The Agenda So Far...

We tend to think of ambition as wanting more: more growth, more influence, more responsibility. But sometimes It’s how we respond to uncertainty, how open we are to change, and whether we’re willing to challenge the limits around what’s possible. That's why the speakers on our Changemakers Stage don't share one definition of ambition.

9.30am | Ambition is Resilience 

Laura Brown, founder of LB Media and co-author of All the Cool Girls Get Fired How to Let Go of Being Let Go and Come Back on Top 

What happens when the career you thought you were building suddenly changes direction? Ambition isn't simply about climbing higher. It's about knowing yourself, staying open to reinvention and having the resilience to navigate change. Laura will explore what happens when a career setback challenges your identity, confidence, and sense of what comes next. Drawing on her own experiences and the ideas behind All the Cool Girls Get Fired, she'll talk candidly about ego, shame and reclaiming power, challenging us to rethink traditional career paths and what success really means. 

10.05am | Ambition is Honesty

• Wendy Kula, Chief Marketing Officer, Saucony
• Sofia Hernandez, Former, Global Head Business Marketing and Partnerships, TikTok
• Maryam Banikarim, Host, The Messy Parts Podcast & Co-Founder, The Longest Table & The Interval
• Helena Verellen, Fractional CMO and Board Member, The Marketing Society New York (moderator)

What does it actually feel like when you’re navigating change?  With a whole industry in constant flux and motion, what are the anchors that keep you focused wherever you are on your journey. Hear from leaders who’ve braved changes, uncertainty, difficult choices and unexpected opportunities that changed their trajectory. No polished textbook stories. Just real and honest conversations about what happens when ambition meets reality, and how staying open to unscripted change can reshape what comes next.

10.35am | Ambition is Risk

Sam Tomlinson, CEO, mediasense 

Brutal terrain. Physical breakdown. Extreme heat. Relentless fatigue. For days on end. With no real rest. Sam has pushed ambition to the limits of the human body, running 250km across the Sahara Desert. He’ll share what it took to keep going when his body and mind wanted to quit and what the experience taught him about taking on challenges without a guarantee of success. In a candid fireside conversation, we’ll explore the risks ambition demands, how leaders can create cultures where people feel able to experiment and fail, and how to keep moving with urgency and optimism when there's no guarantee of success.

11.05am | Nurturing Ambition in the Agentic Age

Roy Armale Chief Product Officer, DEPT 

As AI reshapes the workplace, organizations face a critical challenge: how do you foster ambition when technology is often viewed as a replacement for people rather than a catalyst for growth? In this session, we’ll explore how organizations can continue to nurture ambition during this period of change by focusing on augmenting people through technology, being transparent about what’s being automated, and addressing the friction between career development and AI adoption. We’ll also discuss the need for a new talent development framework for the age of AI, including DEPT®’s perspective on the shift from T-shaped to E-shaped talent and what it takes to help people thrive alongside increasingly agentic technologies.

11.35am | Aim Higher, Build Bolder: Marketing's Case for Ambition

Linda Boff, President, Forbes CMO Network & Chief Executive Officer of Said Differently

Linda draws on two decades shaping one of the world's most iconic brands at GE, and her leap to founding Said Differently, to make the case that ambition isn't a personality trait, it's a discipline. She'll unpack what separates leaders who set the bar and clear it from those who quietly lower it to feel safe.

12.00pm | Connections and Conversations with UK Advertising and mediasense

Join us for light bites and a relaxed, agenda-free lunch with UK Advertising and mediasense. After a packed morning of big ideas around resilience, honesty, risk and bold moves, come swap stories with fellow marketing leaders and tell us what's keeping you optimistic. And to continue the conversation, we’ll be sharing complimentary copies of All the Cool Girls Get Fired by Laura Brown, exploring ambition, resilience and coming back stronger.

1.30pm | Can we really predict how people will respond to a campaign? With Electric Twin

What if you could find out how your audience might respond to a campaign before you launch it? Join us for a live demonstration of synthetic audiences. We’ll put a real campaign through Electric Twin and show you how different audiences respond - in real time. We’ll explain what synthetic audiences are, how they work, and where they fit into the marketing workflow. We’ll share how brands including Wingstop and The Times use Electric Twin to test ideas and make decisions before going to market. This workshop will run twice

Pick the one that fits your schedule.

Session 1: 1:30 - 2:00pm OR Session 2: 2:30 - 3:00pm

Our demo round tables are designed so you get your hands on our tools. During our sessions, we’ll test ads in real time and you’ll be able to put your own questions directly to a synthetic audience. We will cover everything from quantitative ratings of an ad or idea to open-ended qualitative questions exploring why people responded the way they did.

You’ll see the answers come back in seconds, you’ll be able to follow up and discuss your findings with other marketers at your table. Along the way, we’ll explain how synthetic audiences are created and validated, how they differ from traditional research, and where they can be most useful.

You’ll leave with a practical understanding of how marketers can use synthetic audiences to test campaigns, messaging and ideas before launch.
 

Why Ambition? Why Now?

Marketing sits at the heart of business growth, leadership and societal progress, yet too often underplays its own impact. At a time when businesses are navigating uncertainty, transformation and pressure, ambition becomes the force that reconnects confidence with responsibility.

For marketers and business leaders, ambition is about aiming higher,  for businesses, careers, industries and communities and believing that better outcomes are possible. It is about restoring pride in what marketing can achieve, telling those stories more boldly, and giving people permission to be confident about their role in shaping the future.

Incremental thinking is rife across business. But that does not drive the step changes we need to see. We need to think bigger: on innovation, on collaboration, on decision-making, on business process, and on where we look for inspiration and commercial value.