MMA Global

Most marketing teams are trying out AI agents. Far fewer have gotten them into real workflows. On Wednesday, October 28, Marketing + Media Alliance (MMA) will share new research from 100 senior marketing leaders on where agentic AI is deployed today, what is holding it back, and what separates teams that are scaling from those still stuck in pilots. Joining the conversation: • Vas Bakopoulos, SVP, Head of Industry Research, MMA • Wesley Haar, ter, Co-Founder and Chief AI and Revenue Officer, Monks • PRIYANKA SHARMA, PhD, Taxonomy & Way-finding, Business Digital, AT&T You’ll come away with: • A clear view of how far along marketers really are with agents • The data and workflow gaps that keep pilots from scaling • How leading teams decide when to hand more autonomy to an agent 📅 Wednesday, October 28, 2026 🕛 12:00pm EDT | 1 hour Save your spot: https://lnkd.in/ettC5C_t. #AgenticAI #AIinMarketing #CMO #marketing

How can you measure the impact of your GEO investments and tactics? What is the ROI? Are they worthwhile? Dr. Michael Pettiette will moderate another panel of marketers trying to answer these questions every day, and we will hear about the work of Dr. Kartik Hosanagar and his team at Bodhium Labs. We hope you can join us live - learn more and register for free at the link in the comments.

Most brands benchmark ad spend against last year or against channel mix. The data says the bigger gap is somewhere else. Marketing + Media Alliance (MMA) and @MediaRadar analyzed five years of advertising across 10 industries and 6 channels. The biggest differences show up between categories, not between channels or years. Join us for “How We Spend & What We Say: The State of Advertising Spend,” a one-hour live webinar on: 🗓️ Tuesday, October 20 🕛 12:00 PM EDT You’ll see where your category sits, and which of your choices are deliberate and which are inherited. Speakers: • Vas Bakopoulos, SVP, Head of Industry Research, MMA • Jay Nielsen, VP, Brands and Agencies, MediaRadar, Inc. • Marc Guldimann, Co-founder and CEO, Adelaide • Dena Weatherhead, Director, Media, Workday    Register no reserve your spot and get early access to the full report and on-demand video: https://lnkd.in/eeu-Bgt3. #marketing #advertising #cmo

CMOs rate their AI vision around 6 out of 10. The things needed to deliver on it (technology, governance, talent, agency partnerships, and workflows) score closer to a 5. That gap is the focus of the 2026 MMA-BCG Survey on AI Disruption of the Marketing Operating Model, which Marketing + Media Alliance (MMA) and BCG fielded with CMOs from May to July 2026. 🗣️ Hear live from: • Vas Bakopoulos, SVP, Head of Industry Research, MMA • Janet Balis, Managing Director and Partner, BCG • Lauren Beckstedt, SVP and Global Chief Marketing Officer, Brunswick Corporation • Jacki Kelley, EVP, Chief Client and Business Officer, Omnicom • Remi Kent, former Chief Marketing Officer, Progressive Join us live - and get early access to the replay and full report: 📅 Tuesday, October 13, 2026 🕛 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM EDT Register for free: https://lnkd.in/gdkwj2AE #marketing #AI #cmo

Is your brand missing from AI answers because of how your data is built? Schema, product feeds, knowledge graphs, content architecture. Before anyone writes a word of copy, a lot of AI visibility may already be decided by how a brand's data is structured. Or is it? We put that question to a cross-industry panel in the next session of MMA's Great Debates: GEO-AEO. Join us for the live webinar. ⤵️ Does your data structure determine your AI visibility? 📆 Thursday, October 8, 2026 🕛 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM EDT On the panel: • Dr. Michael Pettiette, University of Houston and Program Director, MMA's Marketing Org Strategy Think Tank (moderator) • Evan Bailyn, CEO, First Page Sage • Andrew Warden, VP Marketing, Adobe • Sarah Warzecha, Sr. Director, Enterprise Digital Marketing Technology, Brunswick Corporation • Kirthiga Reddy, CEO & Co-founder, OptimizeGEO • Freddy Dabaghi, Chief Transformation Officer, Crispin Save your seat: https://lnkd.in/eHX2zPcr. #GEO #AEO #AISearch #MarTech #Marketing

