Agenda

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Whether you’re here to spark a new partnership, learn strategies to grow your program, or simply soak up the energy of CJU25, this session is your launchpad. Join us for a practical, warm welcome designed to help first-time attendees navigate CJU with confidence. From how to structure your meetings to where to find the best networking spots and sessions, you’ll walk away equipped with tips, tools, and a stronger sense of community.

Snag your badge and swag bag at check-in, your official entry to CJU. After registration wraps, this desk transforms into your go-to spot for any questions!

The way people find and buy brands has split into three paths and infinite combinations of touches on the way to conversion. There's the brand-led path, social-led path, and the AI-led path. Most marketing organizations were built for one of these and are improvising the other two.

CJ CEO Santi Pierini will discuss what it means to be at the center of this shift, giving brands the means to remake how they go to market. In this session, he'll take stock of how buyer behavior has actually moved, where the old playbooks stop working, and what it takes to meet customers on whichever path they choose. The throughline is trust, and how performance marketing earns it, measures it, and turns it into growth that holds.

Customers don't think about channels. They follow a brand into a search result, out to a creator's feed, over to an AI assistant for a gut check, on to a publisher review, and back again. A brand has to make sense at every one of those stops, and connected commerce is how you hold it together across the brand-led, social-led, and AI-led paths.

In this session, four CJ experts dig into the three paths and what each one demands right now. Then they show how the paths come together into one strategy, the kind that reaches a customer with the right message whenever they are ready. You'll leave knowing how to build a program that follows the customer instead of your org chart.

Becoming an AI-led organization will radically shift what you do, who you collaborate with, and how you operate. The question isn't whether to make that shift, it's how to do it without losing what makes your organization effective in the first place.

Nancy Giordano has spent her career helping enterprise organizations and visionary leaders navigate exactly that kind of change. As founder of Play Big Inc. and a veteran of three of the world's top global advertising agencies, she brings both a strategic eye and the hands-on experience to make the future feel actionable rather than abstract.

In her keynote, Nancy will unpack what it really means to build an AI-first strategy, how to drive organization-wide adoption, and what this shift means for the future of work. Approaching change through the lens of curiosity, let Nancy inspire you to use technology to become more human.

The way people find and buy products is moving onto social platforms, and the platforms themselves are driving the transformation. What started as influencer marketing has grown into creator commerce: creators now drive discovery, shape decisions, and increasingly close measurable sales. Every major platform is building tools, shopping features, and monetization models to connect content to purchase.

This panel brings together leaders of the largest social platforms for a candid conversation about what that future looks like. They'll talk about where shopping behavior is heading, what creators need to thrive, what brands are getting right and wrong, and how measurement is catching up to the way people actually buy.

Social platforms are where discovery happens now, and TikTok Shop has turned that discovery directly into commerce. This session breaks down how CJ's TikTok Shop offering connects brands, creators, and buyers inside the platform where purchase intent is born. Attendees will see how social search behavior differs from traditional search, how affiliate mechanics work inside TikTok Shop, and real results from programs running today. This is a practitioner's session: what to sell, how to activate creators, how tracking and attribution work, and what performance looks like. Leave with a realistic picture of the TikTok Shop opportunity and how to activate it with CJ. 

For some brands, connected commerce is already a vivid reality in how they go to market. In this panel, a few of partnership's most innovative brand leaders speak candidly about how they're remaking the way their companies reach customers.

They'll talk about how partnership's role changed inside their own organizations, and what it took to break it out of its silo. They'll get into integrating partnership marketing with influencer programs, content, retail media, and the AI-driven discovery now reshaping how customers decide. And you'll hear how they made our industry a central part of the marketing plan, instead of a sideshow.

