Agenda

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

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 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.

Most customer journey analyses fail because the underlying data is inconsistent, incomplete, or stitched together poorly across platforms. Kyle walks through a hands-on, practical workflow for auditing, cleaning, and unifying journey data so analysts can trust the insights they share with stakeholders. The focus is on real implementation details—tagging, identity stitching, data governance, and the small gaps that quietly break journey reporting. See a clear workflow for auditing and cleaning journey data so you can quickly identify where accuracy breaks down. Pick up practical methods to reduce identity fragmentation and connect user behavior across devices and channels. Take home a straightforward blueprint for keeping journey data clean, consistent, and usable across dashboards and decision-making.

Most marketing teams still struggle to connect the dots between fragmented datasets—campaign configs, attribution signals, incrementality tests, and spend logs. Uber tackles this by building a marketing semantic layer: a shared data foundation that stitches together marketing concepts, metrics, and identifiers across sources to create a single, queryable source of truth. Seojoon unpacks how they designed their semantic layer and its companion “context registry,” which captures the evolving business meaning behind metrics and entities. Learn how this system helps analysts, scientists, and marketers interpret performance shifts faster, automate root cause analysis, and reduce time spent reconciling inconsistent data definitions. Expect a grounded walkthrough—not theory—of the architecture, governance model, and cultural changes behind making marketing data truly interoperable.

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.

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. 

Stay Tuned

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.

Session description coming soon.

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.

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.