Research revealing a new marketing growth strategy, outperforming traditional reach-based marketing plans by more than 50% on return on ad spend (ROAS
Does brand lift translate into business outcomes and how sustainable is it?
Advertising is trying to pack more into every ad than it did five years ago, and each industry does it differently. This report tracks how brands spend and what they say across 10 industries, 6 channels and 20 quarters (2021 to 2025), so every marketer can see where their industry stands and which of its habits are worth keeping.
Brand marketing faces increasing pressure to demonstrate ROI. Over the past two years, budgets have shifted toward performance—driven by an increased focus on measurable outcomes. This trend is expected to continue. Meanwhile, confidence in brand measurement is low, leaving most marketers unable to defend brand investments when budgets tighten.
Bringing into sharp focus a longstanding duality at the heart of modern marketing: the need to balance short-term spending with long-term growth outco
The new Brand as Performance (BaP) whitepaper from MMA and TransUnion reveals that traditional measurement methods have undervalued brand’s impact by up to 83%. Backed by studies from Ally, Kroger, and Campbell’s, BaP shows how brand campaigns lift favorability (+24%), drive higher conversions (4–5x), and deliver 1.8–6x greater long-term sales impact compared to short-term tactics. With BaP, CMOs finally have the evidence to defend budgets, optimize strategy, and demonstrate marketing’s full value.
A 3-week assessment to predict the Movable Middle ROAS upside and optimal audience allocation for your brand.
Assess your Channel Measurement Score - measure the incremental impact of each marketing tactic.
Step-by-step guide to launch a successful MTA initiative, from inception through full deployment. Determine at what stage your organization is currently within the journey to access specific acceleration tools most relevant to you.
A concise reference tool that visualizes all the data needed, giving brands a clear picture of how datasets can interact and be integrated for successful MTA execution.
The Great Measurement Debates
Leading CMOs discuss & debate five key areas which have a direct role in achieving true marketing growth
Marketers may be familiar with at least one marketing growth framework, but few are familiar with them all. Through this series, the authors of leading growth frameworks presented their research and answered questions to help marketers make educated decisions on the optimal approach to drive growth for their business.
Marketing has an identity crisis. Through this series, the MMA has brought together more than 30 industry experts to debate the most effective strategies to roadmap the future of identity.
Generative AI (GenAI) may offer a transformative potential for marketing, but realizing this requires a strategic, organization-wide approach. We introduce a strategic framework, the "Need-Case Map," to guide marketers in prioritizing investments, aligning initiatives with business objectives, and maximizing impact.
A detailed framework of six values and 90 capabilities for success
A collection of resources on how marketing organizations are changing.
A collection of resources of the latest tools and technology for marketing organizations.
ISM includes paid and organic promotion in traditional search, as well as new, AI-based mechanisms.
How does the mission of marketing tie to the firm’s growth agenda?
Strategize, Manage Responsibilities, Build Capabilities, Tackle Organizational Challenges
Marketing measurement has reached an inflection point. After years of investment in analytics tools, platforms, and data infrastructure, the question is no longer whether marketing organizations measure. It’s whether that measurement changes anything.
In collaboration with AppsFlyer, MMA engaged with 150 senior marketers across various sectors to provide a view of the current state and future trajectory of Data Privacy, and introduces a new comprehensive framework to approach privacy as a source of competitive advantage.
Over the past two years, the data maturity landscape has shown limited progress in certain areas, with a relatively slow pace of change and evolution among leadership, suggesting that organizations need to accelerate their efforts to drive significant advancements in how they approach data.
New insights reveal that marketers are struggling to adapt to the shifting identity, privacy and regulatory landscape
Find out how your organization’s CX capabilities stack up against industry leaders with this brief assessment.
The MMA has created a Data Maturity Assessment that allows companies to assess their maturity level across over 20 important dimensions at both an industry and sector level.
Understanding data means understanding your consumer – who they are, where they are and what they want.
Learn key lessons from the past year with a focus on the new rules of engagement for succeeding in a post-covid world.
DATT Unplugged Virtual was a one-day event bringing together brand marketers, data and privacy experts and other thought leaders to discuss and define the future of data in marketing.
Advertising optimizes who, what, and when; it has never optimized for why people buy. MOCA tests whether aligning media and audiences to the motivations already in your creative moves the business.
Discovery is moving from search results to AI answers. When buyers ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity, the brands the model names win the consideration set, and the pages it cites are often not the ones that rank in search. Most brands can’t see whether they show up, or change it. GASP is a new MMA research lab that helps brands measure their visibility in AI answers and prove what actually moves it, quantifying how much is in their control.
The Agentic AI Advertising (A³) Lab is a collaboration between MMA's AI Leadership Think Tank and Monks to assess the creative and commercial impact of video advertisements fully produced by agentic AI. As the advertising industry evolves from generative to agentic AI, this initiative provides insights into practical capabilities, true impact on effectiveness, and the evolution of workflows, tools, and processes. A³ represents shared learning to future-proof the marketing industry.
AI Creative Effectiveness (ACE) uses artificial intelligence to analyze creative performance patterns and provide pre-launch scoring and recommendations. By learning from your past campaigns, ACE extracts brand-specific success drivers and applies them to new assets—checking brand/platform compliance, predicting performance, and suggesting edits before you go live. This pre-optimization approach helps teams prioritize high-potential assets and fix issues early, reducing costly revisions and improving campaign outcomes.
What it found is a gap between how widely AI has been adopted and how little of it runs at scale. Almost every team is piloting or deploying, very few have expanded what already works, and almost none let AI act without a person in the loop.
MMA and BCG have partnered in an exclusive CMO survey that explores how AI is influencing key aspects of the marketing operating model. AI is reshaping marketing – specifically the future of how we work across the full operating model internally and externally. This research offers actionable insights into building a more agile, AI-ready marketing organization.
Marketers have spent years perfecting how media is bought and targeted, and in a world where that precision has become table stakes, it’s no longer where the biggest gains are found. Far less attention and investment has gone into the creative that runs through that media, and that’s where the unclaimed value now sits.
The 2025 State of Personalization Report, published by MMA in collaboration with Monks provides a comprehensive analysis of how marketing leaders are navigating personalization’s complexities and charting its future.
Foundational training that gets marketers hands-on with Generative AI. 5 Days / 1-Week Marketer Training Series
AI and privacy laws are evolving fast, creating both hurdles and openings for marketers. In this webinar, Alec Foster breaks down key changes—like the EU’s AI Act and U.S. legal shifts—into clear, actionable insights for marketing teams.
As AI agents shift from copilots to autonomous teams, join MMA’s Responsible AI Innovation Lab for a strategic look at this change. Despite big promises, under 1% of enterprises use AI agents effectively. This webinar offers clear, practical advice for responsible adoption.
AI is reshaping marketing, but using it responsibly is key to protecting your brand and earning customer trust. This webinar from MMA’s new Responsible AI Innovation Lab offers practical strategies for ethical, effective AI use.
17–19 November 2026 | Online via Zoom
About MMA NEXT! Pulse
MMA NEXT! Pulse is a new annual, members-only series taking place each November, bringing together the findings from MMA's research over the past year across our three key programmes: DATT, MATT and ALTT. Drawing on both global and local research, NEXT! Pulse will reflect on the developments that have shaped marketing over the past year, explore what these findings mean for South African marketers today and consider how they can inform our thinking and planning for 2027. Each one-hour session will feature a focused research update led by an MMA programme expert, followed by an industry panel discussion and member Q&A. Members can attend individual sessions or participate in the full series, with participation across all three sessions contributing towards an MMA NEXT! Pulse learning certificate.