Incrementality is the measurement every marketer wants and few can prove. CJ and Capital One Ad Solutions set out to prove it. Holdout tests are one of the strongest tools for the job, but they answer just one question: did sales change? They rarely show what customers did instead. In this session, CJ and Capital One Ad Solutions share results from a series of holdout tests, pairing the experimental design with customer journey analysis to trace what happens when customers stop seeing a publisher. Do they shift to another affiliate partner? Convert off affiliate? Drop off the path to purchase entirely? The answers changes how you read a publisher's real worth, and how you value the partners in your program.  

Creator marketing is now central to how brands reach people, yet many advertisers still struggle to turn engagement into measurable results. On the flip side, many creators understand that their future growth lies in driving strong business results but need advertiser partners to work with them to understand how to drive the best results.

In this panel, advertisers and creators talk candidly about how they build partnerships that go past awareness to drive traffic, conversions, and sales. They get into what makes a collaboration work, how brands choose and activate creators across tiers, how to make affiliate and performance-based compensation work, and the measurement approaches that prove creator value. 

Snag your badge and swag bag at check-in, your official entry to CJU. After registration wraps, this desk transforms into your go-to spot for any questions!

The old way for brands to go to market was to set a goal and pour almost all the investment into owned channels: the website, search terms, ads, and brand pages on social. But those touchpoints are a small slice of where customers spend their time. Most of the journey happens away from brand properties, out where trusted publishers and creators supply the content, the learning, and the credibility.

In this session, we'll show how a single brief can strengthen every part of the marketing plan. You'll see how affiliates can hold search positions a brand can't hold alone, how a message can carry through trusted voices, and how programmatic can be co-branded with publishers an audience already relies on.

CJ's Publisher Audience Commissioning lets publishers turn what they know about their audiences into a real edge with advertisers. This session gives a practical walkthrough of how it works, from audience segmentation and publisher-passed parameters through campaign setup, reporting, and advertiser collaboration. It also covers eligibility, best practices, and real-world examples so publishers can see where the solution fits and how to get results from it.  

Consumers are shifting from searching to simply asking for definitive answers, and that change is reshaping how brands and publishers work together. As answers replace lists of links, visibility is moving upstream, and influence is concentrating around fewer, more trusted sources.

This session brings together AI leaders to talk about what they see coming over the next 12 to 24 months, and how they are adapting their strategies, partnerships, and business models for an answer-first world. Campaign-based relationships are giving way to deeper, always-on collaboration, where value increasingly comes from being a cited, trusted source. The panel looks ahead at how publisher influence, business models, and partnerships will evolve, and what brands should do now to stay competitive.

 Advertiser spending across affiliate and commerce keeps climbing, and publishers are well positioned to capture more of it by making their media easier to buy. This session covers the practical moves that get budgets evaluated, approved, and funded: entry-level pricing, structured test-and-learn programs, verticalized packages, and smarter use of remnant inventory. It also looks at product-based media packages tied to category initiatives and vendor priorities, which can open funding sources that sit outside a strained core budget. 

Creators have become one of the fastest-growing forces in commerce, and they can play an even more powerful role in performance marketing by centralizing recommendations in a single venue. Instead of relying on scattered links across bios and captions, creator storefronts give each influencer a curated, shoppable destination: their taste, your products, one URL. This session demos the technology live, showing how storefronts get built, how attribution flows back to the brand, and how they fit into a centralized creator strategy across UGC, seeding, TikTok Shop, and D2C affiliate. Attendees will leave knowing why persistent, creator-owned destinations out-earn one-off link drops.  

AI is reshaping performance marketing on every front at once. It is changing how consumers find and evaluate products, how marketers choose partners and direct their spend, and how teams plan and run programs day to day. Many companies have responded by bolting on point solutions, which adds complexity without delivering much in return. CJ is taking a different route. Our 360-AI strategy puts AI to work across the entire ecosystem, so we deliver value to the consumers, the marketers and partners who serve them, and the people who run programs every day.

This session shows how that plays out in practice: helping consumers discover your brands in an AI-driven world, empowering marketers to make sharper decisions across the partner lifecycle, and transforming the ways people work. You'll see where CJ AI stands today, the results clients are already reporting, and where the roadmap heads next, including agentic campaign execution, deeper publisher intelligence, and embedded commerce.

