This is the 10th edition of the LTR online conference experience. LTR is a fast-paced 2 1/2 hours and starts at 11:30am EST (New York time) Wednesday 4th August with a half hour of networking followed by 90 mins of presentations and then another half hour networking session.
LTR is designed to help you get to know other CXOs and fellow leaders of online social communities and dating companies, and inspire you to further business growth. This event is small, focused, and by-invite-only. 80 places only.Â
You'll meet CEOs and top flight executives from a diverse group of leading dating and online social communities. We have some brilliant speakers, and attendees, that can help you think outside the box and inspire you about the future.
The LTR conference is hosted and attended by the Internet Dating Excellence Association (IDEA) and the Online Social Community Association (OSCA).  If you got an email invite, you're in the group, and very welcome to join us. (Email mark@courtlandbrooks.com to inquire about joining IDEA or OSCA, it's free!).
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Presentations are ~20 minutes each and will reveal a core idea. You'll hear ideas on growth opportunities and user experience, challenging issues worthy of collaboration, interesting new technology and inspirational and informative stories to help enhance your understanding and sharpen up your strategy.
LTR is a unique and uplifting and essential event that will help you and your company align with the best of what the dating and online social community industries will become. LTR will help you evolve and help you connect with and get more perspective from your peers.
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This is a closed-door session and is by direct-invite-only from your host and organizer Mark Brooks. Â
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PLEASE NOTE: LTR is by invite only.  Please reply to Mark's email invitation to RSVP.Â
PRIOR LTR EVENTS FILLED WITHIN 72 HOURS OF INVITES BEING SENT. Â
Kindly sponsored by:
  RealMe - Improve safety with user access to background info and raise your ARPU
  vPaaS by Meet Group - Video at scale
 Courtland Brooks - Internet dating and communities consultancy-agency
Mark runs the agency-consultancy Courtland Brooks (est. 2005) which is comprised of an elite team of 30 industry specialists focused on serving strategy, marketing and business development assistance to Internet dating companies and online social communities.Â
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He supports the dating and online social community industries by heading IDEA.gp (since 2007) & OSCA.gp, hosting LTR, and publishing the news summary services Online Personals Watch (est. 2004) and Very Social Network (est. 2006). Â
Mark graduated from HBS in 2014 and completed an Executive MSc in Behavioral Science at London School of Economics in 2017. Â
Mark is committed to helping dating and social industry executives connect, learn and share, and get inspired for an even more effective and prosperous future.
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Acclaimed author, researcher, and TV personality, Pepper Schwartz has devoted her life to the fields of intimacy & sexuality. She created the compatibility profiling system for two dating companies in the past. Â
Professor Schwartz did her PhD at Yale and has been at University of Washington for 49 years! Pepper was Love and Relationship Ambassador for AARP for 11 years.
See her books, Finding Your Perfect Match, Prime, The Normal Bar, Dating After 50 for Dummies, and more.
Pepper lectures internationally on intimate relationships, sexuality, and women's wellbeing and is relationship expert on "Married At First Sight" on A&E Network.
Sean is one of the people behind rolling out video at The Meet Group. Of course, The Meet Group is known for its great success with one to many video, and making video fun.
He was Senior Product Manager from 2017-2019 and leads the video monetization and gamification teams for all of The Meet Group's mobile apps.
Now he is Director of Product at The Meet Group. In the past he was Product Lead and Game Master at Kabam, working with studios such as Marvel, WB and Paramount to develop franchises such as the Godfather and the Hobbit into immersive free-to-play games.
Sean is deep into game design and video, and will help us get a better sense of how to get video right, and how it might evolve in our contexts, in his presentation.
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I first met Dennis when I visited Yahoo Personals in 2005. His title intrigued me. His card read 'Data Miner.' He was a technical marketer back then. We've stayed in contact since then and Dennis has evolved to become a prolific public speaker on the subject of Facebook marketing.Â
He writes for Ad Week, Social Media Examiner, and 3Q Digital, among others, and has worked with Blitz Metrics for the last 14 years. Â
In short, Dennis is an inside-guy for Facebook marketing strategy. Â
Dennis studied at London School of Economics, and continues to be studious in his approach and application of cutting edge Facebook marketing strategy.
