Review - Agenda 2026

Marketing Analytics Summit 2026
Hilton Santa Barbara Beachfront Resort, Santa Barbara, CA

Get a head start on the Marketing Analytics Summit at our ‘DIMSUM X Marketing Analytics Summit’ on the evening before. This pre-conference event blends relaxation with networking in an ambiance enriched with delicious dim sum.

It’s the ideal setting for data enthusiasts and marketing analytics professionals to connect, share insights, and explore the latest trends in Data AI and digital marketing. Join key decision-makers and influencers from various sectors for an evening of meaningful conversations and potential collaborations.

Don’t miss out on this unique opportunity to network and set the tone for the upcoming summit. We eagerly await welcoming you to this engaging and memorable evening!

When? Monday, April 27, 2026 | 5:30pm – 7pm
China Pavillion
1202 Chapala St, Santa Barbara, CA 93101

RSVP here

Marty looks back from the year 2080 at the Great AI Rupture of 2026 to 2036. It will have been be a time when artificial intelligence and the people who command it dismantle and rebuild marketing from the ground up. Relive the future with identity decoupling, synthetic psychodynamics, and biometric resonance became central to the new creative economy. “Those who treated AI as a tool became obsolete. Those who treated it as a colleague rewrote the industry.” 

You spent half your time asking the marketer what they actually did. They spent half their time explaining it. And somehow, at the end of all that, nothing changed about what went out the door.

This isn’t an insight problem. It’s a context problem.

Analytics fails when it’s disconnected from the objectives, decisions, and operational systems that surround it going in and coming out. When insight can’t connect to activation, it doesn’t drive behavior. It just becomes another dashboard nobody acts on. And another dashboard won’t fix it.

If your analytics can’t change what gets sent tomorrow, it’s not analytics. It’s reporting.

You could be home watching old presentations on YouTube – OR – you take full advantage of being in the same room with other, living, breathing analytics enthusiasts. You never know whom you’ll meet, newbies, or people who have been coming to the Marketing Analytics Summit since 2002! Important notes:

1. You’ll only have 2 minutes to tell the person you are face-to-face with your entire life story so practice your elevator pitch.
2. Bring business cards. No, really. If you meet 100 people this week and your only record is a LinkedIn connection, how on Earth are you going to remember who’s who?? A note on a physical business card is a superb memory hack.

If you’re the practitioner responsible for turning raw data into actionable Account Based Marketing (ABM) intelligence, this session is built for you. Lisa walks through exactly how to use ChatGPT alongside NodeXL and Excel to map influence clusters and spot early intent patterns. See practical workflows, prompt examples, and repeatable methods you can immediately apply to your own accounts. Reduce manual analysis time, improve accuracy, and deliver insights your sales and marketing teams will act on. Level up your analytical toolkit and become indispensable to your ABM program.

For years, the dashboard has been the center of marketing analytics. Teams gathered data, built reports, and waited for humans to interpret what mattered. But AI is changing that workflow fast. When querying data, generating SQL, summarizing insights, and even recommending actions become easier, the real bottleneck moves upstream: defining the right question, connecting business context, and turning signal into action.

Chalsea-Blaze explores a new way of thinking about marketing analytics in the AI era. Instead of treating dashboards as the final product, we can start to see analytics as a decision loop or command center where data, context, workflow, and action come together. Attendees will leave with a practical framework for identifying whether their teams are still operating in dashboard-era analytics and how to begin redesigning one workflow around faster, smarter decision-making.

Your data will never be perfect, but you can still make great decisions with it. Jenn delivers practical ways to work with what you have, to uncover meaningful trends and attribution signals – even in the face of slipping data quality.  Think optimizing consent rates, using bot-mitigation tools, and filling gaps with first‑party data and AI assistance. Jenn walks through the steps of extracting insights even when the numbers aren’t complete, by focusing on trends, relationships, directionality, and alternative attribution methods. Stop waiting for data perfection that will never come.

From the start (2002) the Marketing Analytics Summit has been the place to discuss and share our common problems. These are your people – they understand your situation. Often rated the best part of the Marketing Analytics Summit, sharing your problems with like-minded professionals is your path to answers, a little empathy, and a stronger professional network. Come prepared with an issue you are facing, a problem you are solving, or a question that needs answering. And then, be ready and willing to help others in this, their hour of need. (Homework assignment! At the end, email Jim Sterne with three pieces of advice that you are most grateful for. He’ll compile the results and feed them all back to everybody.)

