The consulting world will be well represented at next week’s annual APAC B2B Marketing Leaders Forum in Sydney, with a handful of speakers from some of Australia’s leading firms due to appear – including the regional and national CMOs and growth and marketing heads of Capgemini, Cognizant, KPMG, BDO, Grant Thornton, NCS, and Merkle. A number of consulting alumni are also part of the line-up.
Described as the region’s largest annual gathering of chief marketing officers and marketing leaders, with more than 600 industry figures expected to attend, the sold-out event will take place over two days on the 24th and 25th of May at the Doltone House Jones Bay Wharf in Pyrmont.
Topics include ESG marketing, delivering growth amid tightening budgets, and the macro impacts on marketing, with a serious wealth of marketing and consulting experience on display.
Bernadette Conlon
Based out of Sydney, Conlon has served as APAC area VP for marketing at Cognizant since 2021, having also previously held CMO and marketing executive roles at Oracle, Optus and IBM Consulting over the past twenty years. Conlon will feature as part of a group discussion on engaging and building relationships with the executive suite, together with Apptio APAC marketing director Catherine Vissiere and CAPITAL-e strategic growth director Rajhev Rajkumar.
Tracy Gawthorne
Gawthorne is Asia Pacific chief marketing officer at Capgemini, joining the consultancy in Sydney last year after more than 15 years at Accenture, including as global director of marketing and communications for the firm’s energy industry practice and local managing director. Gawthorne will share her expertise at the forum on the broad subject of growth, as a member of a panel alongside EG Funds marketing and communications head Angela Maxwell.
Janet Glasper
A two-decade BDO veteran, Glasper was appointed as the firm’s national CMO in mid-2021, and has served as the APAC representative for BDO International’s brand & marketing committee based out of Brisbane. Glasper will feature as part of a round-table discussion on the challenges and opportunities of B2B marketers in the professional services industry, alongside former BCG marketing lead Janelle Cook, who is now a marketing director with the NSW government.
Fraser McNaughton / Ben Scott
McNaughton is the Australian chief marketing officer at Grant Thornton, having held the role for the past seven and a half years after first joining the firm in Sydney in 2010. He is joined at the conference by Brisbane-based colleague Ben Scott, Grant Thornton’s head of digital marketing and communications. McNaughton will present a professional services B2B case study, while Scott will chat on the subject of marketing attribution and ROI.
Jadanne Dare
Bringing two decades of top-level marketing experience, including regional leadership roles at AWS, Adobe, SAP, Verizon and AT&T, Dare was recently recruited by KPMG as its new head of brand and marketing strategy. Dare will deliver a keynote on the importance of efficiency, effectiveness and collaboration as a key growth factor, supported by Kimberly-Clark APAC Strategy and Integrated Marketing lead Mariam Nouel.
Georgia Swanson
Swanson serves as head of strategy and growth at NCS, which recently rebranded in Australia from its subsidiary ARQ Group, acquired last year for $290 million. Prior to joining ARQ in Sydney in early 2021 as director of customer and marketing, Swanson spent six years in various roles at Optus. She will contribute to a discussion on B2B marketing in IT, tech, SaaS and cloud, hosted by NextDC data centre chief marketer Glenn Flower.
Samantha Cunliffe
Cunliffe is A/NZ managing director of the B2B advisory wing at Merkle, Dentsu’s CX and data analytics consultancy, previously spending a decade at Merkle acquisition DWA between London and Sydney. She will present a case study on the challenges and insights of building a B2B brand at a long-established company – in this instance Woolworths – joined by the consulting-happy supermarket group’s head of B2B marketing, Brady Dennett.
Consulting alumni
In addition to those currently employed at large consultancies, several of the forum’s speakers also share a consulting firm background, including AMP CMO Renee Howie, previously head of marketing at PwC; AWS A/NZ head of marketing Lisa Cameron, who led marketing at Unisys, Cognizant, HCL, DXC, Fujitsu, IBM and PwC; and Highspot A/NZ head Jessica Turner, who spent four and a half years as a senior director at FTI Consulting in London.