The Marketing Immersive 2026

Held every fall, the Marketing Immersive is AMA Chicago’s planning experience for marketers preparing for the year ahead.

This half-day program brings marketers together for expert-led, working sessions focused on the skills, decisions and strategic thinking needed to build stronger marketing plans in a rapidly changing environment.

Designed for marketers across career stages and disciplines, each session goes beyond inspiration to provide practical frameworks, current perspective and usable tools participants can apply as they prepare for the coming year.

Whether you are leading a team, managing a channel, supporting strategy, or building your own marketing leadership skills, the Marketing Immersive is designed to help you think more clearly, plan more confidently and connect your work to what matters most now.

Three concurrent sessions: you may attend only one, so bring your team!

• Session 1: The One-Page Marketing Plan: A Clearer Way to Focus, Plan and Act, led by Shannon Lee, Executive Creative Director, Komodo Health
• Session 2: Using AI to Build Smarter, More Focused Marketing Strategies, led by Susan and Scot Westwater, co-founders of Pragmatic Digital
• Session 3: When Everything Is a Priority, Nothing Is: How Marketers Make Better Decisions and Build Alignment, led by Jennifer Severns | Founder & Principal of Severns Innovation Group

If you’re not a member, the value you’ll receive from the Immersive is worth the price of membership alone!”
—Doug Davila, 2024 attendee

Sessions will not be recorded but each participant will receive a link to a digital document of the information presented during the session they attend.

Session 1
The One-Page Marketing Plan: A Clearer Way to Prioritize, Align and Act

Traditional marketing plans are often too long to use, too detailed to share and too disconnected from the decisions marketers need to make every day.

This interactive session introduces a flexible one-page planning framework designed to bring clarity, focus and alignment to your marketing work. Whether you are building an annual marketing roadmap, launching a campaign, or organizing priorities for a team, this framework helps you define your audience, clarify your message, choose the right channels and identify practical KPIs.

Participants will work through the framework during the session and leave with a clear, shareable plan they can use to guide action, align stakeholders and focus time and budget on the initiatives most likely to drive results.

The session will also include a brief look at how AI tools and targeted prompts can speed up the planning process without replacing the strategic thinking marketers still need to bring.

Key Takeaways

You’ll leave with a clear, shareable planning framework that helps you:

1. Adapt the plan to the work in front of you
   Use the same framework for an annual roadmap, a campaign plan, a launch plan, or a focused marketing initiative.
2. Create alignment faster
   Turn scattered ideas, stakeholder input and tactical requests into a simple visual plan your team can understand and discuss.
3. Prioritize what matters most
   Focus time, budget, channels and content around the audience, goals and activities most likely to drive meaningful results.
4. Use AI as a planning accelerator
   Learn how targeted prompts and AI assistants can support drafting, organizing and refining the plan — while keeping human judgment at the center.

Presented by Shannon Lee | Executive Creative Director at Komodo Health | LinkedIn

Shannon Lee is the Executive Creative Director at Komodo Health, leading brand marketing and creative strategy for the healthcare technology platform. With over 20 years of experience spanning enterprise tech, healthcare and B2B agencies, Shannon specializes in bridging creative storytelling with data-driven business growth.

An expert in operational excellence and a member of Komodo’s AI Council, she has a proven track record of scaling high-performing teams and automating workflows. Notably, Shannon developed the original “plan-on-a-page” framework featured in this session during her time leading a 22-person agency team, where it was adopted by startups and enterprise clients alike to drive alignment. She brings this deep focus on speed, simplicity and execution to the workshop, helping marketers eliminate friction and build strategies that actually deliver.

Session 2
Using AI to Build Smarter, More Focused Marketing Strategies

AI is most valuable to marketers when it improves the quality of strategic thinking, not just the speed of execution. This session explores how marketers can use AI to improve insight quality, strengthen positioning decisions, sharpen prioritization and evaluate strategic opportunities and tradeoffs.

Through guided exercises and discussion, participants will learn techniques for using AI to synthesize information, surface patterns, pressure-test assumptions and strengthen strategic direction. Applications include insight development, trend analysis, positioning, prioritization and strategy evaluation.

AI can help teams explore more possibilities. This session focuses on how to turn those possibilities into stronger strategic choices and improve the quality of marketing strategy work.

Key Takeaways

You’ll leave with:

1. Techniques for using AI to support insight development, trend evaluation, positioning and prioritization
2. Ways to use AI to synthesize information, surface patterns and pressure-test assumptions
3. Practical approaches for applying AI throughout the strategic planning process
4. A clearer understanding of where AI can strengthen the quality of strategy work and where human judgment remains essential

Presented by Susan and Scot Westwater | co-founders of Pragmatic Digital | LinkedIn

Susan and Scot Westwater are the co-founders of Pragmatic Digital, where they help organizations apply AI across marketing, customer experience and operations. Together, they bring decades of experience across marketing, innovation, digital strategy and emerging technology, including years of work in conversational and voice AI before generative AI became mainstream. They are also the co-authors of Voice Strategy and Voice Marketing, which features a foreword by Philip Kotler and was recognized as a finalist for the AMA Foundation’s Leonard L. Berry Book Award.

Session 3
When Everything Is a Priority, Nothing Is: How Marketers Make Better Decisions and Build Alignment

Most marketing teams don’t suffer from a lack of ideas. They suffer from too many competing priorities.

New campaigns, stakeholder requests, emerging technologies, strategic initiatives and urgent opportunities all compete for limited time, budget and team capacity. Without a consistent way to decide what moves forward, what waits and what stops, teams can quickly default to urgency, politics, or personal preference.

This interactive workshop introduces practical tools for evaluating competing priorities, making tradeoff decisions and building alignment around the work most likely to create meaningful impact. Participants will learn how to compare opportunities more objectively, assess value versus effort, break large initiatives into manageable pieces and identify high-leverage work that supports multiple goals.

Attendees will also learn how to communicate prioritization decisions in ways that increase understanding and support — shifting conversations toward shared goals, business impact, customer value and real team capacity.

Through hands-on exercises and real-world examples, attendees will leave with a repeatable decision-making process, prioritization scorecards and practical worksheets they can immediately apply to current marketing challenges.

Key Takeaways

1. Create a repeatable process for evaluating competing priorities and making better tradeoff decisions when resources are limited.
2. Use practical frameworks to assess business value, customer impact, effort, strategic alignment and organizational constraints.
3. Build alignment and influence prioritization conversations by shifting discussions away from opinion, politics and urgency and toward shared goals, business impact, customer value and team capacity.

Presented by Jennifer Severns | Founder & Principal of Severns Innovation Group | LinkedIn

Jennifer Severns is a customer experience and transformation leader with more than 25 years of experience helping organizations improve how they serve customers, support employees and adapt to change.

She currently serves as Chief Member Experience Officer for Healthtech Benefits Solutions and is the Founder and Principal Consultant of Severns Innovation Group. Her work spans marketing, digital strategy, experience design, innovation and organizational transformation. She has led teams, facilitated workshops and advised executives across healthcare, financial services, technology, nonprofit and professional association environments.

Known for making complex topics accessible and actionable, Jennifer brings a practical, cross-disciplinary perspective to challenges involving people, process, technology and organizational change.

Jennifer serves as President-Elect of AMA Chicago and holds a Master of Science in Information Design and Strategy from Northwestern University.

The Marketing Immersive 2026 is sponsored by