Joe Anthony

Joe

Anthony

Speaker 2025


Joe Anthony is the CEO & Founder of Hero Collective, a 100% Black-owned creative agency. Most recently, Anthony launched Hero Media, a Black-owned media and technology holding company with a mission to bring greater parity in the investment of diverse-owned media platforms.

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Lola Bakare

Lola

Bakare

Speaker 2025


Lola Bakare is an innovative marketing strategist and the creative force behind the #responsiblemarketing movement. As the founder and owner of be/co, a boutique consultancy firm, Lola empowers brands and marketing leaders with strategic guidance, coaching, training, and workshops. Her groundbreaking initiative, Maximize The Movement™, won gold at the inaugural Anthem Awards, which celebrates mission-driven work globally.

With a career spanning leadership roles at The Daily Dot, PepsiCo, New World Pasta, Diageo, and Dell, Lola has shaped initiatives for iconic brands such as Gatorade, Ronzoni, and Smirnoff. As a consultant and speaker, she has partnered with notable companies across industries including Merck, Novo Nordisk, Typeform, IBM, LinkedIn, Irvine Company, OCVibe, Wilmington Trust Bank, Taylor Morrison Homes, Thought Exchange, Vimeo, The Tory Burch Foundation, Pinterest, & LiveRamp. Her contributions to the industry earned her a spot on Adweek’s 2023 Creative 100 List and recognition in Insider as one of the 13 Top Consultants and Experts advancing diversity in advertising.

A sought-after industry thought leader and accomplished writer, Lola’s insights have been published in major publications including Harvard Business ReviewMarketing BrewAdweek, and Contagious. She has shared her expertise as a panelist, moderator, and keynote speaker at prestigious events including Cannes LIONS, Brandweek, Reuters Strategic Marketing, SXSW, LinkedIn B2Believe, and Female Quotient spaces, as well as universities nationwide.

Named a LinkedIn Top Voice, Lola engages with a vibrant community of over 40,000 thought leaders and changemakers. In December 2024, she released her highly anticipated debut book, Responsible Marketing: How To Create An Authentic & Inclusive Marketing Strategy (Kogan Page)

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Chris Foster

Chris

Foster

Speaker 2025


Chris Foster is the CEO of Omnicom Public Relations Group, overseeing 20 communications, consulting and public affairs firms within Omnicom. In his role, he is focused on talent, innovation and cross-agency collaboration to drive growth.

Chris previously was the President of North America at BCW Group, responsible for managing growth, talent and client relationships in the region. Prior to the BCW merger, he was the Global Executive Vice President and Chief Business Development Officer for Burson-Marsteller, leading both organic growth and new business development across the global operation. Chris took a break from public relations agencies in 2010 and spent 5 years at the global management consulting firm, Booz Allen Hamilton, where he was Senior Vice President and Partner leading teams and growth across the government and civil business.

He has led national and global public awareness and communications campaigns for organizations such as the U.S Department of Defense, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Social Security Administration, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Amgen and Intel. He specializes in working with the federal government and private companies on understanding reputation risk and leveraging communications analytics to drive enterprise-wide strategy.

Chris serves on the Board of Directors for the Folger Shakespeare Library, The LAGRANT Foundation, The Institute for Public Relations, and the University of Virginia’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies. He is also a founding member of the Black Executive CMO Alliance (BECA).

In 2022, he was named one of Savoy Magazine’s Most Influential Black Executives in Corporate America and was included in PRWeek’s “U.S. Power List” for the second year in a row. Chris been a guest lecturer at Columbia University School of Continuing Studies, the University of Maryland and Western Kentucky University and published his first book, “Reputation Strategy and Analytics in a Hyper-Connected World,” a cross-disciplinary resource for communication and digital professionals alike.

Chris earned an M.S. in Applied Behavioral Counseling from The Johns Hopkins University and a B.A. in Philosophy from The University of Virginia.

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Kaleeta McDade

Kaleeta

McDade

Speaker 2025


Kaleeta McDade is the chief experience design officer at VML, North America. Kaleeta bridges creative storytelling, technology, design, and user experience for clients across VML’s client portfolio.

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Shannon Washington

Shannon

Washington

Speaker 2025


Shannon Washington is an award-winning creative director, creative business leader, brand builder and culturist.

After a storied run within IPG, recently serving as the Global Chief Creative Officer at Gotham/McCann Worldgroup, a role she assumed after a successful tenure as US Chief Creative Office at R/GA, Shannon finally pivoted back to one of her first loves—sports. Today, she is Chief Creative Officer & Managing Partner at 11Ounces, an award-winning creative studio focused on the culture of sport.

