An Exclusive Retreat for Marketing Technology Leaders: Elevate Your Thinking. Deepen Your Connections.

The Marketing Tech Retreat – An Exclusive Forum With Content By Refreshingly Different Event for the Victorian MarTech Community

Designed for deeper and more meaningful connections, this event is the very opposite of a one-day inner-city conference. With not a single exhibition stand in sight, the Marketing Tech Retreat offers two days of compelling keynote presentations, fireside chats and curated social experiences – giving you the space and time to have the conversations that matter most.

You’ll form unparalleled connections in a relaxed, distraction-free setting that no exhibition hall or inner-city venue could ever match.

We’re excited to be returning to the RACV Cape Schanck on 18 – 20 November 2026. Register your interest to stay up to date with speaker announcements and the 2026 agenda.

Building Human-Centred and Customer-Focused Marketing Technology Ecosystems

If 2024 was ‘Composability’ and 2025 was ‘Ownership’, then our word for 2026 is ‘Cohesion’.

The challenge facing MarTech leaders is no longer about having the platforms or even knowing who owns them. It’s about achieving cohesion: between IT and Marketing; between technology and business outcomes; between stakeholders with fragmented ownership; between admiring the tools and actually owning them, and between what AI promises and what teams are ready to deliver — from a skills perspective and open to it from a cultural one.

A central question for Symposium 2026 is whether the difference between MarTech Stacks and their evolution into MarTech Ecosystems is a greater emphasis on people and human-centred design.

Join us as we explore how to build cohesive, team-embraced and customer-focused marketing technology ecosystems; where the missing translation layer between business and tech is finally addressed, where teams are developed for roles that don’t yet exist, where data foundations support what AI will demand, and where technology serves the customer experience rather than the other way around.

Our Key Themes for 2026 are:

• The Operating Model – Cohesive Stakeholders with Fragmented Ownership: How does the operating model evolve from tech stack to ecosystem when everyone gets defensive over ownership? Who owns business outcomes versus tech rollout, and how do you remove the translation layer between business and tech whilst navigating matrix organisations with IT versus Marketing, Regional versus Global?
• Leading Teams from Tech-Stacks to Human-Centred MarTech Ecosystems: Is AI genuinely driving restructures or just a convenient scapegoat? How do you inspire teams to own the tech rather than admire it, make the case for incremental investment, and navigate the change journey in organisations where people define their value by roles technology is now reshaping?
• The Vendor Challenge – We Don’t Need More Tech: How do you push back on vendors adding cost rather than efficiencies when contracts grow from $2 million to $5 million for AI features? How do you make the case for changing your stack versus just renewing, and manage integration complexity when moving from one vendor to best-in-class across twenty?
• Skills, Capabilities and the Talent Pipeline: What happens to judgement when people get the title without doing the rungs? How do you recruit for roles you can’t describe yet, develop judgement in people who’ve never built it the hard way, and help graduates stay current when their degrees aren’t and all they hear is AI taking over?
• AI, Governance and the Risk You’re Already Carrying: How do you write an AI playbook when tools arrive with AI as default before anyone decides the rules? Where do you start, who needs to be in the room, and what are the risks when everyone’s dabbling but no one’s doing it at scale because they’re too scared?
• From Tasks to Agents – AI That Genuinely Collapses Workflows: Ten tasks, two weeks; collapsed into one agent running in under an hour. What does it take to select the right use cases, trust the machine to act, and automate manual processes so people become brand custodians thinking strategically rather than doing manual work?
• Readying Our Data Foundations for What the Future Will Demand of Them: How do you align stakeholders on what value means when the limitation isn’t the data collected but your ability to synthesise it? How do you build feedback loops showing whether MarTech delivers on what it was set up to achieve, and address the non-technological prerequisites for AI use cases?
• Beyond the Tools – Building a MarTech Culture of Excellence: How do you make curiosity the default rather than the preserve of advanced users when people keep doing repetitive tasks manually? How do you build AI curiosity, whilst maintaining human authenticity and ensuring outputs aren’t just the average of the internet?
• Inclusion in MarTech – A Blueprint for Navigating Uncertainty: Leaders who’ve never seen someone like them do their job before built the blueprint the whole industry needs: resilience without a roadmap, confidence in rooms not designed for them. How do you build that confidence, and what does being generous with your voice, seat and knowledge actually look like?
• GEO, Agentic Commerce and the Next Frontier: Machines are increasingly the intermediaries between brands and audiences. What does it take to be discoverable in a generative engine landscape when pages friendly to users aren’t friendly to engines? What do buyer agents and injection commerce mean for MarTech functions, and how do you make the investment case?
• The Build Handbook – From the Bottom Up: The economics of building have collapsed; what was $10 million to build versus $500K to subscribe is now drastically different. How do you work out the principles guiding when to build versus buy versus consolidate? What are the pitfalls when you’re not a product manager and don’t know about stewardship and maintenance costs?