Bright Spots:
Track the Signals.
Own the Shifts.
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Jay Chiat Awards Ceremony and Reception
Monday, October 5, 2026
Join us for our Jay Chiat Awards (JCA) ceremony in New York City where we will be honoring this year's winners, their extraordinary strategic work and breakthrough thinking. The JCA ceremony kicks off StratFest 2026, the premier conference for strategists taking place on Tuesday, October 6.
Time
5:15 - 9:00 PM
Registration
5:15 - 6:00 PM
Cocktails
6:00 - 8:00 PM
Ceremony
8:00 - 9:00 PM
After Party
StratFest
Tuesday, October 6, 2026
Bright Spots: Track the Signals. Own the Shifts.
Real transformation begins in fragments: small breakthroughs, emerging behaviors and new ways of thinking that reveal where the future may already be taking shape. StratFest 2026 is about finding those bright spots across strategy, creativity, culture and business — and learning from the people bold enough to test, build, adapt and move first. Because signals of momentum are all around us. The challenge is knowing where to look.
Time
8:00-9:00 AM
Registration and Check-In
* Breakfast will be served.
9:00 - 9:10 AM
Opening Remarks
- Justin Thomas-Copeland, CEO, 4As
- Andy Goldsmith, SVP, Member Engagement & Development
- Elizabeth Paul, Chief Strategy Officer, MARTIN* & 4As Co-Chair, Strategy Committee
- Christopher Ferrel, Chief Strategy Officer, TRG & 4As Co-Chair, Strategy Committee
9:10 - 9:35 AM
Stop Making Sense: The Art of Under-Strategizing
Michael Fanuele challenges strategists to abandon over-rationalized thinking and embrace inspiration as a craft. He argues that the best strategy doesn't persuade, it ignites, drawing on neuroscience, behavioral economics and brand storytelling to show that passion minus reason equals the formula for moving people. Drawing on his journey from agency CSO to Chief Brand Officer at Shake Shack, he equips strategists with a practical framework to spark their clients and creative teams.
Speaker: Michael Fanuele, Founder, Talk Like Music, Former Chief Brand Officer, Shake Shack
9:35 - 10:00 AM
The Human Signal: Why Experiential Is a Bright Spot for Brands
The next signals of change won’t all be found in dashboards, data sets or AI-powered research. Some are happening in real time, on the ground, where consumers live, gather and engage. Chris Meyer and Justin Thomas-Copeland will discuss the growing role of experiential marketing as a way to create authentic human connection, uncover deeper consumer insights, build trust and drive meaningful business value.
Speakers:
- Chris Meyer, CEO, Project Worldwide
- Justin Thomas-Copeland, CEO, 4As (Moderator)
10:00 - 10:15 AM
Jay Chiat Award-Winning Case Study
10:15 - 10:35 AM
Moonshots and the Reinvention Imperative
A company’s ability to survive is closely tied to its ability to reinvent itself.
But reinvention takes more than a bold idea. Drawing on Google’s approach to moonshot thinking, Jessica Qaasim explores the mindsets, skillsets, and toolsets organizations need to move beyond incremental improvement and imagine what could be radically better.
From thinking 10x to using emerging technology to unlock new possibilities, this session offers a practical look at how organizations can build the capacity to reinvent before change demands it.
Speaker: Jessica Qaasim, Head of Industry, Google Marketing Platform
10:35 - 11:00 AM
How Strong Brands Make Room for New Ideas
For 25 years, the Gorilla has personified Gorilla Glue’s promise of toughness. This session explores how Gorilla Glue and their agency, Betty, transformed an enduring brand character into the Chief Tough Officer, sharing lessons on agency-brand collaboration and co-creation, the dos and don’ts of using AI and how to redefine a category on your terms.
