Andy Lark is a globally awarded leader and entrepreneur. He has built one of the most successful SaaS start-ups into a global software powerhouse; launched apps used by millions every day; lead the transformation of Australia’s most vibrant financial services brand; and, built one of the largest eCommerce sites in the world.
During his tenure as chief marketing and revenue officer of Xero - the cloud accounting software leader and one of the world’s fastest-growing software as a service (SAAS) companies, Xero was named the world’s most innovative growth company by Forbes. Andy has held senior executive roles at Dell, Sun Microsystems, Nortel, Commonwealth Bank, and Foxtel.
Today Andy chairs Group Lark - a global consultancy driving brand and digital transformations for the world’s leading countries and enterprises. Group Lark helps great ideas and entrepreneurs flourish in a digital world - and great brands design their future there. His work as an investor, advisor and entrepreneur lead him to raise hundreds of millions resulting in multiple public listings. Group Lark works with founders and their high-growth brands to achieve scale through effective sales and marketing strategies. These include Jiko, Soul Machines, Ansarada, WhiteSky Labs and Westpac.
Andy is regularly rated in the Top 100 CMOs and digital leaders globally; writes one of the leading marketing blogs - The Daily Lark; and recently co-authored NYTimes and Amazon best-seller, Augmented.
For the past two decades, Andy Lark has worked alongside CEOs and their leadership teams to drive growth and change with the aim of attaining digital and brand greatness for their institutions. These include Air New Zealand, Brocade, Commonwealth Bank, Coles, Dell, Emirates Team New Zealand, IBM, Simplot, Southwest Airlines, Sun, The New Zealand Government, Visa, and Xero. He has co-founded and built multiple businesses to >100m valuations.
He is a non-executive director of Mighty River Power. He has held directorships with SLI Systems, Fronde and Number 8 Ventures - New Zealand’s leading technology venture capital firm.
A native of Auckland, New Zealand, Andrew holds a bachelor’s degree from Auckland University and attended Dilworth School in Auckland. He is a passionate supporter of NZ and Australian entrepreneurs where his work was recognised with the NZ Government’s prestigious World Class New Zealander Award - and most recently, the Flying Kiwi Award on behalf of the NZ Hi-tech sector.
When he is not immersed in work, he is a competitive sailor, a very non-competitive cyclist, and writer.
Talking Points
Marketing Myths & Mayhem
How brands and marketing must work - and how you might be able to learn a few things from Taylor SwiftMarketing Myths & Mayhem
TL’DR: Marketing must return to core principles and disciplines to succeed, putting hyperbole and punditry in its place. How does a business develop high-impact marketing and brands and rally employees around them? How do we challenge frames like funnels and product lead growth to understand how our companies can thrive?
BRAND | MARKETING | PURPOSE | STRATEGY | BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION | DATA | MARKETING ATTRIBUTION | CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE | NPS
Andy is rated in the Top 100 CMOs globally and has developed high-performance marketing organisations and brands for the world's largest and smallest companies. Discover how marketing’s key principles remain as true today as ever and how to apply them in the context of new media and consumer needs.
Learn and understand:
- How to connect marketing and brands to customer experience
- What a brand is and why mental, physical and digital availability matter more than ever
- Why all consumers and businesses buy infrequently and how to meet them in the buying moment
- Why funnels and data are vastly overstated in their importance
- The new role of data in marketing and how to deploy efficient and cost-effective marketing technology
- How to build effective marketing ROI and attribution models
- Why marketing leaders must balance managing and making
- How innovators are deploying new methods to drive advantage
Why Andy?
These are just a few of the questions that will be answered in an entertaining and enlightening keynote by Andy Lark - a multi-award-winning marketer, an entrepreneur who has built billion-dollar brands, and an innovator who has taught thousands of people how to secure advantage in the post-digital economy. Andy is rated in the Top 100 CMOs globally and has developed high-performance marketing organisations and brands for the world's largest and smallest companies. He’s advised many of the world’s leading marketing technology brands and is an in-demand speaker on data, AI and marketing attribution.
