Agenda

This is a sharp wake-up call to senior marketers and CEOs: marketing must stop being seen as a soft, promotional function and reclaim its role as a core driver of growth. Drawing on her TSR research, she will argue that companies that outperform over time prioritize organic growth—and marketers are best positioned to lead it. She plans to frame creativity as a hard skill, essential to value creation, and challenge CMOs to step up as growth leaders. Her keynote will be direct, urgent, and provocative: unless marketers redefine their role, they risk becoming an endangered species.

For decades, marketers have struggled to prove their contribution in terms the CFO actually trusts. Now, there’s a radical new formula that directly connects marketing activities to enterprise value. This session reveals how leading brands are using it to create a shared language for growth across the C-suite. But here’s the problem: most organizations aren’t remotely built to operationalize it. We’ll explain why — and what you can do about it.

Drawing on new MOSTT research across 900+ companies, this session explains the nature of marketing operating models (M.O.M.), the effect they have on people and business outcomes, their role in enabling AI adoption, and actions that CMOs and marketing leaders can take to assess and strengthen their operating models.

CMOs are often forced into a false choice: build the brand or chase short-term performance. MMA’s multi-year Brand as Performance research shows that choice may be costing companies far more than they realize. This session reveals new evidence on how brand investment drives measurable financial value, why the old budget logic is breaking down, and how CMOs can use the findings to change the conversation with the CFO.

Most companies assume their master brand helps sell their products. Few have the data to prove it. TransUnion, as part of MMA’s BaP Future Lab, answered that question for Intuit — using identity-level data to connect brand sentiment to actual purchase conversions. The results may change how you think about where to focus your investment in your brand portfolio.

A cross-industry view of advertising in 2026: what brands are saying in their ads, how layered the messages are, and how much creative they’re producing. Built on five years of MediaRadar data across ten industries. A benchmark for CMOs to ask: am I aligned with my category, or breaking from it on purpose?

Forget the segmentation playbook you’ve been using for decades. More effective targeting for growth isn’t about finding more consumers, but finding the ones most likely to respond — the movable middles. Proven across categories, the Movable Middles Growth Framework beats other audience segmentations. Hear from the first advertiser rolling out this approach company-wide on what’s working, what they didn’t expect, what we still don’t know, and what comes next.

New analysis with LiveRamp surfaces three truths CMOs need to hear: the pattern of data loss matters more than the volume, identity precision matters more than match rate, and RCTs hold up where other methods break. We’ll walk through the implications and what leading brands are doing to stay measurable.

Most acquisition models are built to find consumers likely to buy. But buying once is not the same as becoming valuable in the long term. This new MATT Future Lab with AlixPartners explores a different question: who is likely to become a high-value customer, and where can marketing influence that outcome? Hear from the CMO helping pilot the approach on what they’re learning so far, where the early signals are promising, and what marketers should test next.