What to Expect At Digital Day
One week from today, it's go time.
Mission Control: Digital Day is June 18th, and whether this is your first Digital Wichita event or your fifth, there's something uniquely energizing about walking into a room full of people who are all trying to figure out the same thing you are — and leaving with a head full of ideas, a phone full of notes, and approximately seventeen new people you want to stay in touch with.
But if this IS your first time — or if you've been to conferences before that left you feeling vaguely overwhelmed and under-nourished — this post is for you.
We're going to tell you exactly what to expect on June 18th. The logistics, the vibe, the unwritten rules, and the insider moves that separate the attendees who leave energized from the ones who leave exhausted. Consider this your mission briefing.
The Basics: Where, When, and What to Bring
Where: WSU Tech's National Center for Aviation Training (NCAT) 4004 North Webb Road, Wichita, KS 67226
If you haven't been to NCAT before, prepare to be a little wowed by the venue. It's a working aviation training facility — think massive open spaces, industrial-cool architecture, and the kind of environment that makes you feel like you're about to do something important. Which, as it happens, you are.
Parking: Free. Pull in, park, walk in. No apps, no meters, no circling the block.
Doors open: 8:00 AM Opening session begins: 8:30 AM sharp
We mean it about 8:30. The opening session with Krissy Buck and our emcees sets the entire context for the day — miss it and you'll spend the first hour feeling like you walked into the middle of a conversation. Get there at 8, grab a coffee, find your seat, and settle in.
What to bring:
📱 Your phone, fully charged — several sessions are hands-on, and your phone is a participation tool, not a distraction. Bring a portable charger if you have one.
💻 Your laptop, if you have one — especially important if you're attending the Dennis Yu workshop on June 19th, but useful for the Summit too.
📓 Something to take notes with — old school paper notebook, notes app, voice memo, whatever works for your brain. You will want to capture things.
💳 Your ticket — have it pulled up in your Eventbrite app before you walk in. It speeds up check-in for everyone.
🧠 Your two or three personal priorities from last week's self-audit — if you did the exercise, bring those gaps with you. They're your filter for the day.
What NOT to bring: The expectation that you'll implement everything you learn by Friday. Digital Day is a planting day, not a harvesting day. You're gathering seeds. The implementation comes after — and we'll help with that too.
The Vibe: What Kind of Room Is This?
Here's something worth knowing about Digital Wichita events that sets them apart from a lot of conferences you may have attended: this is not a room full of people trying to impress each other.
It's a room full of people trying to figure things out. Business owners who are genuinely uncertain about where AI fits in their operation. Marketers who are doing their best with limited resources and want to do better. People who have been meaning to address their content strategy for a year and are finally doing something about it.
That mix creates an unusually candid, unusually collaborative atmosphere. People ask the "dumb" questions out loud because everyone in the room has the same question and nobody wants to be the only one who didn't ask. The speakers are accessible and genuinely enjoy talking to attendees. The hallway conversations are substantive.
After eleven years of building this community, we can say with some confidence: Wichita shows up. The people in that room on June 18th are the kind of professionals who take their craft seriously, support each other genuinely, and leave having made real connections — not just LinkedIn additions.
Come with that energy and you'll fit right in.
The Schedule: How the Day Flows
Here's a high-level picture of how June 18th is structured — so you're not navigating blind.
8:00 AM — Doors open Coffee, breakfast, and the best networking of the day. Seriously — the first thirty minutes before the opening session is prime connection time. The room is relaxed, people are approachable, and nobody is rushing between sessions yet. Introduce yourself to the people around you. Ask what brought them to Digital Day. You'll be surprised how quickly genuine conversations start.
8:30 AM — Opening session Krissy Buck and our emcees kick things off with the mission briefing for the day. Context, energy, and a clear picture of where we're headed. This is also where you'll get any logistics updates or schedule adjustments, so being in the room matters.
Morning sessions Luis Rodriguez sets the big-picture context, followed by the first wave of breakout content. The morning sessions tend to be more foundational — the "here's the landscape" content that makes the afternoon sessions land harder.
Lunch Not just a meal — a structured opportunity to connect. We build networking time into the lunch break intentionally. Sit next to someone you don't know. Talk about what you heard in the morning sessions. Ask what they're going to implement first. Some of Digital Wichita's best ongoing relationships started over a lunch table at Digital Day.
