ProcureCon Marketing 2025
November 17 - 19, 2025
Marriott Austin Downtown, TX
Day 1 - The Future of Marketing Procurement: Trends, Technology, and Techniques To Deliver Results
7:15 am - 8:15 am
Continental Breakfast & Registration (Grand Opening Of The Solutions Zone)
8:15 am - 8:30 am
Welcome Remarks And Icebreaker
8:30 am - 8:40 am
Chairperson’s Opening Remarks
Philip Guiliano -
Partner,
BrandActive
8:40 am - 9:10 am
Keynote Fireside Chat: Tone at the Top: Driving Business Results With A Dynamic Partnership With Finance and Marketing - Turning Struggle Into Success
Sherry Epting -
US Commercial Procurement Leader,
AstraZeneca
Steven Dubroff -
Senior Director, Procurement,
Hilton
Philip Guiliano -
Partner,
BrandActive
Without a consistent set of goals, expectations, and directives among your Finance, Marketing, and Procurement leaders you’ll be struggling to accomplish your objectives. This exciting Fireside Chat will discuss ways you can take the lead in ensuring alignment among these teams, giving you the structure and support you need to accomplish your goals. You’ll receive insights from leading practitioners surrounding:
• How Marketing Procurement should position itself to address key business challenges
• How you can make the most impact within your organization
• Can’t miss trends that you’ll need to address as you enter into 2020
9:10 am - 9:50 am
Interactive Panel: Moving the Needle Past Transparency Into Trust And Verify
Nicholas Kline -
Senior National Manager,
Toyota Motor Sales
Antonio Humphreys -
Senior Manager, Global Procure to Pay,
Adobe
Fiona Foy -
Managing Director, FirmDecisions North America,
FirmDecisions
Bill Duggan -
Executive Vice President,
Association of National Advertisers
With the desire to move beyond the tired ‘transparency’ debate, this interactive panel discussion with provide perspectives from industry thought leaders on current trends/actions being taken by advertisers and agencies to help move the trust needle forward. We’ll have a lively discussion on stage and get the audience’s perspective on:
• The current (and desired) state of transparency between agencies and advertisers
• What role does verification of agency compliance to the terms in place have in building trust
• Top tips/best practices for marketing procurement to build trust levels with their agency partners
9:50 am - 10:10 am
Keynote Presentation: Empowering Agency Negotiations By Corralling Your Agency Activity
Kristi Boyd -
Director, Worldwide Agency Operations,
The Coca-Cola Company
Given the complexity and uniqueness of marketing services, it’s no wonder that agencies are at an advantage during the negotiation process. Among your disparate marketing teams, hearing different terms for what is seemingly the same or similar service can leave even the most experienced procurement professional asking what the heck are we even buying? It can feel like the wild west out there!
This case study will review how Coca Cola, a major brand with a few thousand agencies and 1500+ marketers across 200+ markets approached this challenge by standardizing the scope to invoice process for its marketing spend. You’ll leave this session with key takeaways surrounding how to:
· Break your marketing landscape into standard deliverables and language
· Assess if your existing P2P tools can truly accommodate marketing activity
· Tie your GL to marketing spend
· Achieve support for similar initiative at your own organization
10:10 am - 10:50 am
Coffee Shop Refreshment & Networking Break In The Solutions Zone
11:50 am - 12:30 pm
Panel: Blasting Off: Finding Innovative Ways To Approach Agency Sourcing (While Eliminating RFP Ridiculousness)
Frank DeRosa -
Senior Vice President, Client Sourcing And Optimization,
Weber Shandwick
Alessandra Scocco -
Strategic Sourcing Leader, Global Marketing,
Google
Patrick Fogarty -
Senior Vice President, Business Development and Marketing Americas,
Tag
Rob Panor -
Category Manager – Marketing, Communications & Events,
Cisco
Philip Guiliano -
Partner,
BrandActive
Leah Power -
Executive Vice President, Agency Operations,
Institute of Communication Agencies
For years, agencies have been challenged with the traditional RFP and pitch process that procurement (rightly or wrongly) has bestowed on them. On the flip side, procurement is tasked with formally evaluating which agency is the best for the company. Can a middle ground be reached? Lets hope so!
