Agenda

Marketing Analytics Summit 2025
Sheraton Phoenix Downtown Hotel, Phoenix, AZ

Get a head start on the Marketing Analytics Summit at our ‘DIMSUM X Marketing Analytics Summit’ on June 2nd. 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.

And as a special culinary highlight, we’ll also be serving Peking Duck, adding an exquisite touch to your experience. 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? June 2, 2025 | 6pm – 8pm

RSVP here: https://dimsumx.com/#dimsum-x-marketing-analytics-summit

Kick off your summit experience with the RevRun — a relaxed, 3.7-mile group run through downtown Phoenix. We’ll meet in the Sheraton Downtown Phoenix lobby at 6:00 AM, then head out for a slow, conversational-paced jog. It’s the perfect way to get moving, meet fellow attendees, and spark some great conversations before the day begins. All paces welcome — come for the run, stay for the networking!

While many focus on generative AI’s ability to automate tasks like email writing and workflow management, its greatest potential lies in amplifying human creativity and ingenuity. Jim is excited about how to leverage Large Language Models as creative partners rather than mere tools. He presents how to use AI for ideation, strategic planning, and novel problem-solving. This is a practical approach for using generative AI to unlock new perspectives, make unexpected connections, and drive innovation in ways traditional computing never could.

Self-driving marketing sounds like a dream—automated decisions, AI-driven campaigns, and real-time optimization without constant human intervention. It’s not just possible—it’s inevitable. But getting there isn’t as effortless as dropping a ChatGPT into your workflow.

This session explores what self-driving marketing really means and what’s holding most organizations back. You’ll learn:

• Why AI alone won’t drive your marketing without structured, accessible data
• Why relying on a single large language model limits performance, context, and security
• What “agentic” systems are and how they move us closer to truly autonomous marketing
• Practical steps you can take today to build the infrastructure that makes AI effective

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.

Marketing leaders increasingly recognize analytics and measurement as strategic imperatives, yet often rely on IT for its data management. In this session, I’ll explore the concept of data as knowledge and one of marketing’s core assets. I challenge the common practice of delegating data management to IT – which typically lacks the specialized expertise in marketing-specific use cases like attribution, strategic analysis, and activation – and outline why achieving the transparent, clean, and unified data warehouse desired by CMOs requires direct marketing involvement. Finally, I’ll provide guidance on building and operating such environments and highlight ways to effectively leverage data for improved marketing outcomes.

Josh explores how combining campaign performance data with user behavior data, you can improve conversion rates, enhance personalization, and increase customer lifetime value. Ideal for marketers, product managers, and analytics professionals seeking to maximize their analytics tech stack. Josh then shares how to build a cohesive data infrastructure, including architecture patterns, common pitfalls, and some practical integration strategies for a scalable analytics foundation.

Fred likes to joke that he’s an expert on imposter syndrome – mostly because he’s felt it in every aspect of my life.  As a GA/GTM professional and, especially, as a guitarist in pit orchestras for musicals, Fred has spent plenty of time wondering if he belongs. But those experiences have also taught him some ways to navigate self-doubt.

In this talk, Fred will share stories, musical snippets, and a few laughs about finding confidence when you feel like a fraud. 

People, Process, Technology: which is that hardest? It’s the people! Krista shares real-world lessons from implementing GA4 and integrating multiple channels for a Retail Media Network. From navigating internal politics and shifting stakeholder landscapes to adapting to evolving requirements and re-scoping complex projects, Krista highlights make-or-break success factors of large-scale analytics initiatives.
              Managing competing priorities across diverse stakeholders
              Setting realistic timelines while staying agile
              Ensuring alignment between goals and execution
              Communicating effectively to maintain buy-in
              Turning setbacks into opportunities
This is a behind-the-scenes look at balancing technical precision with the human element with essential survival skills whether you’re a project lead, analyst, or stakeholder.

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.)

