Announcing our 2017 Keynote Speakers

In this keynote, based on his new book But What If We’re Wrong? Chuck Klosterman visualizes the contemporary world as it will appear to those who’ll perceive it as the distant past. Throughout, he asks questions that are profound in their simplicity: How certain are we about our understanding of gravity, or time? What will be the defining memory of rock music, 500 years from today? How seriously should we view the content of our dreams, or the content of TV?

 Kinetically slingshotting through a broad spectrum of objective and subjective problems, this talk builds on input from a variety of creative thinkers—George Saunders, David Byrne, Jonathan Lethem, Kathryn Schulz, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Greene, Junot Díaz, Amanda Petrusich, Ryan Adams, Nick Bostrom, Dan Carlin, and Richard Linklater, among others—interwoven with the type of high-wire humor and nontraditional analysis only Klosterman would dare to attempt. It’s a seemingly impossible achievement: a keynote about the things we cannot know, explained as if we did. It’s about how we live now, once “now” has become “then.”

Corporations and brands can learn from causes when it comes to mobilizing people around an important single issue, and creating a mass movement. Elizabeth Nyamayaro, Senior Advisor to Executive Director of UN Women and the driving force behind the groundbreaking HeForShe initiative, will share insights into the initiative’s success drivers. With at least one man in every single country in the world signing on to initiative within its first week of launch, HeForShe has become one of the most important social movements in the world today, and has been subject to more than 2 billion conversations online, with offline activities reaching every corner of the globe. www.HeForShe.org

We live in an age where it's tough to walk down the street without someone trying to sell you something. The entire American experience now seems to be brought to us by some corporation. Utilizing the cutting-edge tools of comic exploration and total self-exploitation, Morgan Spurlock dissects the world of advertising and marketing by using his personal integrity as currency to sell out to the highest bidder.

Scathingly funny, subversive, and deceptively smart, he shines the definitive light on our branded future.