Communications Speakers

Ken Schmidt is the legendary former director of communications strategy for Harley-Davidson Motor Company. He played an active role in one of the most celebrated turnarounds in corporate history, and his vision helped transform Harley into one of the world’s most dominant brands. He is widely known as a provocative and engaging thought leader. Funny and energetic, he shares stories of how to compete with weapons stronger than price, build a fanatically vocal customer base, create a passionately loyal corporate culture, and develop leaders who inspire and motivate.

Mika Brzezinski, the co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe and the daughter of former National Security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, spends each morning debating the headlines with a roundtable of political insiders, journalists, and newsmakers. Brzezinski is also the author of the best-selling books, All Things at Once and Knowing Your Value. She addresses current headlines, politics, women’s issues, women in the workplace, and the media.

Have you ever wondered why more salespeople buy BMWs than other cars? Or why a name’s popularity grows after a hurricane of that name hits? Jonah Berger has the answers. A marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the New York Times best-selling author of the books "Contagious: Why Things Catch On" and "Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces That Shape Behavior," Berger has spent the last decade studying how social influence works, why certain ideas and products catch on, and what we can do to make ourselves more influential. He shares with audiences the keys to harnessing this “influence” to forge great partnerships, sell slow-moving products, and be more intentional with business strategies. His work is regularly published in top-tier journals, he consults for a variety of Fortune 500 companies, and popular outlets like Harvard Business Review often cover his work.

Throughout his career, Mr. Matthew Oczkowski has worked at the intersection of where product development meets data science to forecast, predict, and analyze commercial markets and American elections. Prior to his work at Data Propria, Oczkowski also served as Head of Product for Cambridge Analytica where he most notably ran the team of embedded technical specialists inside the Trump Campaign that led to the scientific understanding of the eventual outcome of the election - a scenario that pundits missed. Using tactics from the worlds of behavioral science, growth hacking, machine learning, sentiment analysis, and NLP, Oczkowski successfully connects behavioral dots together to make informed decisions about groups of people.