August 5, 2025
The Q3 Edit | A Deep Dive from MMA India’s July 2025 Board Meeting featuring India’s most influential marketing leaders - from Adobe, Nestlé, Myntra, Haleon, Kotak, Jubilant, Haleon, Snap, CK Birla, and more.
Body - This quarter, the MMA India board meeting was less about updates and more about recalibration. Held in July, it brought together India’s most influential marketing decision makers - from Adobe, Nestlé, Myntra, Haleon, Kotak, Jubilant, Snap, CK Birla, and more - into a closed room. The agenda? Rewire marketing for the next cycle.
As discussions turned to attribution, media fragmentation, and scientific framework adoption, one sentiment cut through: it's not just about deploying tools. It's about rethinking operating systems - from marketing org charts to capability investment models.
Meanwhile, the Smarties Business Impact Index and MMA’s global frameworks are being repurposed as working models within Indian organizations - tailored to local needs. Nestlé and Jubilant are leading adoption for frameworks like CAP (Consortium for AI Personalization) and MMGF (Movable Middles Growth Framework), showing tangible progress in segmentation-led ROI improvement.
Anindita Veluri of Adobe, one of MMA India’s newly inducted board members, led a provocative session that challenged conventional workflows. Her team’s Agentic AI framework didn’t just showcase automation - it offered a glimpse into a world where marketers become editors of intelligence, not operators of interfaces.
Top 4 Signals from India’s Most Influential Marketing Room
1. Transforming Marketing Workflows with Agentic AI
Adobe’s session landed with unmistakable force. Their Agentic AI approach, anchored in real-world applications, presented a shift from prompt-based interaction to outcome-driven orchestration. AI agents like Audience Agent and Journey Agent are already generating segments, building multichannel journeys, and optimizing content autonomously. The presentation made it clear: this isn’t about creative support - it’s about reengineering the marketing pipeline end-to-end.
This resonated across the board. Another new board member Vipul Kedia, Chief Operating Officer at Affle, highlighted the transformative potential for marketing agility. He noted how Agentic AI could help brands “respond with speed and precision” in a market defined by fragmentation and moment-driven consumption. Others echoed concerns around platform interoperability, deployment readiness, and ROI modeling - but the underlying mood was one of momentum, not hesitation
Adobe’s pilots with Coca-Cola and others reinforced that this isn’t conceptual. It’s operational. And now, MMA India is exploring a bespoke Agentic AI use case internally - aimed at improving outreach, engagement, and operational efficiency.
The takeaway: marketing workflows are being re-architected. From planning and content production to execution and optimization, Agentic AI is forcing CMOs to rethink not just how teams work - but what work marketing even means.
Read more: How Agentic AI is shifting the focus from segmentation to individualisation
2. The ‘Movable Middle’ May Be Marketing’s Most Overdue Correction
India’s top CMOs are questioning the default mode of mass-reach advertising. The MMA’s MMGF (Movable Middle Growth Framework), currently being piloted by Nestlé and Jubilant, targets the segments most likely to shift - neither loyalists nor lost causes.
The payoff? Smarter budgets. Fewer wasted impressions. And sharper personalization. In an ecosystem where media costs are rising and consumer attention is fractured, this shift from mass to math is timely - and necessary.
3. Agentic AI Could Be the Productivity Breakthrough Indian Marketing Has Waited For
Beyond strategy, the implications are practical. Adobe’s AI agents are producing content, testing it, optimizing it, and measuring performance - on their own. This elevates marketers from micro-managers of execution to architects of orchestration.
The board conversation shifted from “if” to “how fast.” As one participant noted, "Brands aren’t just hiring AI. They’re giving it KPIs." Indian teams are increasingly exploring how Agentic AI can reduce repetitive tasks, speed up test-learn-optimize loops, and free up bandwidth for more strategic creativity.
The MMA board also agreed: insights from such implementations must be documented and shared - creating a feedback loop for learning as AI adoption scales.
4. The CMO is Being Recast - As a Growth Architect, Not Just Brand Custodian
The meeting reinforced a long-brewing sentiment: the marketing head is no longer just the brand’s voice - they are becoming the growth function’s backbone.
To do that, they must speak the language of profit and loss. Nikhil Sharma of Perfetti and Chandan Mukherjee of Nestle have constantly emphasized that CMOs must tie brand actions directly to business outcomes. The ability to fluently bridge marketing with financial performance is now a leadership expectation, not a value-add.
And with AI and automation taking over execution, the CMO’s new mandate is to shape capability models, drive ROI logic, and influence upstream org design.
Looking Ahead
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A custom Agentic AI use case is being built for MMA India to test internally
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CMOs will lead deeper activation of Movable Middles and CAP frameworks
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The APAC AI Marketing Summit in Singapore will feature India’s POV prominently, supported by the board
Closing Thoughts
In a world addicted to AI talk, the MMA India board didn’t just talk. They interrogated. They challenged. They committed.
Because if the future CMO needs to think like a CTO, speak like a CFO, and act like a COO - there’s no time left to just be a “brand custodian.”
This quarter, marketing’s job wasn’t to follow change. It was to get ahead of it.