Join this case study oriented session where you’ll hear how Room & Board used ObservePoint’s Email Link Validation to rescue revenue, reclaim time, and preserve their email team’s sanity. You’ll discover:

• How broken links silently wreck campaign performance
• The exact workflows Room & Board built to automate link checks
• How they saved 153 workdays/year while protecting $11M in email-driven revenue

This is a must-attend for email marketers, campaign managers, and anyone who hits “Send” and hopes for the best. Bring your lunch — and leave with answers.

How are how customers using AI and how do you track their usage? Wil has been at the forefront of the search and traffic world for more than two decades – and has been at the forefront of testing the impact of AI. Wil shares a bunch of ways to analyze AI traffic so you can make better decisions.

Creating a robust Next Best Action (NBA) model can be tricky. Emma demonstrates some tips and tricks through the strategic use of analytics. Through real-life examples, Emma describes some of the challenges in both analysis and the implementation of a Next Best Action model and shares:

• Guidance on how to approach the analytical side of NBA
• Tips and tricks for a successful model
• Real-life examples of NBA in action
• Pitfalls to watch for in the implementation of an NBA model in the front line.

As multi-touch attribution fades, Marketing Mix Modeling is emerging as a key tool for understanding marketing performance. Jim explores the fundamentals of MMM: what it is, how it works, and the questions it’s primed to answer. With real world experience and practical resources, Jim brings MMM into focus, helping you build confidence in this method to drive better marketing outcomes.

In B2B marketing, the buyer journey is anything but linear, spanning months and multiple touchpoints. Nadia explores how to bridge the gap between marketing efforts and sales outcomes through solid attribution strategies. She breaks down the essentials of data hygiene and keeping in alignment with your sales structure, whether lead-centric or account-based.
This session cuts through the noise and gives you a real-world playbook for making attribution work now—not in a perfect data fantasy.

Walk away equipped with:

• Best practices for cleaning and structuring data for reliable insights
• Techniques to map marketing metrics to your unique sales process
• A clear, no-nonsense framework for multi-touch attribution that reflects reality, not theory

Attribution doesn’t work unless your foundation is solid, and traditional attribution models weren’t built for the data chaos of modern B2B reality. That means obsessing over data integrity, cleaning up your CRM, getting campaign tracking tight, and making sure your funnel mirrors how your team actually sells. Without that, you’re just guessing. Outdated attribution is dead. It’s time to fix the foundation and finally connect marketing to revenue—with confidence.

Now that you know what MMM is thanks to Jim Gianoglio (see previous session), learn how to apply the knowledge gleaned from MMM to your marketing decisions. Skeptical? You should be! Jeff will walk through how to use MMM flexibly and in tandem with other methods with the aim of building trust. Worried about how to get your organization to lean in? Jeff delivers tips and tricks for being an agent of change.

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!

Starting in March 2011, a web analytics group that jokingly called itself “Team Evil Forces” spent four years trying different ways to communicate in a less public way than Twitter. They eventually settled on Slack that had over 100 people in January 2015. Today, there are roughly 25,000 digital analytics denizens asking questions, helping each other out, and being the gravitational center of the digital analytics community. Today, we honor Lee and Michele for their dedication to the industry.

This is your chance to get out of your comfort zone and prove that you are serious about meeting your peers. Sign up for a Dutch-treat dinner and we’ll tell you at which (very nearby) restaurant to meet for a meal (everyone pays for their own dinner).. Get to know your colleagues in a relaxed setting over good food and favorite beverages. You might just meet somebody who can solve that burning issue you’ve been working on or whom you can help with your experience. “This was a little awkward for the first few minutes and then we had a great time!”

