2:00 p.m. ET - Joint Business Planning: "Paradigm
for Retail - CPG Collaboration and Optimization"
Joel Cartwright of Vistex discusses:
- Strengthening Alignment for Joint Business
Planning: How retailers and consumer products
manufacturers can work together more effectively to drive shared
profitability 
 
- Streamlining Efforts for Greater
Impact: Identifying areas where partners are
duplicating work and finding opportunities to optimize
processes.
 
2:50 p.m. ET - Winning the Holidays and Building
for 2026: Retail Media Strategies for CPG Brands
Retail Media is growing quickly, and for CPG marketers the
holiday season often feels like a high-stakes sprint. The challenge
is meeting year-end goals while also building momentum for
long-term growth.
In this session, Justin Jefferson of Keen Decision Systems will
share guidance on how to get more from retail media during the
holidays and set your brand up for success in 2026. They will focus
on what truly drives incremental ROI and how to make investments
work harder across your portfolio.
You will walk away with:
- Strategies to prove impact and show real growth beyond
retailer-reported results
 
- Approaches to balance short-term holiday ROI with brand equity
and stronger retail partnerships
 
- Clear direction on how retail media fits into 2026 plans for
sustainable growth
 
3:40 p.m. ET - AI Meets Category Management: What's
Next?
Artificial Intelligence is rapidly penetrating every retail
business process as myths and misinformation abound. Category
Management, with its painstaking analytics and planning processes,
is ripe for this transformation, and AI tools are already being
introduced.
For CPGs and their retail partners, this shift promises to speed
routine repetitive decision cycles to allow more responsiveness to
changing market conditions. It is expected to enable superior
forecasting that incorporates shopper data from outside the
retailers' walled gardens. Is a new era of joint business planning
in the making? Are brand marketers ready to adopt new methods?
Listen in as James Tenser, Story-Teller-in-Chief at VSN Strategies
explores the answers to these questions - and more.