Residence for the course on humour in business, and a regular guest lecturer at Harvard Business School, his framework has academic validation alongside its commercial track record. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Marketoonist, a cartoon-led content marketing and culture change studio; 200+ campaigns for Google, Adobe, LinkedIn, DBS Bank, PwC, and Unilever Creator of the Marketoonist weekly cartoon series, published since 2002; 500,000 weekly readers; featured by the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and The New York Times; weekly contributor to MarketingWeek since 2007 Harvard Business School alumnus; Cartoonist-in-Residence and Lecturer, Stanford Graduate School of Business course on humour in business; regular guest lecturer at Harvard Business School Author of Your Ad Ignored Here; illustrator of three Deloitte business books – Provoke (WSJ Bestseller), Detonate (National Bestseller), and Work Disrupted Former Interim CMO at HotelTonight (acquired by Airbnb); Marketing VP at Method Products (European brand launch named Brand Launch of the Year, The Grocer); brand management at Nestlé and General Mills Speaker at TED Salon: Unconventional, TED World Theater, New York; 200+ keynotes delivered in more than 30 countries Biography Tom Fishburne started drawing cartoons on the backs of Harvard Business School cases in 2000 and has published the Marketoonist series weekly since 2002. That series now reaches 500,000 readers a week and has been featured by the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and The New York Times. The reason it travels is not novelty – it is recognition. The cartoons name what people in organisations already know but rarely say aloud. His argument, developed across a marketing career at Nestlé, General Mills, Method Products, and HotelTonight, is that most marketing underperformance and most innovation failure is cultural in origin. Customer journeys break not because teams lack data, but because organisational dynamics prevent anyone from acting on it. Ideas lose momentum between brainstorm and launch not because of resource constraints, but because of unspoken idea killers that no one has named. Humour, Fishburne argues, is a functional diagnostic tool for exactly these problems – not a way to make difficult conversations comfortable, but a way to make them possible. In 2010, he expanded Marketoonist into a creative studio. The studio has since built cartoon-led content and culture change campaigns for more than 200 organisations, including Google, Adobe, DBS Bank, and PwC. He is Cartoonist-in-Residence at Stanford GSB for the course on humour in business and returns regularly to guest lecture at Harvard Business School. He illustrated three bestselling Deloitte business books – Provoke, Detonate, and Work Disrupted – and authored Your Ad Ignored Here. A senior buyer leaving his session does not leave with a framework to file. They leave with a vocabulary for conversations their team has been avoiding – and a demonstrated method for making those conversations productive. Key speaking topics Marketing effectiveness and customer engagement Innovation culture and idea management Humour as a strategic tool for culture change AI adoption and organisational readiness Visual communication and storytelling in business Challenger brand thinking Creative culture and overcoming idea killers Ideal for Chief Marketing Officers and senior marketing leadership teams Chief People Officers and culture change leads Innovation and digital transformation leads Leadership conferences where marketing, creative culture, or organisational change is on the agenda Audience outcomes A clear diagnostic framework for identifying where marketing efforts break down and why Practical understanding of the cultural conditions that allow creative ideas to survive from brainstorm to launch A shared vocabulary for discussing organisational blockers – customer experience failures, AI adoption gaps, innovation stalls – without defensiveness Insight into humour as a repeatable strategic tool for culture change, distinct from motivation or entertainment A more honest assessment of whether technology and AI initiatives are failing for technical reasons or organisational ones

Why organisations work with Jon Carmichael He brings a single, verifiable feat that anchors every claim he makes about creative ambition: the 2017 “108” photograph, captured aboard Southwest Airlines flight 1368 after the captain secured FAA approval to perform five 180-degree turns mid-flight. The story has been covered by Good Morning America, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today and Inc., which gives the keynote external validation few inspirational speakers can match. He has presented at NASA’s Hubble Auditorium and at TEDxManchester, two audiences with low tolerance for thin material, which signals he can hold a room of senior or technical attendees. His “Eclipse Mindset” gives sales conferences, innovation summits, and culture events a non-corporate frame for talking about ambition, alignment, and risk without sounding like internal-comms language. Biography highlights Astrophotographer; sixteen years documenting corporate and political events. Photographed the 2017 total solar eclipse from 39,000 feet aboard Southwest Airlines flight 1368, image titled “108”. Has spoken at NASA’s Hubble Auditorium and at TEDxManchester to an audience of around 2,500. Eclipse work featured by Good Morning America, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Inc., and Weather.com. Visual storytelling engagements with Twitter, Dell and ESPN; collectors of his fine art work include Sir Elton John. Unveiled the “108” image at a Twitter company event at the invitation of Jack Dorsey. Biography In August 2017, a commercial Southwest Airlines flight from Portland to St. Louis made five 180-degree turns at 39,000 feet so a single passenger in seat 1A could photograph a total solar eclipse over the Snake River. That passenger had spent two years mapping flight paths against the moon’s shadow, persuading an airline and a captain to accept the risk, and securing FAA approval the morning of the flight. The resulting image, titled “108”, is the spine of Jon Carmichael’s keynote work. Buyers do not commission him for technical photography. They commission him for what the project demonstrates about how teams attempt things that are not yet possible. The “Eclipse Mindset” he draws from the story is a practical frame, not a metaphor: identify the constraint, recruit unlikely partners, accept that the plan will change in execution, and prepare so that when conditions narrow to a two-minute window, the team can act. His credibility for serious audiences comes from where the work has been received. The