Afternoon sessions The afternoon is where things get hands-on. Jeff Sieh's image generation session, Scott Simson's YouTube strategy session, and Dennis Yu's Content Factory session are all in the afternoon mix — and all of them involve you actually doing things, not just watching things. Come back from lunch ready to participate.
Closing session — Michael King "Staying Human in an AI-Driven World" closes the day, and it's intentionally last. After a full day of tools, tactics, and frameworks, Michael's session is the one that puts it all in perspective. Don't check out early. This is the session people quote on the drive home.
Post-event The conversations that continue after the formal programming ends are often the best ones. Don't sprint to the parking lot. Linger. Talk to the speakers. Exchange cards or contact info with the people you met during the day. The event officially ends when the sessions do — the community keeps going long after that.
How to Work the Room: Insider Moves for Getting the Most Out of the Day
Eleven years of watching people attend Digital Day has taught us a few things about what separates the attendees who leave transformed from the ones who leave just informed.
Talk to the speakers. Every speaker at Digital Day is there because they genuinely want to share what they know — and they're far more accessible than you might expect. Don't wait for a formal Q&A to ask your question. Catch them during a break. Tell them what you're working on and ask what they'd do. You will be surprised how generous they are with their time and their knowledge.
Introduce yourself with context, not just your name. "Hi, I'm Jen" is fine. "Hi, I'm Jen — I run a marketing consultancy and I'm here because I've been trying to figure out how to build a content system that doesn't depend entirely on me" is a conversation starter. The more specific you are about what you do and what you're trying to solve, the more useful every conversation becomes.
Take action-item notes, not transcript notes. It's tempting to write down everything — every framework, every tool name, every statistic. Resist that urge. For every session, your one job is to answer: what is the one thing I'm going to do differently because of this? Write that down. That single action item, captured and acted on, is worth more than three pages of notes that you'll never read again.
Use the hashtag. We'll share our official event hashtag when doors open — use it on social throughout the day. It's a great way to connect with other attendees in real time, capture your own highlights in a shareable format, and contribute to the community conversation that continues well beyond the event itself.
Give yourself permission to not know things. This is the one we feel most strongly about, and the one that's hardest for accomplished professionals to actually do. You are in a room full of smart people who also don't know things. The questions you think are too basic to ask are the questions half the room wants answered. Ask them. Every time.
If You're Attending the June 19th Workshop Too
First: good call. The AI Agent Workshop with Dennis Yu at Groover Labs is the highest-implementation session of the entire event, and the people who attend both days consistently say the workshop is where the Summit really clicks into place.
A few things to know for Day 2:
Location: Groover Labs — different from NCAT, so plan accordingly. We'll send specific address and parking details to Liftoff+ ticket holders ahead of the event.
Come with your laptop. This is non-negotiable for the workshop. You will be building things, and you need a screen big enough to actually work on.
Come with your logins. Think about the tools you use regularly — your email platform, your social scheduler, your CMS, your Google account. Having those accessible will make the workshop significantly more useful because you'll be able to connect your actual systems rather than working in hypotheticals.
Come ready to be a beginner. Even if you've been using AI tools for a while, Dennis's workshop is going to introduce you to ways of connecting and automating them that you probably haven't seen before. Bring a beginner's mindset and you'll get a lot more out of it.
One Final Thing Before We See You There
Digital Day exists because eleven years ago, a small group of people in Wichita decided that this community deserved access to the same quality of marketing education that people in major cities take for granted. That idea has grown into something we're genuinely proud of — a room, every year, full of the smartest and most motivated marketing and business professionals in south-central Kansas, all choosing to invest a day in getting better at what they do.
You are part of that. Whether this is your first time or you've been coming since the early days, showing up matters. The community is better because you're in it.
We'll see you June 18th at 8:00 AM. Come hungry — for coffee, for knowledge, and for the conversations that tend to change things.
Get your tickets to Mission Control: Digital Day 2026 here. The Summit is June 18th at WSU Tech's NCAT Campus. The AI Agent Workshop with Dennis Yu is June 19th at Groover Labs — a handful of seats still remain, but not for long.
Next week — our final pre-event post: 10 AI Marketing Questions You've Been Afraid to Ask (We're Answering All of Them at Digital Day). The one that's going to push anyone still on the fence right over it.
