Anita Alvarez – 2024 Olympic Silver Medalist, Artistic Swimming

Anita Alvarex is an American artistic and synchronized swimmer. She grew up in Buffalo New York until moving west to California at age 16 to train full time in pursuit of the Olympic Dream. Over the past decade she has achieved: 3x Olympian for Team USA, 2024 Olympic Silver medalist, 12x National Team Member, 6x World Championship Team Member, 4x World Championship Medalist, 4x Pan American Medalist and 5x USA Artistic Swimmer of the year.

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Phil Cook – CMO, WNBA

Phil Cook is a tenured marketing professional who turned his passion for sports and culture into a rewarding career. He’s currently wrapping up his fourth year as the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for the WNBA, leading the league’s strategic marketing efforts to elevate the visibility and popularity of the League.

Phil is dedicated to creating a marketing organization of the future. He’s revamped the Consumer segmentation approach to marketing and is focusing his team’s efforts on attracting a new, younger, more engaged fanbase led by athlete storytelling. He’s working with his contractual partners, leveraging their capabilities and innovative approaches to elevate the profile of the League and make it easier to be a fan of the WNBA.

Prior to the WNBA, Phil spent more than 25 years at Nike where he worked in Sports Marketing, Product and Brand Marketing. His Nike journey took him to locations around the world, working in various sport categories with many years spent in Basketball Brand and Partnerships.

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Didi Capers – Group Director, Sports & Entertainment, EssenceMedia.com
Didi Capers is a consumer and sports marketing leader with a passion for crafting meaningful brand integrations into sports while driving fan engagement. She is currently an SVP/Group Director in Sport & Entertainment at a global media agency.

Her sports marketing experience started while working in the spirits industry when she negotiated and activated innovative sponsorships with professional baseball and basketball teams that featured liquor brands. Years later she landed a senior marketing role with an NFL team where she revamped the team’s young fan club, developed the concept for a Thanksgiving halftime show, and launched the team’s new online store all in her first season with the team. In the past 7 years, Didi led brand experiences at five Super Bowl fan fests including a giant consumer sleigh ride in Minneapolis and played a leading role in launching a brand experience in Fortnite.

During Didi’s career several programs that she led gained national recognition including a Bronze Shorty Award and a Gold Webby Award. She is a recipient of the Crain’s Detroit 40 Under 40 honor, featured in Rolling Out Magazine, and participated in Turner Sports Panel of Black Sports Leaders.

As a diversity champion, Didi prioritizes sharing experiences through public speaking and mentorship.

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Brooke Donberg, Head of Partnership and Experiential Marketing, CLIF

Brooke Donberg is the Head of Partnership and Experiential Marketing at CLIF overseeing Athlete, Sports Property, and Brand Partnerships for the company’s portfolio of bars. Through her 17+ years with the company, Brooke has transformed and grown CLIF through thoughtful, insights-led activations with high profile partnerships focused on driving consumer engagement, building cultural relevance, and making an impact. Brooke and her team have won multiple awards for their various equity campaigns, including LUNA Bar’s “Someday is Now” campaign which closed the World Cup roster bonus gap for the 2019 USWNT, and most recently the CLIF CORPS Athlete Coalition campaign, an initiative that works with athlete and organization partners to increase access to sports and the outdoors. Brooke lives in Oakland with her wife Ashlee and their 2-year-old super mutt Starla.

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Soleil Errico, 3X World Longboard Champion, Current World No. 1 on the WSL Longboard Tour

Soleil Errico grew up enjoying the best of both worlds that surfing has to offer—splitting her time between Kauai, Hawaii, and the iconic waves of Malibu, California. She honed her competitive skills on Malibu’s pristine righthand break, and at just 17, Errico claimed her first World Title, becoming one of the youngest WSL Longboard Champions. Six years and two more World Titles later, along with multiple Top 5 finishes, Errico has firmly established herself as a perennial World Title contender. With many competitive years still ahead, and mentorship from longboarding legend CJ Nelson, Errico is just getting started.