image was covered by Good Morning America, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Inc. and Weather.com. He was invited to present at NASA’s Hubble Auditorium, with the talk broadcast to other NASA centres, and at TEDxManchester to roughly 2,500 attendees. Jack Dorsey invited him to unveil the photograph at a Twitter company event. For sales conferences, innovation kick-offs and culture moments where the brief is to lift the room without resorting to standard motivational fare, Carmichael offers a verifiable feat, a named project, and a usable frame, anchored by a story that audiences can recall and repeat months later. Key speaking topics The Eclipse Mindset Creativity and perspective shift Bold execution under constraint Visual storytelling Innovation through ambition Team alignment around a high-stakes vision Ideal for Sales conferences and annual kick-offs seeking a non-corporate opening or closing keynote Innovation, R&D, and product leadership offsites Culture, brand and marketing events CMOs and creative leadership audiences Audience outcomes A specific story they can quote, with named brands and dates, to anchor internal conversations about ambition A practical frame (“Eclipse Mindset”) for identifying which constraints are real and which are inherited Renewed appetite for projects that require unlikely partners and mid-execution adjustment A reminder that bold work is rarely solo: the eclipse image required an airline, a captain, a regulator, and years of preparation

Why organisations work with Ana Andjelic Her “aspirational economy” thesis that brand value is now built through social, cultural, and environmental capital rather than product features or advertising reach gives leadership teams a conceptually rigorous basis for repositioning brands in fragmented consumer markets, not just a set of tactics. She has delivered verified results at scale: the Banana Republic rebrand under her leadership produced a 27% year-on-year comparable sales increase, which means boards are not being asked to take a theory on faith. Her two Routledge-published books, combined with The Sociology of Business newsletter (ranked among Substack’s top 15 business publications), mean her framework is publicly available, continuously tested, and already in use by the marketing leaders her audiences need to influence. She brings C-suite brand experience across three distinct commercial contexts – global mass retail (Banana Republic, Esprit), contemporary luxury (Mansur Gavriel), and independent fashion (Rebecca Minkoff), making her diagnostic toolkit applicable beyond any single category or brand tier. A Columbia sociology doctorate and a senior career at agencies including Droga5 and Havas means she can diagnose what has broken in a brand’s relationship with culture and explain why, not just describe the symptoms. Biography highlights Chief Brand Officer at Banana Republic, rebrand delivered a 27% year-on-year comparable sales increase Former Global Chief Brand Officer at Esprit, led brand repositioning across Europe and market re-entry in North America and Asia-Pacific Author of two books published by Routledge: The Business of Aspiration and Hitmakers: How Brands Influence Culture Recognised three times by Forbes for CMO work, including Forbes CMO Next Publishes The Sociology of Business, ranked among the top 15 business publications on Substack Contributor to Harvard Business Review, Financial Times, Fast Company, The Guardian, Adweek, and Vogue PhD in Sociology and MA in Media Studies; senior agency experience at Droga5, Havas Media, and Spring Studios Biography Ana Andjelic spent two decades in C-suite brand roles, at Banana Republic, Esprit, Mansur Gavriel, and Rebecca Minkoff, while simultaneously building a body of intellectual work that explains why most brand strategy fails. The result is a perspective with unusual commercial credibility: she has made the argument at board level and then delivered the numbers. Her central thesis, developed in The Business of Aspiration (Routledge), is that modern consumers no longer signal status through wealth or possessions but through taste, curation, and values – what she calls social, cultural, and environmental capital. The organisations that understand this are not running better advertising. They are restructuring brand strategy around cultural influence: collaborations, creative communities, content, and what she identifies in her second book, Hitmakers: How Brands Influence Culture, as the systematic production of cultural hits. At Banana Republic, she translated this framework into a full brand repositioning that delivered a 27% year-on-year comparable sales increase. At Esprit, she oversaw the brand’s repositioning across Europe and its re-entry into North American and Asia-Pacific markets. Both assignments required her to make cultural arguments in commercial terms and to redesign the marketing function to deliver them. Andjelic holds a PhD in Sociology from Columbia University and a Masters in Media Studies. Her Sociology of Business newsletter is among Substack’s top 15 business publications. She contributes to Harvard Business Review, the Financial Times, Fast Company, and Vogue, and is a frequent expert source for the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. Key speaking topics Brand strategy and repositioning Cultural influence and the aspirational economy Consumer aspiration and shifting status symbols Cultural hitmaking as commercial strategy The Creative Class and cultural audience segmentation Brand storytelling and narrative architecture Retail innovation and brand-driven growth Ideal for Chief Marketing Officers and Chief Brand Officers leading brand repositioning or category entry C-suite leaders in fashion, luxury, and retail responsible for connecting brand investment to commercial outcomes Strategy and brand teams in consumer-facing businesses seeking a model for cultural relevance that scales Boards and leadership teams reviewing brand value architecture, growth planning, or market re-entry Audience outcomes A working framework for understanding how social, cultural, and environmental capital now drive brand value and purchase decisions, and what that means for brand investment A practical model for redefining brand strategy as cultural influence, with organisational and operational implications Clarity on the role of cultural products, collaborations, content, entertainment, community, in building sustainable brand growth beyond advertising A method for segmenting audiences by their relationship to culture, including how the Creative Class functions as an amplification layer Tested examples of how cultural strategy translates into commercial results, including the conditions that made the Banana Republic repositioning work