Speakers:
- Libby Kapsner, Associate Strategy Director, Betty
- Tim Maleeny, Chief Client Strategy & Integration Officer, President of Quad Agency Solutions, Quad
- Morgan Roberts, VP, Brand, The Gorilla Glue Company
11:00 - 11:30 AM
Break
11:30 AM - 12:15 PM
Workshops
- WORKSHOP #1: WARC Future Of Strategy 2026: Becoming The Upstream Partner Clients Want In The Room featuring Ann Marie Kerwin (WARC)
- WORKSHOP #2: You Can’t Borrow Cultural Relevance featuring Ashley Richardson-George (Conscious Minds Studio)
- WORKSHOP #3: AI Creativity: Escaping the Generic Trap featuring Caroline Hunt Riby (Syracuse) and Lisa Sobilo (IPSOS)
- WORKSHOP #4: See What Your Competitors Miss: Synthetic Data for Strategic Market Advantage featuring Basil Fraysse (Plus Company) and T.S. Kelly (Arima)
- VIRTUAL WORKSHOP #1: How Brands Shrink: Why Decay is the Default, and What to Do About It featuring Paul Ruscoe (Incubeta)
12:15 - 1:00 PM
Lunch
1:00 - 1:45 PM
Workshops
- WORKSHOP #5: What the C-Suite Needs to Learn from Marketers (and How to Teach Them) featuring Ethan Decker (Applied Brand Science)
- WORKSHOP #6:Less Noise, More Signal: Recognizing the Innovations That Matter featuring Albert Thompson (Transient Identiti)
- WORKSHOP #7:Guardrails and Judgment: Making AI Client-Ready featuring Ashwin Bhargava and Jonathan Petrino (ActiveCampaign)
- WORKSHOP #8: It's All Connected: How The Next Era of Strategy Will Be Focused on Systems featuring Diana Kelter (Mintel)
- VIRTUAL WORKSHOP #2: Built, Not Prompted: Creating Future-Fit Strategy Departments featuring Kate Rush Sheehy (PMG)
1:45 - 2:00 PM
Break
2:00 - 2:25 PM
No Time to Waste: Cut to the Strategy
Strategists often say: give me more time and I'll give you better work. But the data tells a different story.
Bain & Company's decade-long research into decision effectiveness found that the highest performing teams don't deliberate longer. They decide faster, act with less friction and execute efficiently, while teams agonizing over every choice get left behind.
For years, clients have asked agencies for real brand strategy. Instead, they've gotten belabored decks and "reverse" briefs that dodge the hard decisions. This is an alignment problem baked into how the agency model runs, rather than a time problem.
Now that automation strips away the research, the formatting and the admin that took weeks, what's left is what actually matters: the strategic decision-making clients have wanted all along.
This session makes the case that less time doesn't shrink strategy. It sharpens it.
Speaker: Joe Burns, Partner & Head of Strategy, Quality Meats Creative
2:25 - 2:40 PM
The Cheeseburger Confession: A Live, Nationwide Study of Who's Loyal, Who's Cheating and Why It Matters to Every Category You Touch
Every agency is hunting for the early signal — the thing that tells you where a client's next move should be before the dashboard does. Turns out it's not in a spreadsheet. It's on a sidewalk. We'll walk through a live, nationwide foot-traffic study — who's loyal, who's cheating, and who's already halfway out the door — across a major retail category. Then we'll make the case for why the pattern doesn't stop at burgers: "local" is the strategic signal every agency is underusing, especially as the ground rules for reading it are shifting under everyone's feet.
Speaker: Adam Roberts, SVP, Sales, Simpli.fi
2:40 - 2:55 PM
Jay Chiat Award-Winning Case Study
2:55 - 3:10 PM
The future of brand connection: Building trust in an uncertain world
Uncertainty isn't theoretical in 2026 — it's the backdrop for every purchase decision, and the terrain every strategist now navigates on behalf of their brands. So, what does that mean for the work you do? Based on new research from Amazon Ads, discover universal truths about how consumers experience uncertainty, the shifts reshaping their shopping behavior, and how brands can keep driving business results by giving consumers confidence in uncertain times.
Speaker:
- Lauren Ingerman, Senior Consumer Insights Manager, Amazon Ads
Sponsored Presentation by Amazon Ads
3:10 - 3:30 PM
You Hired Us to Think Differently. Now What?
