Tenth Edition State of Marketing
Based on a survey of 4,500 marketing leaders worldwide, the consensus is clear: the era of one-way conversations is over. Today’s customers don’t want to be talked at — they want always-on, two-way dialogue at every turn. Read the full report on how top brands are entering the world of agentic marketing, leveraging data and AI to power interconnected, seamless customer experiences. Learn what they see as top priorities and challenges.
Salesforce is the #1 AI CRM, where humans with agents drive customer success together. It’s one open, deeply unified platform integrating your data, AI agents, and Customer 360 apps, so you can create a limitless workforce to scale faster, boost employee productivity, and grow customer relationships.
Proving that Brand is Powerful
Marketers know brand builds growth—but until now, proof was elusive. Download the new Brand as Performance (BaP) whitepaper from MMA and TransUnion to learn how brand-first strategies compound growth and drive measurable results for your business.
Join MMA’s Marketing Org Strategy Think Tank
MOSTT is a community of marketing experts and professors committed to rethinking the world of the modern marketing organization. We seek to develop unique and actionable knowledge to guide CMOs’ organization design decisions and to assist marketing organizations in competing more effectively. MOSTT seeks to aid Marketers in driving business growth in today’s rapidly-changing environment.
Connecting Marketing to Finance
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Tuesday, April 28, 2026
Opening Remarks
Greg Stuart and Tariq Hassan open the day by framing what’s really on the CMO’s plate right now — drawing on new qualitative research with UVA Darden that found striking unanimity across 15 senior marketing leaders on growth pressure, AI transformation, and the legitimacy gap with finance. They’ll set the objectives for the day and preview what’s ahead.
Discussion: The New Economics of Brand — What Drives Growth Now
Instead of maximizing multiyear returns, CMOs are often asked to optimize for short-term performance — without a clear way to measure the true impact of tradeoffs. In this session, we’ll share new findings from MMA’s Brand as Performance work, including AT&T’s latest results, to show how brand investment drives measurable financial outcomes. More importantly, we’ll explore how CMOs are using this to rethink budget allocation, measurement, and conversations with the CFO.
Discussion: Built for What’s Next: Getting Your Stack and Your Brand AI-Ready
What do the CMOs of Slack and Pinterest have in common? They market end-user platforms actively being rebuilt by AI. Both transformations require more than a product roadmap — they demand a new brand story, a retooled tech stack, and a marketing org willing to lead through fundamental change. In this session, Ryan Gavin, CMO of Slack, and Claudine Cheever, CMO of Pinterest, pull back the curtain on what it looks like when the product underneath you evolves fast: how you re-architect your marketing infrastructure to keep pace, how you reintroduce your brand to customers who thought they already knew you, and how you build a team culture that turns disruption into competitive advantage.
Discussion: Designing the Next-Generation Marketing Operating Model
Adoption of AI across the marketing organization carries significant opportunities but also difficult challenges. In this session, Rebecca Messina and Omar Rodríguez-Vilá will share highlights from a recent study on the role of marketing operating models in enabling AI adoption. The findings show that companies guiding AI adoption with clarity of marketing’s goals, metrics, and methods are experiencing higher performance. Attempting to scale AI adoption in an organization without operating clarity can significantly contribute to the challenges and complexities that are inhibiting its success. Come to learn more about the findings and what you can do about it.
CMO Breakout Sessions
AI in Production: What’s Actually Scaling vs. Failing
A peer discussion focused on what AI use cases are actually scaling inside marketing organizations — and what’s not. CMOs will share where they’ve moved beyond pilots, what broke along the way, and what it takes to embed AI into real workflows.
The CMO Role: What Has Actually Changed in the Last 12 Months
What have you personally changed in how you operate as a CMO in the last 12 months? This session focuses on how the role is evolving in practice — how leaders are spending their time differently, making decisions differently, and navigating increased expectations across the enterprise.
Rebuilding the Marketing Machine: How Are You Restructuring Your Organization?
What is one structural change you’ve made — or are about to make — to your marketing organization? This session focuses on how CMOs are redesigning teams, workflows, and resourcing models, including the role of in-house vs. external partners and where AI is replacing or reshaping functions.
Discussion: The Formula for How CMOs and CFOs Actually Work Together
Many CMOs believe the challenge is “proving marketing’s value” to the CFO. But in reality, the issue is deeper: marketing and finance are often operating from completely different models of value. In this session, we’ll explore how leading CMOs are changing that — how they’re aligning marketing metrics to enterprise outcomes, reshaping scorecards, and building real partnerships with finance. This is not about better storytelling. It’s about changing how marketing shows up in the business.