* supporting sponsors of LTR
Adekunle Adeniji, CEO, 2CanPlay
Alex Leshan, Product Owner, DatingPro
Anika Müller, Director Product Management, Spark Networks
Anthony Canapi, Director of Membership, Matchmakers In The City
Arjun Bhatia, CMO, Matrimony.com
Ayo Olatoye, co-Founder, Trueflutter
Ben Goodman, Marketing Manager, CitySwoon
Bernadett Simon, Head of Marketing, Dating Central Europe Zrt
Candace Fan, Marketing Manager, Snack
Catherine Cook Connelly, CMO, The Meet Group *
Christian Mercer, Founder & CEO, Positive Plus One
Courtney Kovacevich, VP Partnerships, RealMe *
David Minns, Founder & CEO, Platformdating.com
Deepansh Malhotra, co-Founder, EntNetwrk
Erica Arrechea, co-Founder, Cinqe
Felix Hoo, Head of Subscriptions, EME Hive
Genevieve Zawada, VP, Brotherton Holdings
Guillaume Asselot, Founder, Seeders
Haze Deng, Chief Revenue Officer, Ruby Life
Higinio Dillinger, President/Owner, Cebcor
Hristo Zlatarski, CEO, Elitebook.bg
Jamie Lee, Founding Director, Lunch Actually
Jean-Marc Larouche, entrepreneur
Jane Ramadan, Account Manager, Business Development, RealMe *
Jessica Alderson, co-Founder, SoSyncd
Jonas Junger, Director of Strategy, Spark Networks
Judith Bosire, co-Founder, DNA Romance
Julien Hamilton, Founder, Single Spot
Justin Davis, CEO, Spectrum Labs
Kate Gould, Senior Digital Marketing Manager, Brotherton Holdings
Kolina Kretzschmar, Head of Operations, Snack
Lisa Butkiewicz, CEO, Meetopolis
Lisa Ferrell, CEO, Intandem
Marci Rubin, CEO, Yak Network
Matt Paoli, Founder, Flare Events
Matthew Milner, COO, CLiKD
Meet Kanodia, co-Founder, Go Gaga
Michael Blakeley, Founder, CLiKD
Michael Carter, President, Passions Network
Michele Tobin, VP Partnerships, The Meet Group *
Neil Davis, CBO, RealMe *
Numair Qureshi, Founder & CEO, Mixo App
Paula Pardel, MD, Bloom Matchmaking
Peter Christopher, Founder & President, ChristianFilipina.com
Phil Henricks, Sr Director of Marketing, Growlr
Radha Patel, Founder, Single to Shaadi
Ritesh Bhatnagar, Head of Marketing and Growth, Woo
Rory McClelland, Head of Safety & Product, Bumble
Saichithra Swaminathan, Chief Portal & Mobile Officer, BharatMatrimony
Sanjay Panchal, Founder, Elate
Scott Valdez, President and Founder, VIDA Select
Shar Fuller, co-Founder, Mai Tai UK
Sid Klein, CEO, Matchmaker2Matchmaker
Sneha Ramachandran, Head of Operations, S'More
Steve Tan, CFO, Lunch Actually
Ulysses Diaz, Program Manager, Reflex Media
Vivek Jain, co-Founder, LOKO
Zach Schleien, Founder, Filter Off
We enjoyed a phenomenal presentation by Yu-kai Chou, a gamification and behavioral design master, and author of Actionable Gamification. Then Dr Timothy Sexton gave us an overview of how he is on a mission to use DNA to forecast 'romantic chemistry.' Finally, Simon Corbett and Mark Brooks introduced the calendar of IRL GDI conferences and LTR Summits in 2021-2022, an entire year of events pre-planned, and then interviewed each other about their involvement with the dating and social industries.
See invitation site here with speakers and attendees
LTR Edition 8 welcomed author Jon Birger to speak about his latest book "Make Your Move" and the key relevant points for dating communities. Then Barbara Soltysinkska, the CEO of International influencer network Indahash, gave us the inside track on how to work with influencer networks.. Shauny Ullman then gave us an overview of her new service, Clean Bill of Health, (CBOH). There's a need for communicating covid status and other health information, and her platform is an example of one that fulfills that need.
