Kantar / Breakthrough Summit
How Kantar Managed 500+ CMOs at Breakthrough Summit Without Anyone Getting Lost
Kantar used Ventla as a 'personal assistant' for 500+ attendees at their annual Breakthrough Summit — handling logistics, real-time communications, and engagement across a packed two-day programme.
At a conference this size, with an audience this senior, logistics noise is credibility damage. Kantar's Breakthrough Summit — one of North America's leading gatherings for Chief Marketing Officers — used Ventla to handle the operational complexity of a multi-day conference for hundreds of senior executives, so the organising team could focus on the content.
The situation
The Breakthrough Summit (formerly Digital CMO Summit) is Kantar's flagship annual conference for marketing leaders. Kantar itself is one of the largest insight and consultancy groups in the world, working with more than half the Fortune 500 — so the event it hosts reflects those relationships. The attendee list reads like a Who's Who of global marketing leadership: CMOs and marketing executives from companies including Spotify, Facebook, Bank of America, and hundreds more.
For an event at this level, the expectations are correspondingly high. Attendees are accustomed to well-run, professionally executed experiences. They're not going to be forgiving of a schedule that's hard to navigate, communications that arrive late, or a platform that requires effort to use.
Running a conference for 500+ senior executives across multiple days, with a dense programme of panels, keynotes, activities, and networking, is logistically complex. At this scale, a "personal assistant" — something that keeps every attendee on track without requiring them to manage it themselves — isn't a luxury. It's an operational necessity.
What they needed
The Breakthrough Summit team needed:
- A way to keep hundreds of attendees informed about schedules, room locations, and programme changes in real time
- Attendee-to-attendee communication that felt like a natural extension of the conference, not a separate tool
- Live feedback and polling to gather insight on sessions and overall experience
- A platform that an audience of senior executives would actually use — not download and ignore
- Something that reduced the inbound queries to the organising team so they could focus on running the event rather than fielding "what time does X start?" questions
How they used Ventla
The organizing team configured Ventla around one central insight: the platform should make attendees feel managed, not just informed. Push notifications were the primary operational tool — not as a broadcast channel, but as a precision instrument for keeping individuals on track.
Notifications fired at the right moments: a reminder about an upcoming panel, an update about a room change, a prompt about where dinner was being held. The notifications were specific, timely, and short — closer to what a conference coordinator would say to you if they were standing next to you than to the mass email updates most conferences rely on.
The chat feature gave attendees a way to continue conversations that had started in sessions or at dinner — a channel that matched how this audience actually communicates, without adding another tool to their stack.
Live audience polling provided the organising team with real-time feedback on session quality and content relevance — information they used to adjust programming mid-conference and to make decisions about future summit content.
What happened
The "personal assistant" framing resonated accurately with what attendees experienced. The operational noise that typically accompanies large conferences — the uncertainty about where to be, when to be there, what changed — was largely absent. Attendees moved through the programme with confidence because the information they needed arrived before they needed to ask for it.
For the organising team, the reduction in inbound queries was operationally significant. The time spent answering "where is the networking dinner?" or "what time does the afternoon session start?" dropped substantially, freeing the team to focus on the experience rather than the logistics.
Post-conference, the live polling data gave Kantar a detailed picture of what had landed with the audience — not the impressionistic feedback that comes from follow-up surveys, but immediate, session-by-session reaction from a highly engaged and experienced audience.
What this means for similar organizations
Large conferences for senior audiences operate at a different standard than general attendance events. The attendees have less patience for operational friction, higher expectations for professional execution, and more competing demands on their attention. Every minute spent navigating a confusing programme or waiting for an answer to a logistical question is a minute spent not engaging with the content.
The lesson from Breakthrough Summit applies to any conference where attendee time is the scarcest resource: the platform should be invisible as infrastructure and present as service. Attendees shouldn't notice the technology — they should just notice that everything seems to run smoothly.
For events at this scale, real-time push communication isn't a feature. It's the mechanism by which a large, complex programme feels coordinated rather than chaotic.
Industry: Media / Research · Event type: Annual Industry Summit · Attendees: 500+ · Region: North America
Running a major conference or summit for a senior audience? Talk to Ventla — we'll show you how the platform handles events at this scale.