This panel will shed light on what leading procurement practitioners are doing to make their RFP process ‘agency friendly’ but still meeting the overall needs of their broader organization along with an agency’s perspective on the process. Key topics for discussion include:
• What to do to prepare for an agency search
• Creating and Negotiating an effective Scope of Work
• Information you need from your marketing team before an agency search should begin
• How to handle organizational pushback to changing the process.
11:30 am - 11:50 am
Presentation By Extreme Reach
Melinda McLaughlin -
Chief Marketing Officer,
Extreme Reach
10:50 am - 11:30 am
Panel: Evolution of the In-House Agency Model 2.0: Ensuring Continued Success of Your In-House Strategy
Sébastien Slek -
Executive Director - Global Sourcing Marketing,
WarnerMedia
Catherine Jones -
Director, Global Strategic Sourcing, Marketing & Sales,
VMWare
Corey O'Brien -
Vice President,
Aquent Studios
Jennifer Patterson (JP) -
Creative/In-House Operations Lead,
TeamPeople
Philip Guiliano -
Partner,
BrandActive
With many brands having made the shift from their AOR to in-housing creative and advertising, it can be tempting to assume that everything’s running smoothly once it’s set up. However like any relationship, In-Housing requires ongoing attention, care and TLC to ensure that it continually delivers for your marketing stakeholders.
This panel will take a broad look at how leading brands (with the help of procurement of course) holistically look at their overall labor strategy and determine whether they’ve optimized their external agency mix to match the maturity of their in-house model.
• In-housing fact vs. fiction
• Can you get the same benefits without going in-house?
• Determining the optimal resource mix
• Setting up your in-house agency for success
12:30 pm - 12:50 pm
Presentation: Transforming Your Marketing Relationships Through An Effective Scope of Work Program
Steven Wales -
Chief Operating Officer,
Decideware, Inc.
Coleman Raymond -
Manager, Agency Management,
InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG)
Whenever you’re collaborating with your agency partners, it’s all too easy for miscommunication or presumptions to send a project off course. That’s why a scope of work program is critical to ensure everyone is on the same page.
This transformational session give you the keys to success whenever a project comes your way. Steps for success include:
• Aligning Stakeholder Engagement: How to secure support from Senior Leadership across Marketing, Agency Ops and Procurement
• Communication Planning and Change Management:
• How to successfully Implement a Change Management Program
• Capturing Outcomes to obtain insights and impacts on decision making and investment ROI:
12:50 pm - 1:50 pm
Lunch for All Attendees
12:50 pm - 1:50 pm
Private Lunch Sponsored By InnerWorkings
1:50 pm - 2:40 pm
Workshop: Making Sense Of Media – Contractual Best Practices That Can Hold Your Media Agency AND Marketing Team Accountable
Jason Cammorata -
VP of Sourcing,
MDC Partners
While media auditing being a hot topic today, it’s important to take a step back to relook at your media contracts. This session will help you
• Assess the strengths and weaknesses of your own media agreements
• Understand the level of internal and external resources required to perform a media audit.
• Understand what to expect upon conclusion of an audit and how to leverage results to impact change within your organization.
1:50 pm - 2:40 pm
Workshop: Market Research Swap Meet
Becca Miller -
Strategic Sourcing Manager,
Google
Michael Takyi -
Marketing Procurement Lead for the Americas,
Castrol
Regardless of what industry you are in, there’s a good chance that you don’t fully understand your company-wide market research spend. This facilitated discussion will let you swap stories with other practitioners to share ideas and approaches they’ve taken to:
• Incorporate market research into the their overall category strategy
• Apply principles of supplier management to the market research category
• Assess the ROI of market research spend
• How are market research methodologies, surveys and tools fundamentally changing, and what new innovations and industry disruptors are entering this space
1:50 pm - 2:40 pm
Workshop: SaaS Negotiations Swap Meet (Introduced By Craig Rutkowske of KPMG)
Michael Rafferty -
Executive Director, Global Marketing Procurement,
Kaplan
Feeling inundated with the amount of bright and shiny new things your marketing team wants to buy? And tired of dealing with arduous contract terms that software vendors refuse to budge on? Bring all your stories, experiences, problems, and successes to this swap meet and your bound to find an idea or two you can take back to the office.
