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Select Your Workshops
- In-person attendees can register for onsite workshops.
- Virtual attendees can register for virtual workshops.
Your StratFest ticket includes two workshops. Pick one per session. Seats are limited, so don't wait.
Time
11:45 AM - 12:30 PM
Session #1:
Featured Workshops
Full-Stack Strategy: Play Outside Your Playground
Dive into the evolving demands of strategic thinking, where traditional boundaries between brand, media and data are dissolving. Emphasizing that contemporary strategists require broad expertise rather than specialized silos, this workshop incorporates cutting-edge, evidence-based research on brand growth and communication effectiveness. The challenge though is that most strategists are only fluent in a slice of the skillset. This dynamic workshop will employ a gameshow-style format, featuring team challenges and rapid-fire prompts to help participants pinpoint their strengths, areas for development and unexplored potential within the comprehensive strategy landscape.
You’ll walk away with:
- A clearer view of your strategic strengths and gaps
- A stronger understanding of the evidence-based foundations behind what works
- A language for full-stack thinking across brand, comms and performance
- And a nudge to stop repeating the same year on loop
Whether you’re brand-side, agency-side, media, creative or hybrid—this session is for strategists who don’t want to be left behind, who want to think bigger and who are ready to stretch beyond their comfort zone. Don’t just master your playground. Learn to play outside it.
Speaker:
- Christopher Owens, Head of Brand Strategy, TRG
The Strategist's AI Playbook
Transform from AI-curious to AI-fluent as a strategist in advertising. This workshop cuts through the noise to focus on strategic AI adoption—not just better prompts, but smarter solutions. You'll explore emerging AI capabilities through live demos designed specifically for strategists, learning to identify opportunities that others miss. This session will dive into the fundamentals of AI strategy development and how to leverage AI's strengths while avoiding its weaknesses. Walk away with a comprehensive toolkit, real examples of award-winning AI strategies and hands-on experience that positions you as the AI voice your agency needs. This isn't another prompt workshop—it's strategic intelligence for the AI-powered future of advertising.
Speaker:
- Elijah Kleinsmith, Innovation & Technology Direction, Signal Theory Inc.
WARC Future of Strategy - How to Make Strategy Indispensable?
The 2020s are shaping up to be a survival test for strategy itself. The paradox is that strategy is viewed by clients and agencies today as both essential and expendable.
WARC’s Future of Strategy 2025 report grapples with this paradox, and looks to identify the opportunities ahead for strategy.
This workshop will explore questions such as: What do AI tools offer an advantage and what are the limitations of AI for the strategist role? What are the human superpowers that strategists can tap into? And how do we elevate strategy to prove its ability to affect business outcomes?
Speaker:
- Ann Marie Kerwin, Americas Editor, WARC
Signals, Not Schedules: Leveraging TikTok for Real-Time Relevance
Media calendars don't dictate culture. People do. And for strategists, adapting means learning how to find and decode the trends and behaviors that your audience is living and breathing.
In this workshop, TikTok will show you how to use the scroll to your advantage to identify what audiences truly care about, uncover community insights and reframe search as a new lens on culture. You’ll leave with a modern framework for building strategies that thrive in a world where attention is fluid, fast and audience-driven.
Speaker:
- Christina Cowan, Learning Enablement Partner, TikTok
Virtual Workshop -
The Evolving Agency: Growth in the Age of AI
AI is transforming marketing, but growth for agencies comes from more than just adopting new tools. This session explores how agencies can harness AI to expand capacity, create scalable offerings and guide clients through complexity with confidence. We will discuss how to evolve service models to balance automation with human creativity and how to use AI insights to deepen client trust. Learn how to position your agency as strategist and executor, driving measurable outcomes, accelerating client growth and unlocking new revenue streams. Attendees will leave with practical frameworks for integrating AI while staying focused on what matters most: helping clients succeed and future-proofing their agency’s role in a rapidly changing landscape.
Speaker:
- Miranda Toal, Global Manager, Partner Growth, ActiveCampaign
1:15 - 2:00 PM
Session #2:
Featured Workshops
Brace for Impact: Driving Growth with AI in a Turbulent Market
In today’s turbulent market, survival depends on more than instinct. Agencies that can’t adapt quickly risk falling behind competitors already leveraging AI-driven marketing solutions to gain speed, precision, and competitive advantage. This workshop will demonstrate why AI-driven marketing is essential—not just for survival, but for accelerating growth—by revealing the “why” behind consumer behavior and enabling strategies that truly connect. Through live demos and an interactive activity, you’ll see how Resonate helps agencies anticipate shifts, strengthen client partnerships, and turn data into action to stay indispensable in unpredictable times.
