Melbourne Digital Experience Summit 2027

Beat the rush and join us early for complimentary barista-made coffee and breakfast.

Australian brands across retail, financial services, healthcare, and the public sector are racing to unify digital, marketing, and customer experience into a single connected discipline. This keynote opens the day by naming the gap between how customers experience a brand and how most Australian organisations are still structured to deliver it, and sets the questions the day's sessions will return to again and again.

• From omnichannel retail to digital-first banking and government services, Australian consumers now expect seamless, personalised, real-time interactions regardless of channel, and the organisations closing that expectation gap fastest are the ones treating digital, marketing, and CX as one connected capability, not three competing budgets.
• What Australian leaders across retail, insurance, banking, and the public sector are learning as they consolidate legacy platforms, unify customer data, and redesign journeys around real behaviour rather than tidy funnels.
• As AI-driven personalisation and decisioning become standard practice, Australian organisations face particular scrutiny given the market's growing sensitivity to data use and algorithmic decision-making, making trust a genuine competitive differentiator rather than a compliance checkbox.

Despite years of investment in digital, marketing, and customer experience technology, many leaders still struggle to demonstrate commercial impact in terms that unlock sustained budget and executive confidence.

• Distinguishing between engagement metrics that feel impressive internally and the commercial indicators — retention, lifetime value, cost-to-serve — that genuinely influence funding decisions.
• Practical approaches for building the causal link between a better customer journey and measurable business outcomes, rather than relying on correlation and anecdote.
• How leaders are securing sustained investment in experience and brand-building work whose payoff often plays out over years, not quarters.

As digital, marketing, and customer experience functions converge around shared data and shared customers, unresolved questions about ownership, budget, and decision rights are creating friction that slows execution.

• Concrete examples of how unclear accountability between teams leads to duplicated effort, conflicting customer messaging, or stalled initiatives.
• What leading organisations are trying — shared KPIs, unified customer councils, merged teams — and what's actually holding up under pressure.
• How resolving ownership questions is directly tied to unlocking sustained investment, since finance teams hesitate to fund initiatives without a clear accountable owner.

After years of acquisitions and disconnected platforms left customer data scattered across dozens of systems, one digital leader built a unified customer data foundation that finally let marketing, digital, and CX teams see the same customer at the same time, without a multi-year rip-and-replace project.

• How the team prioritised which data sources genuinely mattered for near-term use cases, rather than attempting a complete data unification upfront.
• Why the solution connected and normalised existing systems rather than requiring their retirement, dramatically shortening time to value.
• How access to the same customer view changed daily workflows across marketing, digital, and CX teams that had previously operated on different assumptions about the same customer.

A hands-on, interactive session working through a real digital experience scenario as a room. Details announced soon.

Facing scepticism from finance leadership about funding experience improvements with no clean, direct revenue attribution, one leader built a business case approach that secured sustained investment by reframing the conversation entirely.

• How the team moved away from engagement metrics and toward retention, cost-to-serve, and churn indicators that resonated in financial terms.
• How a series of contained, measurable pilot projects built the credibility needed to unlock larger, longer-term investment.
• Building a standing framework for demonstrating experience ROI, rather than rebuilding the argument from scratch every funding cycle.

With customer journeys spanning increasingly non-linear paths across channels, one leader moved beyond traditional funnel-based journey mapping to build an adaptive framework that other teams across the organisation could apply to their own customer segments.

• Recognising that customers weren't following predictable linear paths, and that forcing journey design into that shape was actively obscuring real behaviour.
• How the framework was built to be adapted by other teams and business units rather than remaining a one-off project specific to a single customer segment.
• The change management work required to shift teams away from familiar funnel thinking toward a more adaptive, behaviour-driven approach to journey design.

Years of point-solution adoption have left many marketing and digital teams managing bloated, poorly integrated technology stacks. This panel explores how leaders are deciding between consolidating onto fewer platforms, embracing composable architecture, or rebuilding from scratch.

• Beyond licensing fees, how fragmented tooling is quietly eroding data quality, team velocity, and the ability to deliver connected customer experiences.
• What organisations are learning about the flexibility-versus-complexity trade-off between best-of-breed composable stacks and unified platforms.
• Practical lessons on consolidating or replatforming martech infrastructure without stalling the customer-facing work the stack is supposed to enable.