AI can clean data, write code, and produce insights at the push of a button. What AI can’t do is understand the business, anticipate stakeholder needs, or decide whether the output actually makes sense. Sam highlights the human skills required to thrive: psychology, context engineering, stakeholder discovery, and the ability to adapt insight delivery to each person’s learning style. Learn practical frameworks for:

”           How the role of the Analyst is shifting in a AI forward world

”           Understanding stakeholder fears, motivations, and communication styles

”           Applying the smell- test to AI generated outputs

”           Using GPT personas to deliver insights in email, TLDR, podcast, or deck format

Sam shares stories from a decade of frontline analytics experience to reveal when it’s time to crunch the numbers and when it’s time to trust your gut.

Your marketing stack is full of data, but extracting growth opportunities is often a time-consuming nightmare. Disconnected tools and conflicting metrics make manual analysis nearly impossible. While AI is the solution, out-of-the-box ChatGPT isn’t enough—it needs context and automation to truly work.

In this session, Moehring cuts through the noise. You will learn to:

• Identify the metrics that actually matter
• Inject the “Why” and context into your data
• Use AI and automation to handle the heavy lifting

In-house built analytics tools promise ultimate control but often become “DIY Detours”, costly, custom solutions that fail to deliver expected business value. Liz shares lessons learned from replacing a major off-the-shelf digital analytics platform and details how to thoroughly assess feature parity between custom and vendor digital analytics solutions. Learn to build a foundation of data trust and avoid critical stakeholder adoption challenges. See a practical, universal framework to establish clear value for analytics tools. Hear how to set essential business requirements to successfully land any complex analytics migration. And yes, Gen AI is embedded in each step of the framework.

Share your favorite life hack with everybody at your table. Choose the three that you think are the best to share with everybody else. The table with the most votes wins! Examples? Of course!

            Create a “to-don’t list” and guard it ruthlessly.

            Make every chart answer one verb: compare, trend, rank, or share.

            Keep a “waiting on” list so nothing drops silently.

            Pre-tag your charts with the decision they’re meant to drive.

            Never present a number without the next action it implies.

Each sponsor gets 2 (and only 2) minutes to tell us their name, what problem they solve, and what they’re giving away at their booth on the Exhibit Hall floor. Jim Sterne is standing by with a stopwatch and a hook!

With AI doing all the grunt work, how do entry-level people learn the basics? How do newcomers learn the ropes? Jim takes a forward-looking view at how we can help the next generation do the best work ever given these new tools. The secret? Identifying the new ropes and the new skills required in tomorrow’s enterprise. Paying your dues has never been like this.

After the first day of wraps up and the celebration of 25 years of Marketing Analytics Summit reception winds down, we’re heading out for dinner.

Here’s how it works: we’ll meet at 7:00 PM in the hotel lobby, then split into groups and walk to nearby restaurants — tables already reserved. The format is the easy: good conversations, no agenda, delicious food. Dinner is pay-your-own-way — we handle the logistics, you just show up.

Data tells you what is happening – stories reveal why it matters. Learn how to bridge the gap between analytics and emotion by transforming insights into compelling narratives that inspire decision-making and drive measurable results.  Aleya explores how to interpret complex analytics through a human lens, communicate insights with clarity, and build narratives that influence both strategy and stakeholder buy-in. Through real-world examples and interactive techniques, see how to move beyond dashboards and KPIs to craft stories that motivate teams, energize campaigns, and create lasting brand connection.

What have you done that nobody believes? Each table discusses the most interesting things you’ve done. Together, choose the two most interesting things and then invent a third one which is a lie. Each table then presents their three accomplishments, and the audience votes on which are true and which is not. We’ll be keeping score, and the table that fools the most others wins! It’s a great way to find out what your fellow analysts have been up to and how creative they can be.

Most analytics failures start before any data is touched. Poorly framed questions, unclear intent, and vague stakeholder requests lead teams to produce outputs that miss the mark. Angela focuses on the conversations, facilitation moves, and collaborative techniques that determine whether an insight is even possible. Learn how to interrogate a request without antagonizing the requester, expose hidden assumptions, clarify decision context, and tighten the problem statement so the downstream analysis is targeted, relevant, and actionable. 

