PTTOW!, an invite-only, living, breathing, year-round community of today’s most creative and influential leaders, gathered a curated group of roughly 325 of the world’s most influential CEOs, CMOs, and cultural Icons for the 2026 PTTOW! Summit.
Held at the Conrad Hotel in Orlando, Florida, last May 26–28, 2026, the three-day 2026 PTTOW! Summit raises a critical question that doesn’t get asked enough: as every major business decision, whether it is a billion-dollar campaign, a brand pivot, or a market expansion, ultimately flows from a leader—not a committee, not a framework, not a dashboard, but a person—where do these leaders go to get sharper?
PTTOW! briefed us on what unfolded inside. What follows is as close to an insider account as this event allows.
Setting the Stage: Why Orlando, Why Now
Founded in 2009, PTTOW! has been operating at the highest levels of culture and commerce for senior leaders across all 70 major industries—a network whose members collectively represent over half of all U.S. media investment. The PTTOW! Summit is one of four summits hosted annually, anchoring a year-round community that convenes at major cultural milestones, from the Super Bowl to Cannes Lions, nearly every month.
The five-star Conrad Hotel in the heart of Orlando, Florida, was a deliberate choice for the 2026 PTTOW! Summit and its community, which values experience as much as intellect. Orlando, known as an epicenter of theme park culture, inspired storytelling and experience.
PTTOW! Members participated in a once-in-a-lifetime evening at the newly minted NBC Universal’s Epic Universe Theme Park, closed exclusively for the PTTOW! community. For the Summit at large, every attendee arrives by invitation only, with a custom-curated itinerary built around their specific business priorities, whether they are wrestling with artificial intelligence (AI), exploring new revenue models, or confronting questions of culture, trust, and leadership.
“No two members experienced the same summit,” the PTTOW! team mentions. The result is a summit that feels more like a series of interlocking salons than a mass gathering, even when the stakes are measured in billions. That level of personalization, at this level of seniority, is what separates the community from anything else operating in this space.
The PTTOW! annual flagship summit is not a conference. There are no vendor pitches, no transactional networking. What the summit offers instead is rarer: a non-solicitous environment where the most powerful people in business can drop the performance and actually think together.
In practice, the summit functions as a concentrated checkpoint in an ongoing conversation rather than an isolated three-day event. Members arrive not just to listen, but to build on relationships and ideas that have been developing over months, sometimes years, inside this closed circle.
Mainstage: Ideas That Moved the Room
The mainstage program at the 2026 PTTOW! Summit was assembled with a clear editorial point of view: the leaders in this room need to be challenged on the things their org charts cannot.
PTTOW! Is powered by the partnerships created between members—the mainstage showcased just a handful of the hundreds of partnerships that come to life through this group. This year, a few stood out: the Women’s Pro Baseball League partnering with TheRealest.com as their official memorabilia partner, and iHeart Media joining forces with TikTok to reimagine what content creation and radio can look like for today’s listeners.
Jon Levy, behavioral scientist and founder of The Influencers Dinner, opened proceedings with something unexpected—a gamified experience designed to teach the science of authentic human connection. It was a deliberate first move, signaling that what would follow wasn’t about information transfer. It was about transformation.
From there, Jim VandeHei, co-founder and CEO of Axios, took the stage to unpack what AI is doing to human cognition, and what leaders need to do to stay tapped in rather than tuned out. Joel Lunenfeld, Global CEO of PMX at Publicis Groupe, followed with a session on impact at scale, interrogating what it actually means to move culture when your brand reaches billions.
Brian Robinson, Chief Creative Officer of Universal Destinations & Experiences, gave the room a rare inside look at the creative philosophy behind Universal Epic Universe—what it takes to build something that stops people in their tracks. Meanwhile, Pablos Holman, a hacker, inventor, consultant for Blue Origin, and author of “Deep Future”, outlined how the world’s hardest problems, from energy to climate, and the AI transition, are actually being solved, and what that process looks like from the inside.