Sign up in the conference app Whova under “Community -> Meet Ups -> Dinner with Friends” to be placed in a dinner networking group. We have reserved spots at the following restaurants, all within a 2 minute walk from the Sheraton Phoenix Downtown:

1. Rosso Italian
2. The Vig
3. Blanco Cocina
4. The Arrogant Butcher
5. Mancuso’s
6. Latha
7. Miel De Agave
8. Blue Hound

Kick off your summit experience with the RevRun — a relaxed, 3.7-mile group run through downtown Phoenix. We’ll meet in the Sheraton Downtown Phoenix lobby at 6:00 AM, then head out for a slow, conversational-paced jog. It’s the perfect way to get moving, meet fellow attendees, and spark some great conversations before the day begins. All paces welcome — come for the run, stay for the networking!

Traditional customer journey mapping relies heavily on assumptions and historical patterns. But what if we could let the data tell us what’s really driving customer behavior? Michele shares groundbreaking applications of Bayesian networks and neural architectures that reveal genuine cause-and-effect relationships in customer data. Learn how these techniques can identify hidden influences on purchasing decisions, predict the impact of marketing interventions, and optimize customer experiences – even with incomplete data. Oh – and you can download Microsoft’s Deep End-to-end Causal Inference (DECI) generative model from GitHub and use it for free.

Marketing leaders today are expected to be part artist, part analyst, and full-time mind readers. But most of the tools we use still think two-dimensionally – as in flat dashboards that summarize activity, not stories. Most often, marketers can tell their business a what happened – but not why, or what to do next about it.

In a world where marketing is one of the most multi-faceted functions in the business, that’s not enough. And with reporting credibility on the line, marketing analytics should tell an insightful buyer journey story – not start a debate.

In this session, Eric Westerkamp, CEO of CaliberMind, explores how AI is reshaping the way we understand and tell the story of marketing. From uncovering hidden patterns in buyer behavior to surfacing content preferences and persona trends that drive revenue, AI is moving us from basic reporting to dynamic, multi-dimensional insight – helping us foster trust in data across the business.

This is not a story about replacing analysts. It’s a story about a vision to about empower every marketer to ask smarter questions, explore data intuitively, and see the full narrative. You’ll hear how AI can help teams optimize budget allocation, level up data literacy, and finally connect brand, engagement, and pipeline in a way that resonates in the boardroom.

But the real shift isn’t just insight. It’s a fundamental mindset shift. AI can help marketers answer the questions you didn’t think to ask:

• Who’s on the buying team and what have they done so far?
• If I had another $100K in budget, where would I get the biggest return?
• What trends am I missing in my pipeline right now?

If you’ve ever thought, “There’s something we’re missing in this report”, this talk is for you.

Ready to test your knowledge, creativity, and bluffing skills in the world of marketing and analytics? Marketing Balderdash is where fact meets fiction! Each table receives a set of historical dates, famous figures, and key events from the marketing and analytics industry. The individual whose first name comes last alphabetically is the moderator, holding the correct answer, while everyone else concocts their most convincing (and hilarious) alternative explanations. The moderator reads them out for each player to vote on the most plausible answer. Score one point for getting it right and two points for fooling others! The table with the most points wins so time is of the essence. Who will emerge as the ultimate marketing mastermind?

Marketing analysts shouldn’t spend their time wrangling messy data, they should focus on generating insights to make better decisions. Enter the data engineer: the unsung hero who builds pipelines, ensures data quality, and enables scalable analytics. Mayra details the vital role data engineers play in supporting analysts and marketers, while comparing their work to that of data analysts, analytics engineers, and marketing analysts. With the rise of generative AI adding complexity to already massive datasets, Mayra offers practical strategies to optimize your tech stack, free up your analysts, and deliver faster, more reliable insights.

Jayda illustrates AI models that predict CTR and customer behavior across Omni-channel campaigns, with proven performance improvements for engagement and conversion. She taps into AI-driven predictive querying and unravels how models retrieve sponsored – and relevant – products based on customer search. She also explores predictive audience lists, AI customer segmentation, optimizing upsell opportunities, and prospecting strategies. Learn how AI can elevate customer engagement and personalization at scale.

