The Marketing Analytics Symposium Sydney (MASS) 2026

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.

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.

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.

Dr Ta-Wei Huang (National University of Singapore) will present research conducted with Harvard Business School professors on a novel multitask representation learning framework that predicts heterogeneous causal effects of marketing interventions. By leveraging past experiments, IRL efficiently designs and targets personalized interventions, eliminating the need for extensive testing of numerous potential interventions. Using their model interpretation tool, they demonstrate how companies can customize promotions to enhance profitability across different customer segments.

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.

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.

Lucio Ribeiro is the Chief Innovation & AI Officer at TBWA\Australia and a Forbes columnist. He founded three tech businesses, exited one, and has led innovation and AI programs at Optus, Seven and Nine. He’s partnered with BMW, Goldman Sachs, Mercedes-Benz, Google, NVIDIA, SpaceX and NAB, and is a sought-after speaker at SXSW, Advertising Week and major industry summits.

Outline:

The Human Signal: What 371 AI Films Reveal About Skill, Taste and Judgement

What happens when hundreds of AI creators turn imagination into output? 

Clear patterns emerge. 

This session shares initial insights from 371 AI-made films from Australia’s first dedicated GenAI Film Festival, DISRUPT, examining how creators actually work with generative models and why human judgement and craft remain the strongest predictors of quality. The findings reveal where creators invest time, where they settle too early, and how intent shapes outcomes. These insights connect to themes from a highly acclaimed SXSW talk by the speaker on ceilings and floors: AI raises the floor for everyone, but the ceiling still belongs to those with intent and taste. A grounded, practical view of creativity in an AI-accelerated world.

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.

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.

Professor Song Lin (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) presents his latest research with his co-author from MIT on the potential of generative artificial intelligence in facilitating opinion expression particularly for those who are relatively less vocal. They built a video streaming platform that enables users to watch videos and leave comments at will using different formats of AI assistance. Based on a series of studies, their results illustrate the potential of generative AI assistance in encouraging wider provision of opinions that reflect individuals' true opinions and enhance consumer engagement.