Small-group, discussion-based sessions where you'll work through real digital experience challenges with peers in similar roles. Roundtable topics will be announced soon.

Put your knowledge to the test in this fast-paced quiz covering real-world trivia, key concepts, and emerging trends. Compete for bragging rights — and a voucher — as the top scorer takes the crown.

With a lean digital team unable to keep pace with personalisation demands across dozens of customer segments and channels, one leader built an automated personalisation framework that scaled output without proportionally scaling headcount.

• How reusable rules and content frameworks let a small team support far more personalised variation than manual execution ever could.
• Identifying which personalisation decisions still required human strategic input, and building clear handoff points between automated and human-led work.
• How the team ensured that scaling volume didn't come at the cost of relevance, building feedback loops to catch personalisation that missed the mark.

As AI enables hyper-personalised experiences at unprecedented scale, customers are growing simultaneously more receptive to relevant engagement and more wary of how their data is being used to achieve it. This keynote explores how leading organisations are navigating that tension without sacrificing either growth or trust.

• Why more sophisticated targeting and customisation can just as easily erode trust as build loyalty, and how organisations are learning to read the difference between helpful and unsettling.
• How forward-thinking brands are making data use visible and controllable to customers as part of the experience itself, turning a legal requirement into a trust-building feature.
• As AI increasingly mediates the relationship between brand and customer, what that means for accountability when personalisation gets it wrong.

With growing pressure to justify technology and experience investment in commercial terms, leaders are re-examining which metrics genuinely predict business outcomes and which have simply become comfortable habits.

• A candid look at which long-standing engagement and satisfaction metrics are losing credibility with finance and executive stakeholders.
• How leading teams are moving from correlating experience improvements with outcomes to demonstrating direct commercial impact.
• As AI becomes embedded across personalisation, content, and decisioning, how organisations are isolating and proving its incremental value rather than crediting it for gains that would have happened anyway.

Unwind with your peers for a couple of drinks on us!

Beat the rush and join us early for complimentary barista-made coffee and breakfast.

Australian brands across retail, financial services, healthcare, and the public sector are racing to unify digital, marketing, and customer experience into a single connected discipline. This keynote opens the day by naming the gap between how customers experience a brand and how most Australian organisations are still structured to deliver it, and sets the questions the day's sessions will return to again and again.

• From omnichannel retail to digital-first banking and government services, Australian consumers now expect seamless, personalised, real-time interactions regardless of channel, and the organisations closing that expectation gap fastest are the ones treating digital, marketing, and CX as one connected capability, not three competing budgets.
• What Australian leaders across retail, insurance, banking, and the public sector are learning as they consolidate legacy platforms, unify customer data, and redesign journeys around real behaviour rather than tidy funnels.
• As AI-driven personalisation and decisioning become standard practice, Australian organisations face particular scrutiny given the market's growing sensitivity to data use and algorithmic decision-making, making trust a genuine competitive differentiator rather than a compliance checkbox.

Despite years of investment in digital, marketing, and customer experience technology, many leaders still struggle to demonstrate commercial impact in terms that unlock sustained budget and executive confidence.

• Distinguishing between engagement metrics that feel impressive internally and the commercial indicators — retention, lifetime value, cost-to-serve — that genuinely influence funding decisions.
• Practical approaches for building the causal link between a better customer journey and measurable business outcomes, rather than relying on correlation and anecdote.
• How leaders are securing sustained investment in experience and brand-building work whose payoff often plays out over years, not quarters.

As digital, marketing, and customer experience functions converge around shared data and shared customers, unresolved questions about ownership, budget, and decision rights are creating friction that slows execution.

• Concrete examples of how unclear accountability between teams leads to duplicated effort, conflicting customer messaging, or stalled initiatives.
• What leading organisations are trying — shared KPIs, unified customer councils, merged teams — and what's actually holding up under pressure.
• How resolving ownership questions is directly tied to unlocking sustained investment, since finance teams hesitate to fund initiatives without a clear accountable owner.