Affiliate has gotten crowded, and that's a good thing. Traditional publishers now share the stage with tech partners and newer monetization models, and each one moves the consumer somewhere different along the path to purchase. This session lays out what CJ has changed and is changing to help you earn more, more easily. We're building our product roadmap and operating model around four things publishers have told us matter: focus, earning power, revenue protection, and usability. That means monetization that reaches past the click, measurement you can trust, and support teams that work as growth partners instead of ‘just’ answering support tickets. We'll show you what's already live, and where we're headed next.  

Going global is one of the biggest growth opportunities for a brand, and one of the hardest to get right. Each new market arrives with its own publishers, regulations, payment norms, languages, and ideas of what a trusted recommendation even looks like. Hear from leaders who have done it successfully, building comprehensive global programs spanning traditional affiliate, content, and the wider set of partnership types.

They'll talk about where brands and campaigns should bend to local culture and where they should not. Real-world experiences will show how partnership leaders leveraged the brand essence while becoming an organic part of the conversation in each market. 

CJ Wallet opens a new door into the customer journey, turning first-touch interest into a lasting connection. This session shows how mobile wallet experiences let consumers save offers, stay engaged over time, and convert when the moment is right for them. It creates a fresh communication channel for brands and a high-intent path to conversion for publishers across both online and in-store. Attendees will leave knowing where CJ Wallet fits and how it opens new ways to influence, engage, and convert customers. 

Expanding into a new market with the same program that worked at home is where many brands come unstuck. This session looks at how advertisers can use partnerships to grow into new markets with more structure, local relevance, and commercial confidence. We'll cover what needs assessing before you commit budget: the size of the opportunity, whether the right partners are ready, how local consumers behave, and what localization the program needs. We'll cover the practical things that trip brands up: payments, currency, and regulation. Speakers will talk through where expansion plans stall, how to spot the right partners early, and what to have in place before investing heavily. Leave with a framework for a partner-led expansion plan that balances central strategy with local execution.  

Affiliate is becoming a strategic driver of brand visibility as AI reshapes how people discover and choose financial brands. In this session, brand, agency, and partner leaders share how collaboration changes where and when brands show up for high-intent buyers.

The panel will reveal how a leading brand and publisher partnered to build visibility across high-value financial queries. You'll see how they aligned on content strategy, chose which coverage to prioritize, and used data to direct where to invest. We'll cover how publishers are adapting their editorial and commerce strategies to meet advertiser needs for improved visibility, and how advertisers are rethinking their presence beyond traditional placements. 

Creator and affiliate programs used to run as two separate efforts: one for awareness, one for performance. That is changing. Leading brands now use creators to support the whole customer journey, from discovery to purchase, and they design social commerce as a connected system, with each creator activation feeding the next.

In this fireside chat, Annemarie Belda, Communications Manager at Intuit TurboTax, sits down with Kristina Severance, Account Director, CJ Influence, to discuss how the brand expanded its existing creator strategy by adding a creator affiliate program designed to better connect creator activity to measurable outcomes. They will cover how this approach enabled a more diverse creator mix across the customer journey and the learnings about what drove results. The session will also explore how the program is evolving as it matures, and is expanding into new ways to connect creators closer to conversion.

It's time to celebrate our 25th anniversary and your incredible achievements with a delicious dinner under the stars. Raise a glass as we celebrate the advertisers, publishers, and agencies who've pushed performance boundaries this year.  

Not feeling the dance floor at The After Party? Try your luck at our high-stakes CJU Casino tables. All the thrill of Vegas, with ample networking opportunities between hands.

 It's our party and we'll dance if we want to! Grab a 5-minute shuttle downtown to drink, unwind and show off your best moves at our exclusive after party.  

Stop by for a late-night bite from one of our street food vendors outside The After Party.