The Marketing Analytics Symposium Sydney (MASS) 2026

Omer Shai is the current Global CMO at Wix. He is an internet veteran with more than 18 years of experience in search optimization, online advertising and social media. He joined Wix in February 2008 after co-founding digital design company Hyperactive. Under his leadership, Wix has successfully expanded into multiple international markets, including the U.S., U.K., Brazil, Canada and Australia, and has been essential to the $1B+ annual revenue at Wix. Omer has also overseen the launch of several new products, including the highly anticipated Wix Studio, and was integral to the Wix $80M acquisition of GenAI standout company, Base44. Outside the office, he is a self-proclaimed sports lover and die-hard fan of the Baltimore Ravens.

Marc Fischer is Chaired Professor of Marketing Science and Analytics at the University of Cologne. His research focuses on marketing performance management, brand management, marketing-mix optimization, and econometric market response models, with a strong emphasis on linking marketing decisions to firm value and bottom-line outcomes. His work has been published in leading journals including Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, Management Science, and International Journal of Research in Marketing, and has received multiple major international awards. Marc brings extensive academic and industry experience to the discussion, including advisory roles in marketing analytics and prior appointments in Australia and the United States.

Leandro Perez is the SVP and Chief Marketing Officer for Salesforce ANZ, where he leads the strategic direction for the world’s leading AI-powered CRM. With a Bachelor of Science (Computer Science) from UNSW and an Executive MBA from the Quantic School of Business and Technology, Leandro brings a uniquely technology-forward lens to marketing, specialising in the practical adoption of AI at scale.

Leandro is currently leading the charge into the era of the Agentic Enterprise, helping businesses accelerate their digital transformation through the deployment of trusted, autonomous AI agents powered by Agentforce. He believes the future of growth lies in humans and AI agents driving success together - elevating every team, personalising every customer experience, and improving every process.

A recognised industry leader and Fellow of The Marketing Academy, Leandro serves on the Board of the Australian Association of National Advertisers (AANA), and has been awarded the Salesforce Chairman & CEO Award. He is a vocal advocate for ethical AI adoption and is dedicated to democratising technology, ensuring that the benefits of the agentic era are accessible across all skill levels to drive meaningful, inclusive growth.

Professor Vijay Viswanathan (Northwestern University) will present an answer to the question of whether AI drives firm performance. The study offers nuanced insights into how firms’ strategic orientation and internal capabilities shape the success of AI adoption. Its cross-industry scope and focus on publicly listed firms enhance its practical relevance, offering actionable implications for marketing professionals seeking to leverage AI for market sensing, innovation, and organizational transformation.

Kat Warboys is the Senior Marketing Director APAC at HubSpot, responsible for growing HubSpot's business across Australia, Singapore, and India. She leads a regional team focused on brand, PR and partnerships, revenue marketing, and customer advocacy.

As a recognized voice in marketing, featured in publications including Mediaweek, B&T, Dynamic Business, and Campaign Asia, Kat champions Loop Marketing – HubSpot's framework for driving growth in the AI era. She advocates for building hybrid teams where humans and AI work together—with humans leading on strategy, creativity, and brand judgment while AI accelerates execution and personalization at scale.

With 15 years' experience in CRM, Kat's expertise spans both B2B and B2C organizations, with a focus on revenue optimization through connected systems and data-driven strategies.

Bernd Skiera, a world-leading Professor of Marketing from Goethe University Frankfurt and Recipient of the European Marketing Academy Distinguished Scholar Award, will speak about “Growing Via New or Existing Customers.” A firm must decide on which of the paths to focus on. Ideally, a firm grows via both. However, can firms achieve this dual emphasis, and if so, how strong is the respective revenue growth? If not, do more firms realize a focus on new or existing customers? And what is the respective revenue growth? The presentation presents a novel approach to address these important questions.

Sophie Mckay leads APAC Marketing at Notion, where she drives brand awareness, demand generation, and go-to-market strategy across Asia Pacific and Japan.

She brings 15+ years of B2B marketing experience in tech, with a track record of building marketing functions from scratch in high-growth startups across Asia Pacific. Prior to Notion, Sophie spent 9 years at Qualtrics as the first marketing hire in Australia, growing the APAC marketing team from zero to 17 people and launching the brand across 6 regions – A/NZ, SEA, Japan, Greater China, South Korea, and India. Sophie's expertise spans field marketing, demand generation, digital marketing, marketing operations, PR, content strategy, and analytics.

Based in Sydney, Australia, Sophie holds a Bachelor of Business Studies in Marketing from Charles Sturt University, where she was awarded the Executive Dean Award.

Professor Dominik Papies (Professor of Marketing and Dean of Tuebingen University, Germany) will talk about how financial influencers (“finfluencers”) represent a potentially dark side of influencer marketing. This study examines the investment advice provided by finfluencers on YouTube, a platform widely used by retail investors for financial information. The results indicate that most financial influencers’ portfolios underperform and often expose investors to heightened risks. Moreover, recommendations tend to favor recently high-performing assets, suggesting a reliance on hype rather than informed analysis. Given the growing importance of social media for investment decisions, this study underscores the need not only for greater awareness but also for regulatory scrutiny and financial literacy initiatives to mitigate potential harms associated with financial influencer content.

Diana Hansen is Chief Marketing Officer at AHP – Australian Health Professionals, where she leads growth, transformation, and customer strategy of allied health services across aged care and disability sectors.

Over a 20-year career, Diana has led marketing and customer portfolios, combining her experience in brand, go-to-market strategy and enterprise transformation with broader business consulting and executive leadership. She has built and scaled high-performing teams and delivered sustained growth in complex, service-based environments, including health, social services, and education, where data and consumer insights drive informed decision-making.

Diana is a Certified Practicing Marketer (CPM) and holds a Master of Marketing and an Executive MBA from UNSW.

Professor Thomas Reutterer (Vienna University of Economics and Business) will discuss his latest research (with, e.g., prof Schweidel from Emory University) on optimising content for generative search engines. Rather than navigating the traditional “ten blue hyperlinks” in search engines, users increasingly engage with chatbots and generative search engines (GEs) powered by large language models (LLMs) and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) architectures.  These systems provide synthesized, citation-supported responses within an interactive interface, fundamentally altering how information is accessed and consumed. They empirically investigate how high-ranking website content in traditional search compares with content surfaced by LLM-based GEs. A series of field experiments conducted with industry partners shows that GE-optimized content can significantly boost visibility in conversational search settings. Notably, their findings provide firms with actionable methods to enhance their presence in LLM-driven search ecosystems, where conventional SEO strategies alone are no longer sufficient.