The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) Masters of Marketing is a keystone event for the industry. The three-day event (two half days and two full days) is stacked with visionaries and industry influencers ready to share their experiences, keys to success and forecasts.

With so much talent in one place it was hard to narrow the list down to just a handful of sessions. We’ve limited ourselves to one session per day. Here’s what we’re looking forward to at this year’s ANA Masters of Marketing:

The Challenger Brand Advantage

Bionic was built from the ground up with talented engineers and a team who saw the need for better way to buy and plan media. As an independent company, we can relate to Grant Thornton’s role as a challenger brand. At times, it seems like an endless uphill battle to stay ahead of competitors. Especially those with large parent companies and a seemingly infinite stream of funds and resources. We’re excited to hear about the innovative steps they took to build and market their brand in a competitive industry filled established titans and billion-dollar brands.

What more could a challenger brand ask for…than to be fifth in a category defined by a group of leaders called “The Big Four?” That’s the situation professional services firm Grant Thornton found itself in, and has fashioned itself as the ultimate challenger brand as a result. Grant Thornton found that breakthrough growth would require the organization to take bold, innovative steps to build its brand with potential customers.

In an industry sometimes viewed as commoditized, the firm placed big bets on culture, technology, and people. That has begun to pay off, with record growth, earnings, employee retention, and reinvestments in the firm. Bringing this to life was a core tenet and challenge of the firm’s new marketing strategy – one that has aimed to break the industry mold and create brand permission in a congested market.  Grant Thornton and agency gyro will shares the journey the brand has taken and offer tactical recommendations for other challenger brands.

John Harmeling
CMO
Grant Thornton

Mike Hensley
President
gyro Chicago

Brand Building as a Force for Good and Growth

P&G’s Marc Pritchard has made some waves in the industry over the past couple of years. His calls for transparency and mission to end shady advertising practices opened eyes, exposed fraudsters and has become an obsession for many. While we’re thankful for the guidance and foresight he has provided in that arena, we look forward to seeing him take that same level of expertise to breakdown brand building. If Marc Pritchard wants to give you advice on growth, you take it.

The industry needs more market growth since it drives the majority of all company growth and lifts all boats. Growth is shifting and disruption is accelerating. It’s more important than ever to raise the performance needed to win with the people we serve. The bar has never been higher for better creativity and better innovation, fueled by partnerships and productivity, to drive growth and create value. And brands now have a higher order expectation to fulfill — they need to take on broader issues that are important to people and the world we live in. Brands need to be both a force for good and a force for growth.

Marc Pritchard
Chief Brand Officer
Procter & Gamble

Moving to Human-Centric Marketing

Weaving together data and technology with human experience is what we aim to do at Bionic. We’ve seen how the human aspect has begun to erode since the advent of programmatic. This had led to countless issues with control and accountability. When too much reliance is put in algorithms and robots, the traditional safeguards, strategy and creativity that only a human can maintain go out the window. We’re interested in learning how marketing facets outside of media buying are dealing with the issue of losing humanity and what practices we can apply to our discipline.

Is brand-building dead? Marketing appears to be on the verge of becoming an entirely technical discipline driven by a focus on performance marketing. While we can finally market at an individual level, marketing seems to have lost its humanity. This presentation will show how Clorox is successfully driving growth by bringing more, not less humanity, to marketing. Learn how to weave together data and technology with brand purpose and storytelling to create human-centric marketing that outperforms performance marketing alone.

Eric Reynolds
Chief Marketing Officer
The Clorox Company

The Next Tipping Point: How Relationships Between Tech, Brands, & Agencies Will Change Forever

The reason for our excitement about this session should be obvious. The goal of Bionic is to help media buyers work better using technology. Hearing other points of view and a gaining a fresh perspective helps us to create a better solution.

The multi-channel, multi-format, multi-ad size world generates a sea of data points for every digital campaign. Yet most brands still depend on a small army of spreadsheet-wielding media experts, with separate budgets, to manually optimize their buys and drive results. While we intuitively understand computers were built because they can solve these kinds of problems better, we haven’t been able to make the practical leap necessary to change how we advertise. That day is here.

SteelHouse CMO, David Simon will discuss the current state of the agency/brand/technology relationship and how the latest programmatic advancements are challenging those traditional roles.

David U. Simon
Chief Marketing Officer
SteelHouse

Join us at the ANA Masters of Marketing

We hope to see you Oct. 4-7, 2017 at the ANA Masters of Marketing or online using the hashtag #ANAMasters. If you can’t make it we will be publishing nightly recaps of the event on the Bionic blog.