See invitation site here with speakers and attendees
Another sold-out LTR, we were super thrilled to hear Dr Helen Fisher, a powerhouse top-flight anthropologist with a long history in Internet dating. She is Chief Scientific Officer at Match since 2005, and is Senior Research Fellow at Kinsey Institute. Then Carsten Boltz presented on growth strategy. He's CEO of Online Personals Group with properties in 37 countries and a team of 160. Carsten is a member of IDEA Ten Year Club, Anthony Volpe, CMO at Tawkify, overviewed how Tawkify has done well despite the pandemic.
Gitte Bendzilla, the MD of public company, Spark Networks was interviewed by Mark Brooks about her 2 years at Spark. Alex Durrant, the CEO/Founder of Jigsaw talked about the rise and recent raise of Jigsaw. They just raised $3.7m. Henning Wiechers is a long term mega-affiliate in Germany who is an expert on the DACH market and he gave us the benefit of his insights on the DACH markets. All in all, another diverse and fascinating line up, enjoyed by a packed room of online community leaders and luminaries.Â
See invitation site here with speakers and attendees
Edition 5 in Feb 2021 featured celebrity matchmaker Patti Stanger, a.k.a. the millionaire matchmaker. Patti produced and starred in "The Millionaire Matchmaker" for 7 years and is probably the world's most famous matchmaker. Geoff Cook gave us an overview of the vPaaS product which enables PlentyoffFish and is opening up to work with more dating and online social communities. Zach Zhleien is a startup CEO with a penchant for data and video, and gave us his thoughts on video dating.
See invitation site here with speakers and attendees
Our 4th LTR featured noted conversions and digital design specialist Tim Ash talking through some fascinating pricing model designs. Ross Williams from White Label Dating appealed to the industry to work together more and gave some examples of lucrative ways to do that. David Minns of Platform Dating talked us through some of his extreme niche products and gave us insight on why the products work, and how well they're doing.
See invitation site here with speakers and attendees
LTR #3 was another landmark event. Harvard Business School's Professor Ashley Whillans gave us an overview of her findings from behavioral science on how our time can be used in a more personally fulfilling way. Dr Mari-Sanna Paukkerri, CEO of Utopia Analytics, shared how advanced language independent AI is being used for UGC review. Then Catherine Connelly, a notable long termer in the dating industry started her company at age 15, and has guided The Meet Group to it's current $360m a year.
See invitation site here: shows speakers and attendees
Once again, LTR filled to capacity within 72 hours of invitations being sent out. The CEO/Founder of Hornet explained how he transitioned Hornet from being a dating app to being an online social community. The CEO of RealMe defined how reputation data is making users safer. Professor Robert Metcalfe walked us through how we can measure consumer value. We also got a half hour networking session before and after the speakers session, so attendees could meet fellow industry leaders on small tables of six. Â
See invitation site here: shows speakers and attendees
The very first LTR online conference happened September 10th, 2020 and was attended by 99 leaders and luminaries (including 72 CEO/Founders of dating and online social communities). Professor Iyengar of Columbia University spoke about the Art of Decision Making. Geoff Cook, CEO of The Meet Group gave us the inside-track on the rise of video. The Godfather of reality TV, Jon Murray, was interviewed. Â
See invitation site here:Â shows speakers and attendeesÂ
The third formal event took place at Harvard Club New York in early March 2020 and was hosted by Geoff Cook, the CEO/co-founder of The Meet Group (NASDAQ: MEET). We enjoyed a wonderful prior evening of dining and full day of idea sharing and discussion, followed by an IDEA WOW (World Officers Weekend) in New York.
See invitation site here
The second formal event took place in December 2019 in Berlin at the Spark Networks (NYSE: LOV) board room, hosted by Jeronimo Folgueira, the outgoing CEO and Eric Eichmann, the new CEO. An all-star group of executives from some of the top dating and matchmaking companies on the planet were present, and presented their growth ideas to the group. See photo below. Â
See invitation site here
The first formal event took place in April 2019 this year in Chennai, India which is the home of Matrimony.com. The weekend prior to the event we held a WOW, World Officers Weekend, where we toured the sights and sounds and culinary delights of Chennai. Then the first IDEA SUMMIT was held in Matrimony's boardroom and was hosted by Muru, the CEO of Matrimony.com.Â
See invitation site here
IDEA mixers have been happening for the last 10 years but the first semi-formal event was in Malta in November 2018. The World Officers Weekend brought together a group of dating executives to learn and share and have a long weekend in Malta.
See invitation site here