The Drum’s Digital Transformation Festival is underway – here are 5 sessions not to miss

Streamed throughout the week and on-demand, the schedule will include leading voices from Samsung to Santander and Diageo to Decentraland. You can see the full program here, but if you’re not sure where to begin, here’s five great sessions not to miss.

1. Pepsi CMO Todd Kaplan's keynote interview

Pepsi is no stranger to digital transformation, and recently the drinks giant is betting big on NFTs and the wider web3 universe. But why? Chief marketing officer Todd Kaplan sits down with The Drum reporter Hannah Bowler to reveal all about its play into the NFT space, offering a revealing insight into the brand's developing digital strategy and providing advice to other brands debating whether to dip their toes in the water and explore web3 for themselves.

2. What media data is really important for marketers?

In a world in which privacy concerns are turning the tide on how the media industry uses data, it is time to take stock of what data we really need. What data is truly useful to track, optimize and measure marketer's KPIs? How do attention metrics, brand safety and viewability data factor into all of this? In partnership with DoubleVerify, this session will look to uncomplicate the complicated and get down to the essentials on what media data is really important for marketers.

3. Confessions of a CX makeover

In increasingly crowded markets, brand recognition and a great product aren’t enough. Customers demand design, experiences and services that are seamless, lightning-fast, easy to navigate and enjoyable every step of the way. Creating such experiences often requires brands to gather customer feedback, improve interoperability, streamline physical and digital interfaces and create moments that surprise and delight. But with a CX makeover, where do you start? How do you avoid common pitfalls and activate at speed? In this session, we bring together brands and technologists who have pulled off some of the best CX transformations in recent years to answer these and other questions.

4. Rishad Tobaccowala on rediscovering the soul of your business in the post-lockdown era

For four decades Rishad Tobaccowala has been one of the industry’s leading voices. Now was we head into the unknown of the post-lockdown world, he tells us what businesses need to do to connect with a consumer that we might not recognize any more. In a revealing fireside chat with The Drum US editor Kenneth Hein, Tobaccowala explains why data, digital and humanity go hand-in-hand as well as what it takes for a business to restore its soul.

5. Loyalty marketing, the key to navigating a cookieless future: are you listening?

The cookieless future is looming, and marketers are scrambling for ways to combat the drop in performance that is already beginning to show. In partnership with Oracle, we look at how new loyalty marketing strategies across the metaverse, NFTs and blockchain are driving engagement, and what this means for how you should be planning to combat the deprecation of third party cookies. Lastly, we’ll look at a couple of case studies from Budweiser and Red Bull Racing to see the steps they’re taking to drive engagement across the customer journey which lays a foundation for future targeting and acquisition.

The Drum Digital Transformation Festival is live now until March 31. See the full schedule and start watching now on the Digital Transformation Festival website.