This is the fifth time we're running Data Experience together with Mastercard. The format has held because the brief has held: take a room of media and retail decision-makers, and spend an evening turning data — which usually lives in dashboards and decks — into something that maps to a daily operating decision. Not theory. Not vendor pitches. The actual moment a buyer hesitates, a category manager re-prices, a CRM team writes a brief.
The format in one sentence.
A wild and deliberately unusual mix of data context and daily situations, designed to make data feasible — usable on Monday morning — for the people running media and retail businesses.
Date: Tuesday, 16 June 2026 · Location: fortyfour by place to be, Düsseldorf · Audience: CXO-level, media & retail · Format: invite-only, evening session + dinner · Hosted by: Mastercard & prodct.
Why this fifth edition.
The first four editions taught us something specific: the room is more useful than the slides. So this year we've shrunk the talks, lengthened the discussion, and built the agenda around three real situations that a CMO, a head of category, and a head of CRM had on their desk last quarter. Mastercard brings the spending data and the macro context. prodct brings the operating layer — what the data looks like once it's wired into a working environment.
What you'll take away.
- A running view of European spend signals across media and retail — fresh data, not the quarterly deck.
- Three working situations with the underlying data shown live, walked through by the operators who handled them.
- An honest conversation about what's worth building in-house, what to buy, and what to leave alone for another year.
- Twelve to fifteen peers in the same room, off the record, over dinner.
Business meets daily situations. The point is not to look at data — it's to recognize the moment in your week where the data would have changed what you did.
— Working brief · Data Experience series
Who's in the room.
About 80 seats, capped. We curate for mix: large grocers, specialty retailers, retail-media networks, agency-side strategy leads, and one or two operators from adjacent fields where the same data problems show up differently. No vendors, no press, no pitches.
How to request a seat.
The event is invite-only and we've held back a small number of seats for readers of /Insights who fit the room. Send a short note — your role, your company, the situation you'd most want the room to discuss — and we'll come back within two business days.