Two sessions stood apart for their emotional force. Dr. Doris Taylor, co-founder and CEO of Organamet Bio, presented her work engineering pig hearts for human transplantation, a scientific achievement with implications that made the room go quiet.
Daryl Davis, an award-winning Black musician who has spent over four decades personally meeting with KKK leaders, many of whom later renounced their membership, delivered what may have been the summit’s most provocative argument: that sustained, courageous relationship-building is the most disruptive force in existence.
Louie Schwartzberg, the filmmaker behind Netflix’s Fantastic Fungi and founder of Moving Art, closed the mainstage intellectual arc with a meditation on what brands lose when they lose their connection to the natural world. Nadja Bellan-White, CEO of M&C Saatchi North America, rounded out the program with a session on trust, specifically, why building spaces for honest dialogue is now one of the most strategically important things a leader can do.
The evening program matched the day’s ambition. BANDALOOP, a vertical choreography company, performed off the side of a building. Alexia Jayy, Season 29 winner of The Voice: Battle of Champions, performed live at the closing parties—every moment created a memory.
Where the Real Work Happens
If the mainstage is where PTTOW! expands thinking, the breakout sessions are where it gets applied. The 2026 Summit ran four formats simultaneously: Town Halls, Think Tanks, Hack-a-Thons, and Workshops–each has a different scale and purpose, all with the same mandate: leave with something you can use.
“PTTOW expands our thinking beyond beauty, giving us cross-industry insights that inspire breakthrough disruption,” said Patrick O’Keefe, Chief Integrated Marketing Officer, e.l.f. Beauty
Town Halls (80–100 members, open-forum) tackled the conversations most organizations avoid. One session confronted the business implications of disconnection, hate, and polarization in a noisy world, featuring Reverend Dr. Bernice King of The King Center alongside In-Q, a National Poetry Slam Champion who performed mid-session.
Another went directly at C-suite mental health, specifically, trauma recovery at the leadership level. Executives from the Chicago Bears and Sharp Home USA spoke candidly about pressure, burnout, and resilience as they navigate careers filled with uncertainty and constant change.
Meanwhile, Think Tanks brought together smaller groups of 20–22 for roundtable sessions on high-stakes business questions. Topics ranged from the global opportunity in major sports engagements, featuring the Commissioner of the Women’s Pro Baseball League and the Chief Commercial Officer of U.S. Soccer, to the strategic evolution of brand collaborations beyond hype cycles, the largely untapped purchasing power of Middle America, and the emerging business frontier of robotics and tech innovation.
However, Hack-a-Thons asked something harder: don’t just discuss the problem, build the solution. One session challenged attendees to reimagine the modern org chart from scratch. Another tackled broken marketing conversion funnels. Both were facilitated by senior executives from Paramount Streaming, Kenvue, and others who came prepared to work.
The PTTOW! Signature of Excellence
Aside from the talks on the main stages and the closer learning during breakout sessions, the 2026 PTTOW! Summit also took time to honor three leaders who have redefined what’s possible in their fields through the 2026 PTTOW! ICON Awards.
Awardees include Keke Palmer, an Emmy-winning actress, singer, host, and entrepreneur; Leslie Odom Jr., a Tony and Grammy Award-winning actor, singer, songwriter, and producer; and Ken Griffey Jr., MLB Hall of Famer, 13-time All-Star, and cultural force who transcended sport.
For PTTOW!, these awards are not just celebrity appearances. They are signals of where culture is going, and who is already there. PTTOW! has never been about gathering the most powerful and influential people in a room for the sake of it. Rather, it has always been about what happens when those key leaders start building together for the industry’s maximum growth and impact.
The world of tomorrow is being built somewhere. It’s being built with PTTOW!. What the leaders take away after the summit isn’t just a tote bag and a stack of business cards. It’s a new way of thinking about their business and the relationships to help them act on it.
Please visit PTTOW!’s website for more information.