Andy can:
- Tailor the keynote to deliver your key messages
- Make the keynote highly interactive with table or group sessions
- Add sizzle to the Keynote with copies of the presentation as an eBook and the best-seller Augmented
- Complement the keynote with workshops where the ideas and methods are put to work
- Supplement the keynote with additional roundtables and smaller group events on leadership, marketing and more
Change or Die: The AI Transformation Imperative
TL’DR: We overestimate technologies' impact in the short term and underestimate them in the long term. Today, old timelines are being replaced by dramatically accelerated technology adoption and deployment, requiring a new framework for understanding and embracing technology. How you respond to AI and act in the near future will determine your success in the long term.Change or Die: The AI Transformation Imperative
INNOVATION | Ai | WEB 3.0 | METAVERSE | BLOCKCHAIN | TOKENISED COMMERCE | PROTOCOLS | DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
As AI hype explodes, how can we understand AI's new potential to re-imagine processes, products, and the role of people in society and work? How quickly will the rise of technological intelligence occur? What are its practical implications today versus future potential? How will companies rethink the structural underpinnings of their businesses and strategies as machines take on increasing workloads and automation?
By understanding AI’s pragmatic potential, marketers can make better-informed decisions and apply them to their workloads today. Rich with examples and tips, Andy’s keynote will show how marketers and leaders use AI to create capacity and generate creativity.
Andy will put AI into the context of everyday tasks and functions. Through live demonstrations and examples, he will show how AI is one of several trends converging to recreate how we experience work, life and play. Critically, Andy will spotlight and address the AI myths, including why AI will be a critical tool for human survival rather than a threat to human existence, jobs and well-being.
Key takeaways:
A straight-talking demystification of AI: what is it suitable for, where does it fall short, and how should we think about maximising its potential & controlling its downsides - both for organisations and society?
Attendees will leave with new know-how, including:
- Where AI fits into an ongoing pattern of societal and technological evolution
- How does AI relate to Web 3, the metaverse, and parallel trends
- How will AI transform products, customer and employee experience
- What AI is and why it matters - insights into the magnitude of what’s coming
- How AI can and is being applied today
- What you need to do next to navigate the shift to Ai
Why Andy?
Andy is among the world’s most highly regarded Web 3.0 futurists and brand builders. He’s worked with over 100 companies in Web 3.0, worked with major brands to create $100m NFT businesses, and created one of the world’s hottest blockchain-based start-ups. With one foot in the real business world, he can mix a clear view of what’s next and show how you can relate and respond to trends through new ways of working, thinking and teaming.
Creating Your Leadership Playbook
How to achieve high performance for yourself and your teams.Creating Your Leadership Playbook
TL’DR: The world’s leading sports teams are often held up as models of high performance, yet many of their lessons fall short when applied to business. How can you and your teams cross the performance chasm and increase your business's win rate? What can you learn and discard from winners as diverse as the All Blacks, Team NZ, and Formula One?
MANAGEMENT | LEADERSHIP | CULTURE | HIGH PERFORMANCE | TEAMS |
Every great sports team was born from the ashes of losses. Yet, in business, we too often bury failure and only seek to learn from successes. What can companies to learn from the world's leading sports teams? How can you use failure as an event to create new pathways to success? What are the everyday routines and rituals used to drive change and consistent execution? Why is team cohesion the leading predictor of success? Businesses need new approaches to acknowledging and sharing failure - and - creating cultures of accountability without fear. See how businesses are using new frameworks to drive exceptional performance by being willing to fail and learning as they did.
Why Andy?
Andy has worked in the world’s leading learning sports teams, hottest startups and Fortune 100 companies. His unique expertise in bridging all enables him to cut through the myths and deliver entertaining and practical insights into what every business and team should do next to drive new performance levels.