A Perception vs. Reality Check on the Next Generation of Talent
Young talent is often told the path into the industry is straightforward: earn your seat, learn the craft, prove your value. But what happens when the reality of the industry no longer matches that deal?
Jess Collins of VCU Brandcenter and Shazzia Khan of Havas challenge some of the assumptions agencies—and young talent—make about each other. Together, they’ll unpack three tensions shaping the next generation of the industry:
- Access: Should young talent have to “earn” a voice before they’re allowed to use it?
- Craft: If AI eliminates the junior work that once taught people how to think, where does judgment come from?
- The Deal: If agencies struggle to retain young talent, is it the talent that needs to adapt—or the agency?
Through a perception-versus-reality lens, they’ll flip the usual conversation about what’s “wrong” with young talent and ask a more uncomfortable question: Are we bringing new perspectives into the industry only to teach them to think, work, and behave like the generation before them?
Speakers:
- Jess Collins, Director of Curriculum & Instruction, Strategy Chair, VCU Brandcenter
- Shazzia Khan, Global Chief Marketing Officer, Havas Health Network
- Andy Goldsmith, SVP, Member Engagement & Development, 4As (Moderator)
3:40 - 4:00 PM
Break
4:00 - 4:25 PM
Relationships > Robots. How Great Creative-Strategy Partnerships Can Unlock the Magic Machines Can’t.
Strategists learn the mechanics of strategy — the brief, the research, the workshop, the presentation — but rarely learn how to build creative partnerships that can unlock great work. And that gap matters more than ever. The more technology removes friction from making things, the more important it becomes to create the conditions for the kind of magic machines can’t make.
Speaker: Madison Giller, Strategy Director, Arnold Worldwide
4:25 - 4:45 PM
The New Trust Economy: How Creators Are Rewriting the Rules of Commerce
This session explores how the discovery-to-purchase journey now runs through people and what that structural shift means for how brands build relationships with consumers.
- Trust is driving purchase behavior. Creator recommendations now influence nearly half of all consumer purchases, and younger demographics index 2.2x higher. This reflects a fundamental change in how people decide what to buy. Creators are the most effective conduit for that trust because their authority is earned, not manufactured.
- Commerce is becoming one-to-one. The creator ecosystem is collapsing the distance between discovery and purchase, from recommendation to transaction without the drop-off. This is not "influencer marketing" as a media channel. It's a structural shift in how commerce works: personal, trust-based and happening in the same environment where the relationship already lives.
- Where this is headed. As AI-powered discovery gets better at matching content to people, creator advocacy increasingly becomes the signal the system optimizes for.
Speaker: Alix Tyler, Creative Director, Meta
4:45 - 5:10 PM
Campaigns Are Dead. Systems Are Thriving. How to Future-Proof Your Influencer Marketing Strategy
Influencer campaigns are everywhere. But almost no one has built a creator system, and that gap is about to become very expensive.
Creators aren't a tactic anymore. They're the channel your audience trusts most, the fastest-growing line in the budget and, for most brands, still managed like an afterthought. Kyra was among the first to call this shift. Marina Mansour from Kyra's founding team will share what happens when a brand stops casting creators and starts building systems around them: faster sign-off, real measurement and results that hold up under scrutiny.
If your influencer strategy still runs on reach, vibes and good relationships, this session will show you what needs to change for the next era of creator marketing.
Speaker: Marina Mansour, President, Beauty, Wellness & Luxury, Kyra
5:10 - 5:35 PM
What If the Bright Spots Are the Patterns No One Taught Us?
We’ve never known more about how brands grow, how people buy and how advertising works. That should count as one of the biggest bright spots in our industry. Yet most practitioners never learn the basic patterns, leaving us wide open to every shiny new object and every confident claim that marketing has changed forever. The Laws of Brand Growth should be year-one certification material, not something you stumble across ten-plus years into the job, if you find them at all. This session gives strategists a practical grounding in the evidence, so they can track the right signals and judge whether a shift is real, starting with their very next brief.
Speaker: Christopher Owens, Executive Strategy Director, TRG
5:35 - 5:40 PM
Closing Remarks
5:40 - 6:15 PM
Strategy Salon
6:15 - 7:00 PM
