Overview Variety came to Advertising Week New York with an interview studio for marketers, and at the 2024 edition Michael Strahan, Terry Crews and Tubi CEO Anjali Sud sat in it on the same lineup as the chief marketers of Amazon Ads, Mars Wrigley and T-Mobile. Canva presented the studio in its first year, 2023, and again in 2024, with Variety editors moderating three days of conversations on branding, storytelling and audience engagement. In 2025 Variety took the conference's Marketplace stage, and for Oct. 7, 2026, inside Advertising Week New York's dates, it scheduled its first Experience and Culture Summit, presented by Outfront, at The Penn District by Skylight. On site The 2023 studio opened with an invite-only happy hour on the rooftop of The Ned NoMad, pouring Canva's Creative Juices cocktails and juices; in 2024 it opened with an invite-only welcome dinner. Studio conversations are published on Variety.com and Variety's social platforms. The 2025 stage panel, Leveraging Moments to Create Moments, walked through Variety's Met Gala campaign for Panera with Digitas and creator Nicky Campbell. The 2026 summit program set out talks on live experiences with Questlove, Charlamagne tha God and Ice-T, a keynote from Outfront CEO Nick Brien, a CMO panel from Ulta Beauty, Dick's Sporting Goods, Snap and Land O'Lakes, and a sports panel with the NFL, Major League Soccer, the New York Giants and the WTA. Audience The studio pairs marketing veterans with newer leaders, and the evening events are for senior marketing, branding and advertising leaders at the conference; many of the 2024 dinner guests also sat in the studio. The 2026 summit was invitation-only. Talent and Influencers Jay Shetty sat with iHeartMedia's Conal Byrne in 2023, and Molly Sims talked with Katie Couric. Common joined T-Mobile's consumer CMO Vinayak Hegde in 2024, Terry Crews came with his agency Super Serious, and Strahan came with his SMAC Entertainment co-founder Constance Schwartz-Morini. Track record The 2024 studio lineup ran from Meta, IBM, Google and Nvidia to Disney Advertising and Warner Bros. Discovery. The Panera work Variety presented in 2025 was a three-part social video campaign tied to its Met Gala red carpet coverage, built around a new sandwich and a limited-edition Croissant Clutch. Brand presence Canva put its own executives into the studio pairings, including its global head of experiential and its global head of brand media, and co-hosted the happy hour and the dinner. Outfront signed on as presenting partner of the 2026 summit, which billed its chief executive for the keynote and its chief marketing and experience officer for a research panel with Kantar and Snap.