After years of acquisitions and disconnected platforms left customer data scattered across dozens of systems, one digital leader built a unified customer data foundation that finally let marketing, digital, and CX teams see the same customer at the same time, without a multi-year rip-and-replace project.

• How the team prioritised which data sources genuinely mattered for near-term use cases, rather than attempting a complete data unification upfront.
• Why the solution connected and normalised existing systems rather than requiring their retirement, dramatically shortening time to value.
• How access to the same customer view changed daily workflows across marketing, digital, and CX teams that had previously operated on different assumptions about the same customer.

A hands-on, interactive session working through a real digital experience scenario as a room. Details announced soon.

Facing scepticism from finance leadership about funding experience improvements with no clean, direct revenue attribution, one leader built a business case approach that secured sustained investment by reframing the conversation entirely.

• How the team moved away from engagement metrics and toward retention, cost-to-serve, and churn indicators that resonated in financial terms.
• How a series of contained, measurable pilot projects built the credibility needed to unlock larger, longer-term investment.
• Building a standing framework for demonstrating experience ROI, rather than rebuilding the argument from scratch every funding cycle.

With customer journeys spanning increasingly non-linear paths across channels, one leader moved beyond traditional funnel-based journey mapping to build an adaptive framework that other teams across the organisation could apply to their own customer segments.

• Recognising that customers weren't following predictable linear paths, and that forcing journey design into that shape was actively obscuring real behaviour.
• How the framework was built to be adapted by other teams and business units rather than remaining a one-off project specific to a single customer segment.
• The change management work required to shift teams away from familiar funnel thinking toward a more adaptive, behaviour-driven approach to journey design.

Years of point-solution adoption have left many marketing and digital teams managing bloated, poorly integrated technology stacks. This panel explores how leaders are deciding between consolidating onto fewer platforms, embracing composable architecture, or rebuilding from scratch.

• Beyond licensing fees, how fragmented tooling is quietly eroding data quality, team velocity, and the ability to deliver connected customer experiences.
• What organisations are learning about the flexibility-versus-complexity trade-off between best-of-breed composable stacks and unified platforms.
• Practical lessons on consolidating or replatforming martech infrastructure without stalling the customer-facing work the stack is supposed to enable.

Small-group, discussion-based sessions where you'll work through real digital experience challenges with peers in similar roles. Roundtable topics will be announced soon.

Put your knowledge to the test in this fast-paced quiz covering real-world trivia, key concepts, and emerging trends. Compete for bragging rights — and a voucher — as the top scorer takes the crown.

With a lean digital team unable to keep pace with personalisation demands across dozens of customer segments and channels, one leader built an automated personalisation framework that scaled output without proportionally scaling headcount.

• How reusable rules and content frameworks let a small team support far more personalised variation than manual execution ever could.
• Identifying which personalisation decisions still required human strategic input, and building clear handoff points between automated and human-led work.
• How the team ensured that scaling volume didn't come at the cost of relevance, building feedback loops to catch personalisation that missed the mark.

As AI enables hyper-personalised experiences at unprecedented scale, customers are growing simultaneously more receptive to relevant engagement and more wary of how their data is being used to achieve it. This keynote explores how leading organisations are navigating that tension without sacrificing either growth or trust.

• Why more sophisticated targeting and customisation can just as easily erode trust as build loyalty, and how organisations are learning to read the difference between helpful and unsettling.
• How forward-thinking brands are making data use visible and controllable to customers as part of the experience itself, turning a legal requirement into a trust-building feature.
• As AI increasingly mediates the relationship between brand and customer, what that means for accountability when personalisation gets it wrong.

With growing pressure to justify technology and experience investment in commercial terms, leaders are re-examining which metrics genuinely predict business outcomes and which have simply become comfortable habits.

• A candid look at which long-standing engagement and satisfaction metrics are losing credibility with finance and executive stakeholders.
• How leading teams are moving from correlating experience improvements with outcomes to demonstrating direct commercial impact.
• As AI becomes embedded across personalisation, content, and decisioning, how organisations are isolating and proving its incremental value rather than crediting it for gains that would have happened anyway.

Unwind with your peers for a couple of drinks on us!