Marketing Keynote Speaker on Brand, Culture, and Complex Industries

Polly Hammond is a strategist and speaker working at the messy intersection of culture, commerce, and communication. She’s best known for her work inside wine — one of the world’s most regulated, tradition-bound, crisis-hit industries — where she helps brands rethink how they talk to people, and whether anyone is really listening.

On stage, Polly is blunt, funny, and grounded in real work. She’s less interested in “best practices” and more interested in honest questions: Why does so much brand storytelling feel dead on arrival? What would it mean to treat listening, not telling, as the starting point? And how do you do any of that inside organisations that are deeply attached to their own stories?

Why organisers book Polly

• Hard-won experience. As founder of 5forests and co-founder of Wine Culture Lab, Polly has spent a decade inside one of the hardest products to sell — wine — working with heritage and highly regulated brands across markets and cultures.
• Straight talk, not deck talk. She is known for cutting through the BS to give audiences insights they can actually take back to their teams and leaders.
• Engaging, not performative. Polly’s sessions mix cultural analysis, real stories, and pop-culture references. Expect laughs, occasional discomfort, and no recycled “inspiration” slides.
• Audience-first. Every talk is shaped to the room: from global conferences to sector-specific events, she builds from the questions people are already wrestling with.