Throughout her career, Shannon has steadily established herself as one of the rising voices of the new generation of Madison Avenue leaders, with the wins and accolades to back it all up. At R/GA, she successfully navigated the brand’s flagship office through a global pandemic, personally leading, pitching and converting over $30M in creative business to include TurboTax, Uber, Samsung, ESPN and Sephora. At Gotham, she helped to craft the re-evolution of the world’s number one color cosmetics brand, Maybelline New York, with creative work that helped to claw back market share and net some of the brands first ever creative awards. Currently, Shannon is working to literally change the game of sports marketing with impactful storytelling, cultural relevance and

Most importantly, her penchant for cultural levity, transparency and mentorship has proven to be her most important asset in her career. In her spare time, Shannon can be found actively leading and participating in industry conversations around creative leadership, cultural inclusion and technology.

Shannon is a proud graduate of Howard University and reluctantly resides in the suburbs of her beloved New York City.

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Cindy Gallop

Cindy

Gallop

Speaker 2025


Cindy Gallop is a graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, whose background is 38 years in brand-building, marketing and advertising – she started up the US office of ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty in New York in 1998 and in 2003 was named Advertising Woman of the Year.  She founded IfWeRanTheWorld, co-action software launched in beta at TED 2010 and subsequently written up and taught as a Harvard Business School case study, enabling brands to implement the business model of the future – Shared Values + Shared Action = Shared Profit (financial and social). She is the founder and CEO of MakeLoveNotPorn – ‘Pro-sex. Pro-porn. Pro-knowing the difference’ – a social sextech platform designed to promote good sexual behavior and good sexual values, which she launched at TED 2009, and for which she is currently raising funding to scale ‘the Social Sex Revolution’.

She is a board advisor to a number of tech ventures and works as a personal brand/life/executive coach and a consultant on brand and business innovation for companies around the world, describing her consultancy approach as; I like to blow shit up. I am the Michael Bay of business; Business Insider named her one of 15 Most Important Marketing Strategy Thinkers Today, alongside Malcolm Gladwell and Seth Godin, and cited her as number 33 on their list of 100 Most Influential Tech Women On Twitter, and number one on their list of Top 30 People In Advertising To Follow On Twitter. Campaign has twice named her number one on their list of Top 10 Trailblazers. She has a reputation as a highly compelling and inspirational speaker at conferences and events around the world on a variety of topics: her talks on the future of advertising and marketing have been tweeted as: ‘The most brilliant speech on the future of advertising ever – not the usual buzzword-laden bullshit’; ‘Watching @cindygallop slice and dice the ad industry status quo like a ginsu knife. #purewin’; and ‘There must be a DeLorean parked outside, because Cindy Gallop is from the FUTURE!’ InfluencerCon NYC introduced her as ‘Cindy Gallop is the truth Jack Nicholson told Tom Cruise he couldn’t handle.’ Together with Susan Credle of FCB and Margaret Johnson of Goodby, Cindy is one of three Campaign Review Committee chairs for the AdCouncil in the US, helping to make the work great. Cindy is an outspoken advocate of diversity and inclusion in advertising, tech and business. She was Jury President at Cannes Lions 2015 for the inaugural Glass Lion awards, proposed by Sheryl Sandberg to celebrate advertising that shatters gender stereotypes in advertising, a role she’ll be repeating at Cannes Lions 2024 for the Glass Lion’s 10th anniversary, and she partnered with AARP on their DisruptAging initiative to challenge and change ageism. You can follow Cindy on LinkedIn, and on Twitter and Instagram @cindygallop.

Steering Committee

Steering Committee


Amber Guild

Amber

Guild

Speaker 2025


Amber Guild is a known leader of driving transformation and growth across advertising, marketing and publishing. As CEO of McCann New York, she is leading one of the creative industry’s most iconic agencies forward, delivering a culture of creative excellence with her leadership team. Her career includes roles at Ogilvy, COLLINS and The New York Times. At the latter, she was President of T Brand Studio and co-authored “A Call to Action: Building a Culture That Works for All of Us,” a public report that sparked one of the most transparent cultural transformations taken by a major news organization, reshaping systems to create an inclusive workplace that allows all talent to excel.

Amber’s value-based and people-first approach is what she believes ignites growth and innovation – citing diversity, equity and inclusion as a core pillar in her growth strategy and as the key to what fuels the creativity needed for brands to have impact with audiences.

Amber has been recognized by She Runs It’s “Working Mothers of the Year,” Campaign’s “Most Inspiring Women Leading Change,” and she has received the New York Times Publishers Award. She has also been featured in the book “Leap to Leader,” The New York Times series “Corner Office” by Adam Bryant and on The Today Show. In 2024 she served on the Cannes Lions Creative Business Transformation Jury and currently serves on multiple boards, including the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s), ANA Educational Foundation (AEF), VCU Brandcenter, and is a founding member of CHIEF.

Steering Committee

Steering Committee