MMA CMO + CEO Summit 2026 Presentations

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.

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.

AI alone won’t transform marketing. What matters is how people use it — to connect signals and tell more relevant stories.

As consumers move across streaming, social, digital, and emerging formats, brands need better ways to understand audiences, activate insights, and adapt creative across every touchpoint. But even as technology evolves, human creativity, judgment, and collaboration remain at the center of great marketing.

In this session, Disney will explore how brands, agencies, publishers, and platforms can work together to make AI, data, and automation more practical for marketers. The conversation will highlight how Disney is building tools and collaboration models that help partners improve planning, creative development, activation, measurement, and learning — moving from insight to action with greater speed, relevance, and control, all while keeping people at the center of the process.

The future of marketing is not about creating more content or replacing creativity. It’s about using technology to help people tell better stories, make smarter decisions, and create stronger connections.

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.

For the first time, marketing has a codified body of knowledge — what’s actually proven, not just opinion. Over the past year, the MMA has been building it, using Empirical Generalizations in Marketing, a collection of 200+ meta-analyses spanning more than 10,000 studies, as the backbone. This session previews the first deliverable: a shared canon every CMO can point to as fact. It’s the first step in marketing becoming a profession.

BCG’s annual CMO inquiry returns with sharp data on where AI is actually changing marketing, where it’s mostly noise, and what it means for marketing. The clearest read this year on what CMOs are doing differently.

AI personalization can deliver dramatic results — MMA’s CAP work has proven that. But rolling it out across an entire enterprise worldwide is a different challenge entirely. Most companies stall after one or two pilots. Hear from Indeed, one of the brands that’s actually figured it out, on what it takes to operationalize personalization at scale: the org changes, the data foundation, the trade-offs, and the moments where it almost didn’t work.

Generative AI has collapsed ad creative development timelines from weeks to hours. The harder question: does the work actually drive business results? MMA’s A3 initiative — with Intuit, Campbell’s, and Monks — is putting that question to the test. Hear what’s working, what’s not, and how leading brands are building the proof points to scale generative creative with confidence.

Creative volume is exploding. Human judgment isn’t scaling with it. MMA’s ACE lab, with VidMob and Kroger, is testing how AI can identify what drives creative success and apply that judgment at the scale modern marketing now demands.

Agentic AI is the new buzzword, but where are brands actually deploying it, and what’s working? A grounded look at maturity across the marketing stack, with hard examples from Monks and iOPEX.

Customers now use AI to research, compare, and decide, often before they ever reach your site, and most of it never shows up in your analytics. Drawing on behavioral data across enterprise brands and a survey of senior marketers, Knotch shows how the journey is actually changing, what marketers are doing to keep up, and whether they’re ready.

AI answers are the new front door to brand discovery. Most marketers sense that community conversation shapes what AI surfaces, but no one had measured how much. Across 212 brands over 27 months, Reddit and MMA quantified it, and what it takes to move it. Join us for what the numbers reveal about the role of community depth and how to influence it.