Matt Scheckner

Matt Scheckner’s career began at New York City Hall.

Fresh out of Emory University, he joined the Mayor’s Commission on the Year 2000, working across questions including economic development, transport, education and the city’s future. From there he moved into sport, becoming Executive Director of the New York City Sports Commission in 1987. During seven years in the role, he helped bring major events and bids to the city, including the 1993 Olympic Congress of the USA and the 1998 Goodwill Games.

It established a pattern that would follow him.

Scheckner was less interested in staying inside a particular industry than in working out what could happen when the right organisations, people and place came together. After a period advising Hill & Knowlton on sports marketing, he founded Empire Sports & Entertainment in 1995, working across major sporting, cultural and entertainment projects. Its work ranged from Radio City Music Hall and the opening of Arthur Ashe Stadium to live entertainment and major brand partnerships.

Then he applied the same instinct to advertising.

In 2004, Scheckner helped launch Advertising Week in New York. What began as an industry gathering grew into a global platform spanning cities including London, Tokyo, Mexico City, Johannesburg and Sydney – combining business conversations with music, culture, entertainment and the institutions of the cities in which it landed.

That combination mattered. Scheckner’s model was never simply a conference with more speakers. Advertising Week was designed around the idea that an industry understands itself differently when it meets outside its normal rooms – at places ranging from Lincoln Center and the Apollo Theater to Abbey Road and Ronnie Scott’s. In 2022, Advertising Week was acquired by Emerald, giving the platform a long-term home for its next stage of growth.

Scheckner eventually stepped away after more than two decades and began building again.

Future Forum takes the instinct behind that career and removes the industry boundary altogether. Privately launched at Abbey Road in late 2025 and formally announced in 2026, it brings people from business, science, government, academia, technology and the creative industries together around shared questions rather than professional categories.

Scheckner describes the principle as creating the conditions for serendipity – putting people from distinct disciplines and backgrounds together because that is where unexpected ideas, partnerships and solutions can emerge.

He spent two decades building a place for one industry to come together.

Now he is building one around what happens when industries stop staying apart.