CMO Growth Council Agenda
Tuesday, 28 October 2025 | 9am-1pm | Sofitel Singapore City Centre
An exclusive closed-door forum for senior marketing leaders to shape global standards in creativity, media innovation, and growth, exploring how CMOs can lead in an AI-powered world while staying grounded in cultural intelligence and creative authenticity.
Drawing on insights from dentsu’s 2025 CMO Report and WARC, the forum will examine the commercial potential of micro-trends, fandoms, and the creator economy, and how brands can innovate meaningfully in today’s fragmented cultural landscape.
Agenda
The CMO State of Play: Navigating Uncharted Waters
Panel Speaking: Clay Schouest, Chief Strategy Officer, APAC, dentsu Gita de Beer, Global Director of Strategic Initiatives and Future Brands
Moderated by Melanie Speet, Director of Spikes Asia
In an AI-driven world where visibility and differentiation are increasingly elusive, CMOs must balance algorithmic success with brand authenticity. This panel draws on dentsu’s 2025 CMO Report and the CMO Growth Council’s global summit to explore how marketing leaders can lead with creativity, humanity, and strategic foresight in rapidly shifting terrain.
Expect a candid discussion on what it means to lead with creativity, humanity, and strategic foresight—at a time when the waters have never been more uncharted.
Followed by: Roundtable - Marketing in an AI Agent World
"Unshittifying" CX: Closing the marketing gap
Presentation Speaking: Rica Facundo, Asia Editor, WARC
In the Marketer’s Toolkit, WARC identified the gap between brand and customer experience as a key trend impacting marketing effectiveness, especially with the “enshittification” of customer service and products on the rise. Since then, the innovation around AI tools and agents are disrupting how customers interact with brands.
In this presentation, we explain why the onus is on marketers to close that gap, and how they can do so across a spectrum of different types of touchpoints.
Followed by: Roundtable - Unshittifying CX
Innovating the path from belief to basket: How Brands Can Anticipate, Shape, and Commercialize Micro-Trends and Mass Culture
Presentation Speaking: Richard Reid, Head of Strategy, Media, APAC, dentsu Mimi Lu, Head of Intelligence and Insights, APAC, dentsu
Culture today is no longer dictated from the top down—it’s fragmented, fast-moving, and often born within micro-communities on platforms like TikTok. Trends can emerge from anywhere and scale at unprecedented speed, but brands often lack the systems to understand the deeper triggers behind them or to respond in ways that are both authentic and commercially effective.
This keynote will explore the lifecycle of cultural trends, how to identify which ones hold commercial value, the roles brands can credibly play in shaping them, and how creative effectiveness on creator-led platforms converts cultural relevance into business growth.
Followed by: Roundtable - Mastering Entertainment as the new media plan