Marketing Collaboration Lab, Fall 2026

The Lab creates a collaborative space where expertise meets real-world challenges.

Get fresh insights and peer-to-peer learning at the second Marketing Collaboration Lab! The Lab is an immersive, ideas-driven experience that brings brand-side marketers and small marketing agencies together for structured, themed roundtable conversations. (If you’re a small agency or consultant, find out how to become a table host.)

Hosted at Catalyst Ranch, Chicago’s vibrant creative hub, the Lab offers a high-energy setting that inspires fresh thinking and authentic connections.

Whether you’re a marketer actively seeking a new agency partner or simply looking for fresh insights and peer-to-peer learning, you’ll engage in meaningful conversations that tackle real marketing challenges, without the pressure of pitches.

With multiple rotation sessions and plenty of informal mingling, the format blends expert facilitation with collaborative problem-solving to spark ideas, build relationships and elevate your marketing strategy.

Key Takeaways

1. Insights and tools for managing your current challenges: You’ll choose from multiple hot topics aligned to your pain points, rotating among the tables that pertain to you.
2. Practical strategies that you can implement immediately.
3. A stronger professional network: Engage with specialists and peers in a relaxed, creative atmosphere that sparks collaboration.

What will Marketing Collaboration Lab attendees walk away with? Watch this brief video (1 min., 47 sec.) to find out!

Agenda

6 p.m. Networking Mixer
6:30 p.m. Introduction: Deb Giampoli, Stone Soup Consultants, on why small agencies and partners are important to the industry.
6:40 p.m. Begin Roundtable Collaboration Sessions: Rotate among three 15-minute, facilitated roundtables; each will feature brief “spark” insights and peer-driven discussion around real-world marketing challenges.
7:45 p.m. Wrap-Up & Key Takeaways: Deb Giampoli highlights the key insights and ideas that surfaced during the roundtable sessions.

Opening & Closing Speaker

Deb Giampoli
Co-Founder,
Stone Soup Consultants

Deb is an experienced marketing and advertising leader with proven ability to drive marketing effectiveness and efficiency. She is skilled at creating and leveraging internal and external marketing and creative agency partnerships, creating and socializing national and global marketing “next practices” and developing marketing talent. Her background includes agency- and client-side line and staff positions in marketing, brand management, consumer promotion and activation and advertising.

View Deb’s LinkedIn

Roundtable Discussion Topics & Hosts

Sharpen what you stand for to earn trust. Move beyond sales pitches and AI hacks that can bleed revenue for your brand: focus on human-to-human relationships to earn trust and build a brand to last. Led by Argelia Martinez of Fractional CMO Services. Led by Argelia Martinez Fractional CMO Services.

Stop feeding the content machine: Creating less, better content. What if your biggest content marketing problem isn’t that you don’t have enough content—but that you’re making too much of the wrong content? Led by BM Consulting.

Strategy and insights in B2B. How do technical buyers decide what to buy? Find out how to turn insights into positioning and go-to-market strategy. Led by Illi Agency.

Testing the idea that nobody will green-light. Is there an idea you would bet on that nobody will get behind? We’ll talk about getting past a client’s approval process by creating a quick working test. Led by Josh Garcia Consulting.

What makes a brand story feel real enough to trust? Today marketers compete against a flood of AI-generated messaging that all sounds the same. But trust comes from genuine conversation, not a script. We’ll talk about turning your authentic story into a month of media. Led by Seamless Content Studio.

AI for content strategy. The combination of AI and human expertise can spin up truly great content strategies. Join Tiffany Meyers as she offers quick micro-lessons on effective uses of AI for content. We’ll ask AI to interview a persona and discover ways to “stop the slop.” Whether you’re a total beginner or you’ve been failed by AI-enabled content in the past, you’ll pick up a trick or three and get more out of your bots. Led by Tiffany Meyers, Content | Brand | Creative.

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