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Kaylin FitzSimons, Senior Director, ESPN Research

Kaylin FitzSimons, who joined ESPN in 2006, is currently the Senior Director of ESPN Research’s Live Sports and Forecasting team. In this role, she and her team are responsible for the measurement and forecasting of ESPN’s cross-platform professional and college sports audiences. Her team also generates strategic fan and audience insights to support content decisions.

Kaylin began her ESPN career as a research analyst. She is a graduate of SUNY Cortland. She has always had a passion for sports, especially basketball. In her free time, she serves as her local High School’s assistant varsity girls basketball coach.

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Jennifer Pelino, Chief Commercial Officer and President, Sports Innovation Lab

Jennifer has been at the forefront of advising the world’s top brands, retailers, media agencies and platforms on how integrated technology, analytics and data can significantly improve marketing effectiveness and efficiencies to drive marketing campaign performance and achieve measurable sales lift. She helps brands strategically plan, target, measure and optimize their media plans and campaigns across channels, saving them millions of dollars in the paid, owned and earned media space.
Her global expertise crosses several critical business functions, including marketing, go to market strategy, business transformation, innovation, partnerships & integration, analytics, and operations, offers a unique integrated perspective to improving business results.

In addition to her growth strategy work, Jennifer is a recognized industry thought leader, frequent contributor to top advertising publications and a sought-after speaker for key industry organizations, including ANA, ARF and WARC. She uses her industry position to champion diversity, inclusion and equity and specifically conducts research to help accelerate the achievement of gender equality promoting the economic benefits of a diverse ecosystem in business, media, technology and sports.

Jennifer has an MBA in marketing from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Her whitepapers and points of view can be found on Linkedin @JenniferPelino.

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Nicole Sangari, SVP, Kantar

As a Media & Entertainment veteran leading strategy and development initiatives for Kantar, Nicole advises top global Entertainment and related Fortune 500 companies on how to significantly improve their performance, optimize their strategies and achieve impactful results across platforms and partnerships. Her global expertise crosses several key functions to improving business results, including thought leadership, content and marketing strategies, acquisitions, disruption and expansion.  She also works with various teams across Kantar broad cross portfolio groups and the communities they serve.

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Lyndsay Signor – SVP of Consumer Engagement, NBC Sports

Lyndsay Signor is Senior Vice President of Consumer Engagement at NBC Sports. In this role, she leads marketing and consumer engagement efforts for NBC Sports’ properties across broadcast, cable and Peacock, CRM/Email, social media and gaming and betting.

In 2018, Signor co-founded On Her Turf, NBC Sports’ cross-platform women’s empowerment initiative that spans across digital and social content, podcasts, sponsorship, and immersive experiences.

Previously, Signor oversaw day-to-day marketing initiatives for the Olympics, PGA TOUR, NFL, NASCAR, IndyCar & Notre Dame football franchises. Prior to that, Signor served as senior director of social media marketing for NBC Sports and Olympics. In that capacity, she oversaw the social media strategy and operations for NBC Sports Group. She also launched the NBC Sports Group’s Social Media Council and Social Media Task Force, creating cohesive collaboration across NBC Sports HQ, Regional Sports Networks, Golf Channel, and sales. Notably, Signor led the social media strategy and execution for the network’s biggest sporting events including the Olympics and Super Bowl.

Signor was named to the Sports Business Journal’s Forty Under 40 Class of 2022. Signor was named one of Multichannel News’ “Top 10 Social Media Mavens” in May 2012, Cynopsis Media’s “Top Women in Digital” in 2015 & 2018, and is a six-time Sports Emmy Award winner. She currently serves on the board of Trailblazer Studios in Raleigh, NC. She graduated from North Carolina State University and currently resides in Connecticut with her husband, Dan, and two children.