**Maximum 30 attendees, available first come first serve***
1:50 pm - 2:40 pm
Boardroom: Agency Compensation Swap Meet
Mithun Sharma -
Vice President - Global Strategic Sourcing,
Visa
Frank DeRosa -
Senior Vice President, Client Sourcing And Optimization,
Weber Shandwick
Feel like performance based agency compensation models have been on your radar for several years? Or have you approached this topic with success? In either case, you won’t want to miss this swap meet on agency compensation practices.
• How we are shifting the contract model from costs and fees to understanding the value an agency can give you
• How are we building a related compensation approach?
• How receptive have agencies been on such an approach?
**Maximum 30 attendees, available first come first serve***
2:40 pm - 3:00 pm
Presentation: The Dilemma Of The Modern Marketer
Simon Moore -
Global VP of Marketing Solutions,
SDL
The dilemma? How to deliver against the need to produce and publish more content, across more channels, faster, with fewer people, at higher quality, with hyper-personalization, and no additional budget. By association, this becomes the shared burden of today’s marketing procurement professional. In this session, Simon Moore reveals practical ways you can uncap the ‘secret sauce’ and deliver more content faster, better, and cheaper through a connected content supply chain, backed up with realworld examples. You may not know of SDL or have heard their name, but there is a good chance that you’re already working with them. For over 25 years, SDL has powered the content supply chain for some of the world’s leading brands. With over 4,000 employees and a footprint of 61 offices in 39 countries, and revenues approaching $500m, SDL helps global brands to create, manage, translate, adapt and deliver omni-channel content worldwide. Find out why 91 of the top 100 global companies choose to work with us on SDL.com.
2:40 pm - 3:00 pm
Presentation: Time for a Change: A New Approach to Pricing in the Exhibit and Event Business
Jim Obermeyer -
Vice President,
Hamilton Chicago
Hamilton is an experiential marketing firm. ‘Experiential Marketing Firm’; that’s actually a fairly recent term used as a descriptor for companies in our industry. Many of you may recognize the term exhibit designer/producer or exhibit house. The reality is that today we are more about creating face-to-face marketing experiences than building stuff. In our brief time together, I would like to present a new idea – or perhaps a new way to look at the costs involved in doing what we do for companies like yours.
2:40 pm - 2:50 pm
Innovation Spotlight By HH Global
2:50 pm - 3:00 pm
Innovation Spotlight
2:40 pm - 3:40 pm
Workshop: Maximizing Your Agency Relationships
Simon Francis -
CEO,
Flock Associates
Mitchell Caplan -
Managing Director,
Flock Associates USA
Flock Associates is a global consultancy that works with clients to transform the way they do marketing, including how to best manage and improve agency working relationships. Come learn how Flock has worked with several of the world's most prominent marketing organizations, including: Ford, Citibank, McDonalds, J&J, Toyota, Cisco, Mondelez, Asda/Walmart and BAT.
Mitchell will be sharing real world examples during the workshop and will be encouraging a lively discussion.
3:00 pm - 3:40 pm
Workshop: Up and Comers Swap Meet
Liz Ziegler -
Sr. Manager, Strategic Sourcing & Category Management,
Vail Resorts
Simona Rabsatt Butler -
Sr. Director - Global Strategic Sourcing, Marketing,
Visa
If you are new to Marketing Procurement or here for the first time you won’t want to miss this gathering/recap discussion of all the exciting information you learned today. We’ll have a couple marketing procurement experts on hand to provide additional explanations as needed!