Speaker:
- David Huffman, SVP, Product, Resonate
- Jonathan Ricard, Chief Strategy Officer, Resonate
- Johanna Ure, Solutions Engineer Associate, Resonate
Build a Persona Factory with AI: A Hands-On Workshop for Strategists
This workshop is designed for strategists at all levels, from junior planners to senior leaders, seeking to leverage AI in their insight work. Participants will learn to use ChatGPT (or their preferred LLM) as a partner in cultural exploration, persona-building and brief development, with no prior technical expertise required. The emphasis is on the ethos of strategy as a team sport.
Attendees will also get a live demonstration of Prism, broadhead’s proprietary AI platform, showcasing its ability to craft personas and customer journeys at the speed of culture. "We contain multitudes. Our platform gives us the ability to see the facets of culture and human behavior as they evolve.”
Speaker:
- Emilie Hitch, Chief Strategy Officer, broadhead.
The Data-Backed Case for Creativity in a Performance-Obsessed World
In a world where algorithms reward instant clicks and CMOs are cornered into chasing short-term wins, System1 flips the script with a data-rich, behaviorally grounded case for the enduring power of compound creativity. Based on their latest research — The Power of Compound Creativity and The Creative Dividend — this hands-on workshop equips strategists with the tools and mindset to adapt to the moment without sacrificing what makes brands memorable.
Join System1’s experts in decoding how consistent creative foundations (think long-running ideas, agency continuity and reusable brand assets) dramatically multiply brand and business outcomes — even in volatile markets. Discover why high-confidence marketers prioritize emotional effectiveness, and learn how creativity, far from being risky, is the most undervalued asset in your growth arsenal.
Attendees will leave with:
- A blueprint for building compound creativity into your brand strategy
- Tools to evaluate and elevate creative quality using System1's effectiveness metrics
- Insights on how to convince stakeholders that creativity isn’t a cost — it’s a multiplier
If the age of adaptation demands clarity, confidence and creative courage, this is the workshop that arms strategists to lead, not just react.
Speaker:
- Andrew Tindall, Senior Vice President, Global Partnerships, System1
Adapt and Thrive: Connecting Strategy to Measurement to Consistently Prove Value
This session is designed for agency strategy leaders who are under increasing pressure to demonstrate their impact in an industry where AI is creating sweeping sea changes. Participants will learn to leverage AI to adapt and thrive. Through interactive exercises, this workshop shows how to integrate insights, strategy and planning with targeting and measurement to delight clients and prove the value of Strategy teams.
We will explore:
- Transforming static data into dynamic strategies to uncover actionable audience truths Making smarter, faster decisions to keep pace with expectations leveraging unified, in-platform metrics
- Creating a dotted line from strategy to performance and prove your strategy team’s value in driving business outcomes
- Positioning your strategy team as growth partners who can accelerate client success – both in storytelling and in hard numbers
- Frameworks and real-world examples you can apply immediately to make strategy more measurable, insights more actionable and your role more essential in proving agency value.
Speakers:
- Ashley Craig, Senior Director, Account Management, Tunnl
- Rich Hill, VP, Client Experience and Insights , Tunnl
- Michael Meyers, Executive Vice President, Tunnl
- Sarah Symns, Senior Director, Business Development, Tunnl
Virtual Workshop -
The Science That Sells Great Work: Win Trust, Sell Creativity & Make Better Marketing
Most agencies want to sell bold ideas. Most clients want data & proof. This talk shows how "the physics of brand growth" can do both. I’ll walk through a powerful framework — the Laws & Levers of Brand Science — that shows how science and art interlock to make work that really works. (Really really works.) Your clients get the rigor they crave and the science behind it; you get to make work that’s more effective, more creative, and easier to sell in.
You'll walk away with 3 things:
- A clear intro to the Laws & Levers framework.
- A couple of choice examples of brand science that are sticky, easy to use, and client-friendly.
- My favorite tricks & tips for using science to sell in smart work.
Speaker:
- Ethan Decker, PhD, Founder, Applied Brand Science
