Mark Ritson Event Nov 2026

Mark Ritson is back in Auckland

Following his sold out last visit, Mark returns to SkyCity Theatre on Thursday 5 November for a morning on where marketing is heading next.

AI is on the agenda, and Mark won't dodge it. He'll share what he's been building over the past two years, with a heavy look at synthetic data and synthetic marketing planning, the stuff coming down the pipe in 2027.

He'll also tackle performance video versus brand building video, and the question of timing. Mark argues there are now two metabolisms in marketing: the long and the short of it have become two very different but equally important paradigms, and you need to master both.

Along the way he'll call out the brands getting it right, right now, and a couple getting it wrong. Then the floor opens for Q&A, which last time ran hot.

Expect it to be sharp, funny, occasionally uncomfortable, and immediately useful for the year ahead.

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About Mark

I have a Ph.D. in Marketing and spent 25 years working as a marketing professor. I was an Assistant Professor at London Business School and the University of Minnesota, an Associate Professor and then Adjunct Professor at Melbourne Business School, and Visiting Professor at MIT Sloan and SMU. My MBA teaching won a sh*t ton of prizes including best teacher at LBS, MIT & MBS.

I have also worked as a global brand consultant for clients that include Baxter, Loewe, McKinsey, Subaru, Donna Karan, Westpac, Shiseido, Flight Centre, Johnson & Johnson, De Beers, Sephora, Benefit, Amgen, Ericsson, Jurlique, Cloudy Bay and WD40.

For thirteen years - from 2002 to 2015 - I served as the in-house brand consultant for LVMH - the world's largest luxury group - working in Paris with senior executives from brands like Louis Vuitton, Dom Perignon, and Hennessy.

I’ve been a columnist for (gulp) 20 years, writing a weekly column for Marketing Week. On five occasions I've been voted Columnist of the Year at the PPA Press Awards, the highest award for magazine journalism in the UK. I’ve also been the British Society of Magazine Editors Business Columnist of the Year twice too, in 2018 and 2022. My more scholarly publications include articles in the Sloan Management Review, Harvard Business Review, the Journal of Advertising, and the Journal of Consumer Research.

I was a Thouron Scholar and spent 1995 at Wharton. I was the recipient of the Ferber Award in 2000 for my doctoral thesis. My co-authored pricing research was cited by George Akerlof during his 2001 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. In 2018 AdNews rated me one of their “Power 50” and I made SmartCompany's top ten business thinkers list. The AMI gave me the Sir Charles McGrath Award, the highest honour for marketing in Australia. I gave the 30th Anniversary Levitt Group lecture for the Chartered Institute of Marketing in 2019 and the Ogilvy lecture for the Marketing Society a year later.