From Data to Action: Powering The Intelligent Marketing Engine (In-Person Only)

WELCOME REMARKS

John Hardy

Senior Vice President, Marketing Technology ANA

FROM THE CMO’s DESK: BRAND “IS” PERFORMANCE: RETHINKING GROWTH MARKETING IN PURPOSE-DRIVEN ORGANIZATIONS

For nonprofits and regulated industries, brand and performance marketing are often treated as competing forces. Dave Lew challenges that assumption. In this session, he shares how organizations like St. Jude and the American Cancer Society treat brand, data, and performance marketing as a single growth system — powered by audience insights, testing, and accountability. Attendees will hear how brand trust directly affects conversion efficiency, lifetime value, and donor retention — and how performance data can be used to strengthen, not cheapen, brand storytelling.

Dave Lew

Chief Marketing Officer American Cancer Society

FROM THE CDO’s DESK: WHY MARKETING AND DATA MUST MOVE AS ONE

As customer expectations accelerate and channels multiply, the line between marketing strategy and data strategy has effectively disappeared. From the CDO’s desk, growth now depends on how well these two disciplines operate together.

In this opening session, Gurpreet Atwal, Chief Data Officer for Consumer and Small Business Banking at Truist, shares a CDO’s perspective on what it truly takes to align marketing ambition with data reality. Drawing on his experience leading enterprise-scale data, analytics, and AI initiatives, Gurpreet explores how modern marketing performance is powered by trusted data foundations, shared accountability, and tighter collaboration between marketing, analytics, and technology teams.

Attendees will gain insight into:

• Why marketing outcomes are now inseparable from data strategy
• What “good” looks like when data, analytics, and marketing operate in sync
• How organizations can move beyond dashboards to activate insight at speed
• The leadership and cultural shifts required to turn data into measurable growth

Gurpreet Atwal

Chief Data Officer, Consumer & Small Business Banking Truist Bank

DROWNING IN DATA? SURFACING THE FIVE FACTS POWERING COMMERCIAL DECISIONING

New research confirms a simple truth: data-driven decisions fuel growth. 95% to 99% of marketing, finance, and analytics leaders report using data in strategic decisions. If that’s true, why do many important decisions still stall, spark conflict, and yield little measurable change?

This session will draw on Analytic Partners’ 2026 State of Commercial Decisioning Survey of 455 executives to challenge conventional wisdom and reveal five evidence-based findings for moving from insight to action across Marketing, Finance, and Analytics. It will also discuss how marketers can win over finance and analytics leadership and drive growth. The result is a blueprint for moving insights from static pools into powerful decisioning currents. The 2026 State of Commercial Decisioning Survey by Analytic Partners offers a rigorous, data-driven view of how leading advertisers make strategic decisions and shape their marketing budgets amid volatile business environments.

Jason McNellis

VP Commercial Analytics Ambassador Analytic Partners

THE POWER OF SIMPLIFYING: REDESIGNING OUR FIRST-PARTY DATA ENGINE

As first-party data strategies mature, marketing organizations are being forced to rethink how activation actually happens. Evolving business objectives, stricter privacy requirements, and accelerating MarTech innovation are exposing the limits of legacy activation models.

In this session, we’ll share how these pressures triggered a strategic reassessment of our first-party data activation approach—across technology, workflows, and team structure. As use cases expanded and expectations grew, we made a deliberate move to simplify our data architecture, streamline orchestration, and modernize execution. At the same time, we transitioned to an insourced delivery model, redefining roles, responsibilities, and operating norms to support greater agility and accountability.

You’ll walk away with practical lessons on:

• Aligning activation capabilities to evolving business objectives
• Connecting first-party data strategy directly to measurable marketing outcomes
• Simplifying technology and workflows to reduce friction
• Designing team models that enable faster, more business-friendly activation at scale

This session offers a candid look at what it takes to move from complexity to clarity—while building a more agile, future-ready first-party data engine.

Ricky Busby

Director, Marketing Data & Technology Georgia-Pacific Consumer Products

CRAFTING THE MARKETING STORY THROUGH DATA

Learn how Delta Air Lines utilizes the power of data to deliver insights that shape Marketing strategy and illustrate how Marketing delivers on Enterprise business goals. This session will explore the transformative journey of evolving advancements in predictive modeling and the utilization of data in marketing measurement and audience modeling. We will discuss the art of effective storytelling and best practices for shaping your data to illustrate Marketing effectiveness.

Katherine Conrad

General Manager, Customer Performance & Insights Delta Airlines

BUILT TO LAST: MARKETING PERFORMANCE - MEASURED FOR THE STAY

Marketing performance isn’t just about optimizing channels—it’s about building systems that sustain demand. Hilton shares how it is evolving its measurement architecture to connect brand strength, performance activation, first-party data, and marketing mix modeling into a more unified view of impact.

By integrating short- and long-term measurement, strengthening identity-enabled capabilities, and exploring the connection between brand health and commercial outcomes, Hilton is redefining performance beyond the transaction—quantifying not just what converts today, but what drives enduring growth—for the stay.

Amy Wainwright

Director, Marketing Strategy & Performance Hilton

SCRAPPY INTEGRATION: HOW PRODUCT-LED DATA FOUNDATIONS ENABLE MARKETING VELOCITY & EXECUTIVE ALIGNMENT

In today's data-driven marketing landscape, the path from fragmented data to intelligent automation doesn't require perfect infrastructure. It requires strategic scrappiness and executive alignment around a unified vision.

This session presents a practitioner's journey building marketing data foundations highlighting Margaritaville at Sea, a boutique cruise line that epitomizes the challenge of competing against industry giants with limited resources but unlimited ambition.

Margaritaville at Sea faces a reality familiar to many marketers: legacy systems, siloed data sources, aggressive growth targets, and a marketing team hungry for the personalization and speed that automation and unified data platforms promise. Rather than waiting for the "perfect" data infrastructure, we adopted an approach that prioritizes integration points based on marketing velocity and business impact, moving quickly from scrappy tactical wins to a comprehensive ecosystem strategy that secured executive buy-in and ongoing investment.

Susan Finnigan

Senior Director, Data Product Management Margaritaville At Sea

POWER YOUR MARKETING ENGINE ON THE RIGHT FUEL: WHY PRIVACY COMPLIANCE IS KEY

Let’s face it: Marketing teams aren’t always excited to chat with their colleagues in Compliance. Why should marketers loop in someone who’s going to tell them they can’t collect that data for this purpose? The reality is, Compliance and Marketing aren’t at cross-purposes. Throughout the day at the Intelligent Marketing Engine conference, you’re going to hear how the right data used in the right way can yield incredible results. A key ingredient to what makes data the right data is privacy compliance.

In this session, Osano — a leading data privacy management platform and certified Public Benefit Corporation — and Policy & Regulatory Advisor Latoya Davidson will show how Compliance and Marketing can partner together to activate data with confidence, reduce risk, win trust, and accelerate decision-making.  This session reframes compliance as a strategic asset — helping marketers drive the business forward without adding risk in an increasingly complex data and regulatory landscape.

Latoya Davidson

Founder CompliHow