How Marketers Are Rethinking Trust, AI and Long‑Term Strategy
Key Highlights
- Growth in marketing is no longer about scale—it’s about adaptability and sustainability.
- AI is unavoidable, but marketers are deeply conflicted about its impact.
- Human connection and peer validation now matter as much as tactics.
Note: Abby White and Alexis Gajewski will be attending Digital Summit Chicago April 7-8. If you see them, say hi and ask for a selfie!
In an industry dominated by dashboards, automation, and constant optimization, in‑person connection has taken on new significance. Marketing leaders aren’t just looking for tactics — they’re looking for perspective, validation and community. Events like Digital Summit Chicago now serve as rare spaces to step back, compare notes and reconnect with peers navigating the same pressures. That human layer is increasingly inseparable from how marketers learn, adapt and grow.
Alexis Gajewski, Associate Director of Newsroom Operations and Development at EndeavorB2B, recently spoke with Danielle Blanchette, VP of Marketing and Strategy at Digital Summit, to get her perspective on the current state of the marketing industry and Digital Summit’s role within the ever-evolving ecosystem. Danielle is a seasoned marketing leader with a passion for events, content and building meaningful audience connections. At Digital Summit, she oversees high-impact educational events that empower marketing leaders nationwide. Danielle is also the CEO of Blue Socks Marketing, an agency focused on supporting nonprofit organizations with marketing and event services.
Alexis Gajewski: On the Digital Summit website, you make it clear that growth is the only option for today's marketing leaders. But marketers in 2026 are navigating budget cuts, AI disruption and increasingly skeptical audiences. What does growth actually look like under those conditions?
Danielle Blanchette: If the marketing industry had its own flag, the motto would say, “It depends.”
Growth is relative to every marketer and the purpose of their organization. At the company level, growth might be iterative through expanding subscriptions, increasing conversions, or creating a social presence. At a personal level, a marketer could be looking for the best AI products to use to test their campaigns or trying to get out of a toxic organization. Growth is the catch-all term for marketing right now because change cannot seem to slow down. You see it in the fresh job titles the marketing leaders are making for themselves.
What I like about the term growth is that it doesn’t assume you're obsolete; it assumes there are healthy roots to stem from, because, as much as we encounter new technologies, the end goal of connecting human beings to a brand will always be our life force.
AG: How do you decide what earns a place on the agenda? And how do you know when a topic is genuinely where marketers need to go, versus just where they're comfortable?
DB: We listen to our audience. For years, marketers have grown up alongside Digital Summit, and they're used to providing extensive reviews of the content we serve and telling us what is helpful and what isn’t.
Our team visits as many on-site attendees as we can to gather real-time feedback, then we meet as a team for hours to review the post-event survey results and detailed speaker ratings. The most mentioned topics over the last two years will come as no surprise: AI acceleration and SEO. Marketers are vacillating between excitement and total burnout on these topics, so we do our best to find compelling speakers that validate the stressful side of the marketer’s experience right now, as well as strategic ways to navigate the change as a leader or contributor. Plus, everyone always needs content ideas, so those sessions where a content guru gives you their secret sauce to a meaty content plan always draw huge crowds. Many marketers are in the late stages of being asked to do more with less. Sessions that provide a refreshing take on content generation bring us back to why we loved this work in the first place.
AG: If you had to name the single biggest shift in digital marketing between past conferences and this year’s Digital Summit — something that fundamentally changed what the sessions need to cover — what would it be?
DB: Every session on our schedule somehow relates to or mentions AI. That can sound exciting or horrifying to a marketer, depending on who you talk to, but it’s the reality of the moment we’re in. What I appreciate about our sessions is that you will find just as many speakers who think AI is great as those who think it has major flaws, both technologically and ethically. When I speak to marketers in real life, that’s exactly where most of us sit.
We know how much it can help, and we want to find ways to use it that help us execute and get some of our time back, but we’re also aware of what it’s hurting and its unpredictability. When we connect in person to discuss our use cases and broader public policy work, we help each other find our place in the midst of that.