Can you predict creative performance before a campaign launches? Targeting, bidding, and budgeting are measured on every media dashboard in the business. Creative is not, even though MAGNA Media Trials and Yahoo! found in 2023 that creative quality accounts for 56% of campaign impact, compared with 44% for media placement.  Kroger set out to close this gap. Working with Vidmob, we tested whether we could predict creative performance before launch. A year of live campaign data, 1,934 assets across Meta and DV360, fed into a model that predicted conversion performance 81% of the time. Learn the method, the findings, and the harder question that follows: how a brand turns a one-time analysis into a repeatable creative intelligence system that lives inside the briefing process. Join our speakers: • Kay Vizon, Director, Kroger Media and MMA Media and Data Board Chair • Anna DiFillippo, Director of Marketing Strategy, Kroger • Alex Collmer, Founder and Executive Chairman, Vidmob • Vas Bakopoulos, SVP, Head of Industry Research, MMA Learn more and register: https://lnkd.in/eEMh9rKh. #marketing #creative #measurement

Should GEO live inside SEO, or is it a separate discipline? The answer decides who owns AI visibility at your company, what gets measured, and what your team needs to hire for. Marketing + Media Alliance (MMA) puts the question to a panel on Thursday, September 24, at 12:00 PM EDT. The goal has moved from ranking for clicks to being retrieved, synthesized, cited, and accurately represented inside AI-generated answers. Practitioner evidence so far says GEO complements SEO rather than replacing it, and still requires new competencies and new measurement. Whether that becomes a specialty, a layer within SEO, or a cross-functional capability across search, content, analytics, brand, and communications is one thing this panel will discuss. On the panel: • Peter Sloterdyk, CMO, Gist • Anda G., CEO & Co-Founder, Knotch • Gisele Goes, Head of Content & Integrated Marketing, Square • Jamie Roô, Executive Director, Head of WM Content, Morgan Stanley Wealth Management • PRIYANKA SHARMA, PhD, Director, Expert Advanced Analytics, Data & AI, AT&T Dr. Michael Pettiette, Program Director of MMA's Marketing Org Strategy Think Tank and a faculty member at the University of Houston, frames the debate and moderates. Register: https://lnkd.in/eZsAmuKQ. #GEO #AEO #marketing

Marketing + Media Alliance (MMA) won two Esomar awards for research this year: 🥇 Gold for Breakthrough Research Methodology 🥈 Silver in North America for Excellence in AI and Automation in Market Research In an MMA-led initiative we ran with Reddit, Inc., we took on a problem the industry is grappling with: why some brands show up in AI answers, and others do not. The usual signals mostly describe which brands are already big, so we shifted focus to how brands are discussed by real people, and the role communities play. The Silver went to CAP (Consortium for AI Personalization), MMA's AI personalization lab, for our work with AT&T. CAP has now run: • 29 other experiments • with 18 brands • across 4 countries and each wave has asked for more than the last. The AT&T study is one of the clearest illustrations of how AI learns impression by impression and optimizes outcomes using contextual signals. Both studies exist because members committed their time and tested a hypothesis before anyone could promise a result. That is what an alliance is for. Thank you Rob Gaige, Clara Cannon Eastes, Parthiv S., and Rex Briggs. Here's to more breakthrough research! Vas Bakopoulos

Can AI finally fix advertising’s “frankenstack”? Advertising execution is still surprisingly manual. Marketers and agencies juggle fragmented platforms, disconnected data, and countless hands-on tasks. When those systems are stitched together with new AI tools, they can create what Fluency CEO Mike Lane calls a “Frankenstack” of software. Listen to the latest episode with co-hosts Greg Stuart, CEO of Marketing + Media Alliance (MMA), and Rex Briggs. Listen and subscribe at https://lnkd.in/eieVZCSY or on your favorite podcast app. #AIMark 𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 #cmo #cdo #GenAI

Entries for MMA's SMARTIES North America now close on October 10, 2026. Campaigns that ran between January 2025 and June 2026 are eligible. SMARTIES honor the most effective, creative, and innovative marketing campaigns across the digital landscape. They judge business impact rather than craft, and winners enter the WARC Media 100 and the MMA SMARTIES Business Impact Index. Learn more and enter: https://lnkd.in/ekAxqYxE. #marketing #SMARTIES