Andy can:
- Tailor the keynote to deliver your key messages
- Make the keynote highly interactive with table or group sessions
- Add sizzle to the Keynote with copies of the presentation as an eBook and the best-seller Augmented
- Complement the keynote with workshops where the ideas and methods are put to work
- Supplement the keynote with additional roundtables and smaller group events on leadership, marketing and more
Solving the SaaS Services Equation
TL’DR: SaaS businesses have long maligned professional services belonging to another era and counter to SaaS business models. But behind the SaaS curtain, many are returning to professional services to increase revenue, reduce churn and drive differentiation.Solving the SaaS Services Equation
Professional Services are too often viewed exclusively through the lens of product or service implementation, relegating their potential to the earliest stage of the customer life-cycle and journey. But what if we viewed professional services as a compelling revenue opportunity to be productised and priced to drive the balance sheet, improve cross and up-sell, and expand reach?
We’ll cover:
- How can you integrate professional services - and when not to - into your value proposition?
- How do you price, package and productise services?
- Why is customer success, not professional services, and why this matters?
- Why professional services are more than driving usage - it’s about outcomes, innovation and expansion revenue.
- Which of the three leading professional services models best fits your business model?
- How and where do you start the journey without creating channel conflict? Can professional services provide a buffer against recessionary headwinds?
- Why every PS resource is the ultimate salesperson
Recession-proofing growth through CX & Marketing
How brands and marketing must work when VUCA is the new normal.Recession-proofing growth through CX & Marketing
TL’DR: Marketing must return to core principles and disciplines to navigate VUCA, putting hyperbole and punditry in its place. How does a business develop high-impact marketing in a recessionary context and rally employees to deliver on the investment? How are world-class customer experiences created to drive ever-scaling revenue?
Web 3.0, Funnels, 80/20 rules, Growth Marketing and more continue to unleash mayhem and mystery for marketers. With much of the advice we get divorced from the reality of marketing, how do we return to marketing's first principles Andy is rated in the Top 100 CMOs globally and has developed high-performance marketing organisations and brands for the world's largest and smallest companies. Discover how marketing’s key principles remain as true today as ever and how to apply them under recessionary headwinds.
Learn and understand:
- Why Growth Marketing is just a tactic and not a strategy.
- How supply chains are a vital component of engineering world-class end-to-end customer experiences
- Where to cut spending, where to increase spending and why.
- How to get the marketing organisation optimised for making over managing.
- What a brand is and why mental, physical and digital availability matter more than ever.
- Why all consumers and businesses buy infrequently and how to meet them in the buying moment.
- Why are funnels and data vastly overstated in their importance?
- The new role of data in marketing and how to deploy efficient and cost-effective marketing technology
- How to build effective marketing ROI and attribution models.
- How innovators are deploying new marketing methods to drive advantage.
Learning from losers: Creating resilient businesses and people by thriving on failure.
TL’DR: The world’s leading sports teams are often held-up models of high-performance for business. Rarely is it the case. But what can you learn from teams at diverse as the All Blacks, Team NZ and F1? How do you create a high-performance team and a reslient business? The key is being prepared to adapt and learn from failure.Learning from losers: Creating resilient businesses and people by thriving on failure.
THEMES: MANAGEMENT | LEADERSHIP | CULTURE | HIGH PERFORMANCE | TEAMS
Every great sports team was born from the ashes of losses.
And yet in business, we too often bury failure and only seek to learn from successes. What can businesses learn from the leading sports teams in the world? How can you use failure as an event for creating new pathways to success? What are the common routines and rituals used to drive team cohesion?
Business needs its own approach to acknowledging and sharing failure, creating cultures of accountability without fear. See how businesses are using new frameworks for driving exceptional performance by not just being willing to fail, but learning as they did.
Myths & mayhem: What marketers must do next
Web 3.0, Funnels, 80/20 rules and more continue to unleash mayhem and mystery for marketers. How do we return to the fundamentals and get back to doing what marketing was always meant to do.Myths & mayhem: What marketers must do next
Web 3.0, Funnels, 80/20 rules and more continue to unleash mayhem and mystery for marketers. With much of the advice we get so divorced from the reality of B2B marketing, how do we return to marketing's first principles?