In B2C marketing, the ability to extract meaningful insights from data is often hindered by bias, scarcity, and inconsistency. Kyle explores how synthetic data modeling, powered by Generative AI, is transforming the way marketers enhance datasets, improve predictive accuracy, and drive better decision-making. He breaks down key techniques for generating realistic synthetic data, mitigating bias, and automating feature selection to create more robust marketing models. All of this with a step-by-step case study for an online retailer.

Walk away equipped with:

• Best practices for generating and validating high-quality synthetic marketing data
• Techniques to reduce bias and fill data gaps for more accurate customer insights
• A clear framework for integrating synthetic data into predictive modeling and AI-driven marketing strategies

A large organization needed to elevate its digital analytics education. The goal was to teach the principles behind data reports rather than just focusing on the platforms. Working with their agency, they went beyond a basic Data Literacy program to establish effective processes and position analytics as a key tool for decision-making. Anil and a colleague explain how they transform every report into a learning opportunity, fostering a culture where data-driven insights are embraced and effectively applied in everyday business decisions.  

Vidya delivers a comprehensive approach to solving machine learning problems that transcends the usual algorithm-first perspective. She’s here to help you navigate the entire process of machine learning projects—from data preparation and validation to model selection and performance evaluation. Learn how to select the right models and validation techniques based on business problems, data availability, and desired outcomes. Get the scoop on optimal validation techniques, an overview of anomaly detection methods, and practical approaches for prediction and classification. Make informed decisions about machine learning techniques that best suit your business needs.

From its creation to its critical role in AI and machine learning, every datapoint has its story. From converting business requirements into data requests and planning data structures to monitoring data flows, Elizabeth shares years of experience battling the trials and tribulations of properly getting the data into shape. She pinpoints best practices, common pitfalls, and key considerations that ensure your data is ready to drive smarter outcomes.

AI and audio can turn complex visualization patterns into memorable stories that resonate with stakeholders on an emotional level. Chalsea delivers demonstrations and practical examples to show how you can identify story-worthy patterns, translate metrics into sonic elements, and create powerful multi-sensory presentations. She has practical templates, AI prompts, and a sound mapping toolkit that will revolutionize how you communicate insights. Check out the future of data storytelling and make your insights unforgettable through the power of sound.

Storytelling meets data analytics in a way you’ve never experienced before! In Turn This Deck Into…, each table receives an identical set of marketing data slides—but with a twist. Each group will randomly select a storytelling genre (horror, comedy, sci-fi, noir, maybe even romance) and must craft a compelling presentation that transforms dry data into an engaging, genre-specific narrative. Will your sales trends become the plot of a gripping thriller? Can customer demographics inspire a rom-com masterpiece?  Each table has a limited time to turn raw numbers into an unforgettable tale to present to the whole room in the next session.

With analytics, you have data about the performance of your content. With AI, you have a powerful data analyst that can find insights fast. Andy delivers a step-by-step process for combining those two tools. It’s amazing to see AI crunch through a dataset. It’s also fun to see what it suggests. You’ll quickly get insights from your marketing data that you can use for social media, SEO, campaign performance and conversion optimization. Andy is your guide on this tour of the latest in AI-powered data analysis.

• How to export and upload analytics data to ChatGPT 
• Which exports from other reporting tools work well with AI
• How to prompt AI for topics and ideas, analysis and actions

Your data storytelling masterpiece is ready for the harshest critics on the planet – the competition. Audience voting will determine the most ingenious and entertaining transformation. If you love a good challenge and a great laugh, this is your chance to bring data to life like never before. Don’t just analyze—improvise!

Adrianne unveils cutting-edge AI techniques that drive dynamic pricing models, enhancing customer relationships while unlocking untapped revenue streams. Learn to implement advanced AI pricing strategies that balance profitability with customer satisfaction and craft agile, data-driven pricing decisions. Gain actionable insights to stay ahead in the rapidly evolving marketplace, reshaping your pricing approach to drive unprecedented growth. Don’t miss this opportunity to lead the charge in the AI pricing revolution and maximize your business potential through innovative, customer-focused pricing strategies.