LEAD Marketing Conference

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Fall 2025 Virtual LEAD Marketing Conference Agenda

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2025

2:00 p.m. - 4:30 p.m. ET

CONFERENCE CHAIR:

John Karolefski, Editor-in-Chief, CPGmatters

2:00 p.m. ET

Joint Business Planning:

“Paradigm for Retail – CPG Collaboration and Optimization”

Joel Cartwright, Industry Principal - Consumer Products,

Vistex

• Strengthening Alignment for Joint Business Planning: How retailers and consumer products manufacturers can work together more effectively to drive shared profitability.

• Streamlining Efforts for Greater Impact: Identifying areas where partners are duplicating work and finding opportunities to optimize processes.

2:50 p.m. ET

Winning the Holidays and Building for 2026:

Retail Media Strategies for CPG Brands

Justin Jefferson, Vice President of Strategy and Insights

Keen Decision Systems

Retail media is growing quickly, and for CPG marketers the holiday season often feels like a high-stakes sprint. The challenge is meeting year-end goals while also building momentum for long-term growth.

In this session, Justin Jefferson of Keen Decision Systems will share guidance on how to get more from retail media during the holidays and set your brand up for success in 2026. They will focus on what truly drives incremental ROI and how to make investments work harder across your portfolio.

You will walk away with:

Strategies to prove impact and show real growth beyond retailer-reported results.

Approaches to balance short-term holiday ROI with brand equity and stronger retailer partnerships.

Clear direction on how retail media fits into 2026 plans for sustainable growth.

3:40 p.m. ET

AI Meets Category Management: What's Next?

James Tenser, Storyteller-in-Chief, VSN Strategies

Artificial Intelligence is rapidly penetrating every retail business process as myths and misinformation abound. Category Management, with its painstaking analytics and planning processes, is ripe for this transformation, and AI tools are already being introduced.

For CPGs and their retail partners, this shift promises to speed routine repetitive decision cycles to allow more responsiveness to changing market conditions. It is expected to enable superior forecasting that incorporates shopper data from outside the retailers’ walled-gardens. Is a new era of joint business planning in the making? Are brand marketers ready to adopt new methods?

John Karolefski,

CPGmatters

Joel Cartwright,

Vistex

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