This session explores how hereditary and environmental factors shape our lives and influence the development of our narrative identity—the personal stories that help us clarify who we are and make sense of our lives. Yet, we possess the power to reshape these narratives through our “Nimble” abilities and help others do the same, ultimately enhancing our lives and achieving a more profound sense of fulfillment.

"During this interactive 45-minute session facilitated by Prof. Julia Minson, participants will engage with the considerations inherent in discovering, communicating, and debating divergent perspectives. The content of the exercises and discussion will be grounded in research on the psychology of disagreement conducted by Dr. Minson and the Constructive Disagreement Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School. The workshop will focus on practicing receptive communication with the goal of building individual skills to more effectively navigate disagreement."

Aaron Cohen Editorial Director

Josh Messinger The Room

Burnout is a pervasive issue for today's professionals at home and work, but it needs to be better understood. According to the World Health Organization, half of the world’s population will experience some degree of mental disorder in their lifetime, and burnout is a major contributing factor. Princess Castleberry helps leaders understand the risks associated with burnout and the incredible opportunities that come from preventing and recovering from it as effectively as possible.

You know it when you see it. These are the leaders that command rooms, simplify complexity, listen attentively, and galvanize action. They also had practice and repetitions to hone their vibe. So how do all of us develop our presence? Join us at a workshop to get specific on improving Wow.

Look at your sneakers, credit cards, car insurance, and skin care regimen and tell us that equity doesn’t matter. And yet, marketers spend huge amounts of time buying RMNs and calculating ROAS. This is a brand summit. Let’s workshop how to restore and redefine the centrality of brand equity.

Amazon has emerged as a mission critical ad platform, but even when you remove them 2024 is the Year of the RMN. Some members of The Room have claimed double digit media migration to this emergent category. But in a world with 500 RMNs where do you buy and how well does it work? What are the KPIs? Join us to debate the case for or against RMNs.

You manage enormous complexity with a plethora of partners, a bevy of data sources, KPIs and insights that no one team member can recall. The trick is to decide what’s most important and eliminate what doesn’t matter. This means knowing your executives and creating relevant content for them. You have to distill. Let’s workshop how to simplify our executive communication.

More than 4 years after Covid began, work has massively changed. 5 days a week is dead. Some of us have 26-year-old employees who have never worked in an office. In white collar jobs, human interaction has plummeted. We hear many of you reporting more time spent working through issues of employee happiness, capability, consistency and resilience. We rely on Gen Z labor to take entry level and early mid-level jobs and this has been much harder in 2024. Join us to share how you bridge the divide and maximize performance.

The influencer economy reminds us of the old advertising joke, “Half my advertising works, I just don’t know which half.” Influencers clearly can have an impact, but how do you work authentically, measurably, and most importantly at scale? Let’s put this sector under the microscope. If we can scale this it has extraordinary potential. But can we?

Many of us are now 2 or 3 days in and the rest remote. Clearly we have figured out some of the things that maximize performance, productivity, and teamwork. We’ve also discovered some pitfalls and taboos. This is a hands-on workshop where we emerge with a list of do’s and don’t for Hybrid Management.

The Fees were squeezed, and the industry consolidated. Now, are you getting what you need from your agencies? Across the Room community, people have in-housed, diversified their agency roster, consolidated their partners, and forged new relationships with media companies and vendors. This is an agency-free zone, so can we talk? This is a workshop with concrete examples of what works and doesn’t in 2024.

It’s an annual Brand Summit tradition. The leading AI practitioners in our community examine how these technologies are changing our work. You join this session to discuss practical tools as well as how they align (or don’t) with C-Suite expectations.

Quickly, what should your colleagues think of you? 5 words. Now do these words fit this particular company? You know you, but have you best positioned your personal brand to match your current company’s culture. Maybe you’re a consensus builder inside a company that thrives on debate. Or maybe you like to workshop inside a more structured environment. At each company, we have to evolve and simplify how the organization perceives us while being true to ourselves.. This awareness can lead to your best work and just as importantly, your company knowing how to best use your talent.

You used to negotiate GRPs and CPMs all day long. It was about ad space, time and reaching target audiences. But now you spend as much time thinking about adtech platforms, gaming, influencer marketing, RMNs, AI, and omni-channel that just keeps omni’ing as media consumption fragments further.

Marketing across the planet requires skills that are not always endemic to American-centric marketers. But many of our companies are growing much faster in China, broader Asia, and Latin America. How do you balance the need to swiftly maneuver centralized strategies, limited budgets, and meet local marketing needs? How can our companies export what we have learned in the US while still understanding that business markets are very different?

While audiences continue the rapid migration to OTT and App based long-form digital video we still can’t measure it and we don’t know what’s real. This is a brand safety issue. It’s also a major challenge with pricing transparency. We need to buy this reach and audience but it’s very complex. This is a conversation that seeks to advance the measurement discussion by getting serious about the pain points and what can be done to demonstrate solutions in 2025.

You’ve arrived. Well-paid, upper middle class, solid career. Why does it seem so hard to keep up with everything? To get where you are now, you waited to have kids that need homework help, screentime managed, and sports games attended. How do you balance this demanding, well paying career with your responsibilities as a parent, and can we talk about whether this is harder for women than men. Join us to talk about whether one can have work/life balance and if so how.

In the fast-paced digital age, negative consumer sentiment can spread like wildfire, fueled by cancel culture and social polarization. For brands facing backlash, the challenge becomes not just managing the fallout, but rewriting the story. How can companies reclaim trust, pivot, and rise from cancellation ashes? What strategies can turn a negative brand perception into an opportunity for reinvention? Let’s explore how some brands have successfully bounced back, and the steps needed to shift the narrative and reconnect with consumers in an age of instant judgment.