In 2025, inclusive marketing was being scrubbed from corporate calendars. We built the conference around it anyway. Attendance grew 60% the following year.
MarketHER is the American Marketing Association Detroit’s annual Women’s History Month conference. Knauf Media Group sponsored and produced the 2025 and 2026 editions, setting the theme and building the speaker program for both.
The problem
In March 2025, companies across the country were removing inclusion language from their programs, their job titles, and their marketing. The safe move for AMA Detroit, the second oldest AMA Chapter in the country, for a women-in-marketing event that spring was an evergreen theme. Personal branding. AI tools. Something no one would have to defend in a Monday meeting.
The safe move would also have produced a forgettable evening. Chapter events compete with everything else on a Friday night in Downtown Detroit, and the reason people give up that night is that the program is saying something they cannot get anywhere else that week.
So we started where the decision actually gets made. The theme is the event strategy. Everything else was logistics.
2025
We named the thing directly: Women Leading the Conversation in Marketing and Communications, with the programming built around inclusive communications at the exact moment the category was under pressure.
Ada Mbonu opened with a keynote on re-strategizing with the resources you already have, which is what the room was actually living through. The panels were split by career stage on purpose. One put students and early-career marketers with practitioners who could tell them what employers were really hiring for. The second asked senior communicators how brands hold credibility when the ground moves under the messaging.
Two audiences, one night, neither one treated as an afterthought.
2026
We evolved the theme rather than repeating it. From Advice to Advocacy moved the conversation from what women are told to what actually changes outcomes: real introductions, portfolio building, and sponsorship when it counts.
Donna Murray-Brown, President and CEO of Inforum and the first Black woman to lead the organization, delivered the keynote. The panel brought together mentorship practitioners from the Center for Success, The Guidance Center, and the Eastern Michigan University Foundation, moderated by Emma Seidel of GM Financial.
Knauf Media Group sponsored the venue, and the venue was a decision. BasBlue is a Detroit nonprofit built for women and nonbinary members, named for the eighteenth-century bluestockings who gathered for conversation that women were not supposed to be having. Hosting a mentorship program inside an institution whose entire purpose is access, mentorship, and capital meant the room was making the argument before anyone took the stage. A hotel ballroom would have held the same people and said nothing.
What changed
Attendance grew 60% year over year, from 25 to 40, with a longer program in a larger venue and the same ticket pricing. Both years drew a substantial share of attendees who had never been to an AMA Detroit event, which for a chapter program is the harder number to move. Growing an existing membership list is a reminder problem. Bringing in people with no prior relationship is a positioning one.
Two things moved it:
The theme was specific and it was timed. Not women in marketing, which is a category, but inclusive communications under pressure in 2025 and mentorship that turns into advocacy in 2026. A theme that could have run in any year gives no one a reason to attend in this one.
The keynote had a point of view. Ada Mbonu argued that you build past your constraints with the resources already in the room. Donna Murray-Brown brought two decades of moving women into leadership at scale. Neither was a survey of the topic. Both were arguing something, which is what people repeat afterward and what makes the event worth an evening.
The takeaway
Events are usually treated as logistics with a speaker attached. The decisions that determine whether anyone shows up, and whether the night means anything once they do, happen months earlier: the theme, the people asked to say it, and the room it happens in. Those choices either carry the message or contradict it.
That is the part we own, and it is the same work we do for executives and B2B brands: decide what the position is, then build every visible element to prove it.
Knauf Media Group 