How do you get from data to insights to activation for contextual marketing? You don’t unless you start with decent data. Pavan shows how agentic AI can enhance your workflow when managing large-scale data products (think clickstreams), and oversee analysis, insights, audience development, or data governance. Pavan uses specialized agents working together to gather requirements, query data, and enforce governance and he shares how to set up a multi-agent architecture. Two real-world examples show how he saves time and improves accuracy and data compliance by adding intelligent automation to your analytics stack.

Jim Sterne hosts a fireside chat with a panel of Marketing Analytics Summit speakers. It’s your opportunity to ask your most important questions – and there are no stupid questions! Score extra points if you can get our panelists to disagree.

Discover how to leverage AI tools to analyze content data, uncover actionable insights, and streamline persona development. Brian shows how to identify gaps in your content strategy and transform high-value content into evergreen assets. Learn how to repurpose, retarget, and redistribute your best-performing content to maximize reach and ROI, ensuring your efforts deliver measurable, lasting results across channels.

Marketing Mix Models often deliver insights without clear action. In this session, Jim walks through real MMM outputs and shows how to translate charts, curves, and channel effectiveness into concrete decisions about budgets, testing, and tradeoffs. You’ll leave with a practical framework for using MMM as a decision tool, not just a reporting artifact.

Is data visualization, at its core, about making the data aesthetically pleasing? In this session, Tim will make the case that the answer is an emphatic, “No!”…but that that is often a beneficial side effect of data visualizations that do what they most need to do: help the audience understand the information being presented. “Understanding” is a function of the brain, so it makes sense that effective data visualization should be grounded in neuroscience and psychology. In this session, Tim will introduce some foundational concepts from these fields: the three types of memory, Miller’s Law, cognitive load, and normative conformity. From there, he will cover specific techniques that are a natural outgrowth of these concepts, including maximizing the data-pixel ratio, the power of McKinsey titles, and why horizontal bar charts generally (but not always!) are more impactful than pie charts. These concepts will all be demonstrated with examples that drive home their breadth of applicability and impact.

As the job market in our industry shifts, many of us are deciding to trade in the 9-to-5 for an entrepreneurial path. Having made that transition in 2024, Victoria and Philip have learned a great deal – and are willing to share the good, the bad, and the ugly of going independent after having been agency practitioners for over a decade. Whether you want to launch your own consultancy, earn a seat at the leadership table, or become an intrapreneur, this talk provides practical lessons for advancement.

In a perfect garden where everything was provided, two humans encountered a serpent who claimed to know everything. Thus began humanity’s complicated relationship with artificial intelligence,

Paula evolved her organization from one part-time optimizer to a pivotal, integrated team of qualitative and quantitative researchers. Learn how this intrepid team de-risks the design process, explores new opportunities for innovation, optimizes the customer journey, and enhances experiences for guests around the globe. 

Even the sharpest dashboards and most compelling data stories sometimes fail to influence decisions. Why? Maybe it’s because we’re only drawing from the analytics playbooks.

Jenny explores how other disciplines decode and navigate the same challenges we do, to inspire you to look outside the usual sources for guidance. Disciplines like Internal Communications, Public Relations, and yes, even an Anthropological understanding of witchcraft can be assets to hone your strategic influence. You’ll pick up practical strategies, unconventional resources, and a fresh perspective on your role. Be better equipped to blend analytics know-how with human insight to influence decisions and drive meaningful outcomes.

The AI meteor has hit and it has reshaped the business world. Just as the one that hit Earth gave rise to the new mammals, we are entering a new era of data practitioner careers. How you approach this new landscape will determine the evolution of your career. Join us in discussing how to evolve your career path to remain relevant, valuable, and necessary in the new world.

The Analytics Power Hour podcast was inspired by discussions in lobby bars after hours at conferences like Marketing Analytics Summit (specifically, by MAS’s predecessor, eMetrics). For 11 years this bi-weekly show has explored various analytics topics with digital drink in hand and the combined experiences and wit of the hosts and their guests on tap and flowing freely. This will be recorded with MAS attendees as a live (and participatory!) audience exploring important topics of the day.