3:00 pm - 3:40 pm
Panel:Sourcing Traditional Categories: Trends, Tactics and Techniques to Manage Physical Media In a Digital Age
Melissa Burkland -
Director of Indirect Sourcing and Procurement,
Rodan + Fields
Phil Zolit -
Manager, Procurement,
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Jose A. Molina -
Marketing Procurement Manager,
Constellation Brands
Andy Shape -
President & Co-Founder,
Stran Promotional Solutions
Steven Morse -
Senior Procurement Consultant,
Toyota Motor North America
Despite predictions to the contrary, physical media (e.g., print, promotional items, etc.) still play a strong role in the marketing ecosystem. This session will provide insights on:
• What’s new and changing in the world of physical media
• Negotiation tactics for print and promotional agencies in today’s world
• What to ask in your print/promotional RFP process
3:00 pm - 3:40 pm
Panel: Fine Tuning Your Martech Stack – Trends and Techniques In An Ever-changing Environment
Stacy Joslin -
Senior Director, Global Business Partner, Marketing,
InterContinental Hotels Group
Katrina Bott -
Director, Global Strategic Sourcing - Marketing & Advertising,
Capri Holding
Pauline Olson -
Senior Purchasing Manager,
Brinker International
Craig Rutkowske -
Director of Marketing Transformation Services,
KPMG
If technology isn’t your jam – it will be by the end of this session! You’ll get a quick overview of some of the key terminology and questions to ask when evaluating the various aspects of technology within your organization. Key points for discussion include:
• What questions you should be asking your martech vendors
• How to stay on top of martech trends and changes
• Ensuring your martech stack is compatible with your corporate IT organization/IT standards board
Stacy Joslin
Senior Director, Global Business Partner, MarketingInterContinental Hotels Group
2:40 pm - 3:40 pm
Workshop: Maximizing Your Agency Relationships
Simon Francis -
CEO,
Flock Associates
Mitchell Caplan -
Managing Director,
Flock Associates USA
Simon Francis, CEO Flock, and Mitchell Caplan, US Managing Director, will be talking about the importance of value creation and exceptional supplier relationship management. They will be drawing on client case studies to illustrate the importance of transparent of remuneration, effective agency appraisal and great scoping to minimize waste.
Flock is a Marketing Transformation Consultancy offering global clients such as Ford, J&J, Cisco, Carlsberg, Danone and Toyota Lexus global support in developing their capabilities, maximizing their agency eco-systems, driving efficient ways of working, and future proofing their MarTech.
**Maximum 30 attendees, available first come first serve***
3:40 pm - 4:20 pm
Cake Break Refreshment & Networking Break In The Solutions Zone
4:20 pm - 5:00 pm
Interactive Case Study: Achieving Success In Sponsorships and Experiential: A Day In The Life At Anheuser Busch
Andy Whitener -
Senior Director, Commercial Procurement,
Anheuser Busch
David Leonhard -
Director, Commercial Procurement,
Anheuser Busch
With hundreds of millions dollars in annual spend, sponsorships and experiential marketing is a big deal at Anheuser Busch. While you might not spend quite that much at your company, this must attend case study demonstrating how an industry leading CPG firm has achieved maturity and success in managing this category. Key takeaways from this session include:
• How to gain influence in this category
• Key tactics for negotiating with experiential suppliers
• How to internalize the evaluation of sponsorship deals to determine ROI
4:20 pm - 4:50 pm
Private Tasting By Cre8ive
5:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Interactive Roundtables
Donald Lee -
Senior Director, Strategic Sourcing,
Visa
Steven Dubroff -
Senior Director, Procurement,
Hilton
Michael Rafferty -
Executive Director, Global Marketing Procurement,
Kaplan
Fernando Camargo -
Global Category Manager,
Dell
Jason Pierce -
Agency Strategy & Management Consultant,
Dell
Paul DeLucchi -
Category Manager,
Adobe Systems
Paul Winans -
Marketing Category Manager,
Brinker International
Scott East -
CEO/Co-Founder,
MSIGHTS
These interactive roundtable sessions take a deep dive into the specific areas you came to learn about. Sit and learn in an intimate format from the speakers who have had an impact on their company and industry. Take control of your own event experience and don’t be shy! Ask questions (or answer them!) alongside other conference attendees who are dealing with the same challenges as you network with industry peers with very similar challenges, interests and responsibilities.
1.Transition – Tactical To Strategic Donald Lee, Senior Director, Strategic Sourcing, Visa
2.Corporate Barter Steven Dubroff, Senior Director, Procurement, Hilton
3.Public Relations Caitlin Michaelis, Category Manager, UNUM
4.Promotional Items Michael Rafferty, Executive Director of Global Marketing Procurement, Kaplan
5.Managing Marketing Relationships, Fernando Camargo/Jason Pierce, Dell, & Paul DeLucchi, Category Manager, Adobe
6.Shopper Marketing Paul Winans, Marketing Category Manager, Brinker International
7.Five Things You Need To Negotiate With All Martech/Ad Tech Partners, Scott East, CEO/Co-Founder, MSIGHTS
8.Localization/Translation - TBD
6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
ProcureCon Flavors of Fall Reception
A bountiful harvest of autumn themed beverages and treats await our delegates as we close out Day 2 of our conference. Embrace your ProcureCon family in preparation for Thanksgiving later in the month! We’ll have some lively music on hand along with some fun and games for you to enjoy!