Huge CX keynote: Award-winning author, trust theorist and CCO Christina Garnett

How many people can say they sparked an entire online marketing community and transformed thousands of marketers’ careers – lives, even – with a single tweet? 

Christina Garnett can. And after years of wishing, we’ve finally convinced her to join us at State of Social ’26: Friction.

Welcoming Christina Garnett, award-winning author, trust theorist and CCO.

Where do we start? The tweet that spawned Marketing Twitter? Her book, Transforming Customer-Brand Relationships: Use Emotional Connection to Build Loyalty? How about her research into why trust breaks and how brands rebuild it? Or creating the discipline of Customer Trust Infrastructure and the Customer Trust Equation. Or her CX and CCO work at HubSpot, Neuemotion, HeyOrca…

Christina is prolific. A trailblazer. A human dynamo. Which leads us to her SOS26 keynote.

You Can’t Optimise Your Way to Human: Why Efficiency Is Destroying What Social Was Built For.

Nobody set out to make social feel like a vending machine, but somewhere between the scheduling tools, content calendars and quarterly goals, we lost our way. And it turns out, removing human decisions also removes moments of trust.

As people become increasingly, disturbingly good at detecting marketing that’s optimised to the nth degree for performance, the brands people love are the ones that show up when it would be easier not to. Christina is going to explain how to be one of those brands. How to be human again.

Christina is the latest big-name, big-brain speaker to join our world-class lineup at Optus Stadium on 25 & 26 August. Her highly anticipated keynote is worth the price of admission on its own.