What I like about the term growth is that it doesn’t assume you're obsolete, it assumes there are healthy roots to stem from because as much as we encounter new technologies, the end goal of connecting human beings to a brand will always be our life force.
- Danielle Blanchette, VP of Marketing and Strategy, Digital Summit
AG: Marketers are publishing more, spending more on ads, and now competing for AI-generated search visibility on top of everything else. At some point does "harder" become "unsustainable" for certain types of teams or organizations?
DB: Absolutely, our industry is at a breaking point. I saw a poll last year from MarketingWeek that said almost 60% of marketers are feeling overwhelmed and undervalued. I trust that data because I’ve seen it in myself over the last decade and in the conversations with attendees I connect with, especially in our roundtable discussions.
Everything feels harder and like we aren’t able to keep up, but all of us keep going. This is not limited to small orgs either. Some of the largest brands and agencies with teams of 50-100+ who take our stage talk through the grueling task of simply keeping up.
We’ve found our role as an event series in each of these markets is to be accessible, affordable, and to build a bridge between marketers and their peers. Validation and human connection in a time where disconnection is the norm help us energize each other, not just to learn about AI, but to be actively involved in determining the acceptable use for our brands and our teams.
AG: Brand trust, audience trust, trust in AI outputs — it's woven through the session titles this year. Do you think the marketing industry has a trust problem right now, or is this more of an opportunity for the best brands to exploit?
DB: Brand trust was always on thin ice because connecting with a brand will always be manufactured and surface-level connection. You’re connecting to an idea, not usually a person.
The evolution we’ve seen in my lifetime is the abundance of brands and their stakeholders breaking our trust over and over again, whether it’s actively harming audiences or being caught faking the value set that drove their success in the first place. That’s why I love when our speakers talk about the biggest marketing flops, fails and misses. You have to analyze why people mess up (on purpose or accidentally) to learn how to navigate that environment as a leader.
Conversely, you need to learn to ride the waves of good PR, going viral, or where most of us end up: being forgettable. Most of the brands and agencies in our industry fall into that final category. It’s as critical to capitalize on good momentum and vibes with your audience when it’s happening in real time as it is to have your crises plan in place.
AG: What's the one thing you think most marketers attending this event will leave believing differently than when they walked in?
DB: Our team believes in two core objectives that drive the way we plan the summits: We want you to leave with a new idea for your brand, and to leave having met someone you didn’t know before.
In most cases, you get double or triple those goals. My favorite "after-the-event" photo is a marketing leader with pages full of notes, whether it’s a physical notebook or a digital trove. The beautiful and exhausting part of this industry is that there is no shortage of ideas or new ways to tell your story; we are always limited only by our own time and priorities. The ideas, tactics and strategies are all inside the sessions, but the connection with other marketers is how we all grow together.
About the Author
Alexis Gajewski
Contributor
Alexis Gajewski is the Associate Director of Newsroom Operations and Development at EndeavorB2B, bringing 18 years of experience in B2B media and publishing. A digital-first editorial leader, she sets the vision and direction for content strategies that maximize reach, engagement, and visibility across EndeavorB2B’s portfolio of brands. Alexis oversees editorial planning, workflow management, and team development, ensuring that all content aligns with both audience needs and business objectives. With deep expertise in SEO, AI, and analytics, she drives data-informed editorial decisions that strengthen storytelling, boost organic growth, and uphold the highest standards of quality and integrity.
As a strategist and mentor, Alexis works across the editorial department to foster a culture of creativity, collaboration, and continuous learning. She develops company-wide editorial standards, training programs, and performance frameworks designed to elevate content quality and operational efficiency. Her passion for innovation keeps teams at the forefront of media transformation—whether implementing AI-driven tools, refining workflows, or exploring new content formats. Through her leadership, Alexis empowers editors, reporters, and content strategists at EndeavorB2B to adapt, grow, and deliver impactful, audience-focused journalism in a fast-evolving digital landscape.
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