Mr. Stewart has long encouraged MMA members to actively participate in numerous trials, pilot tests, and other marketing experiments to advance the marketing discipline beyond historical norms. Essentially, much of what is still being taught in college marketing courses is outdated but is being carried into the workplace. And Mr. Stewart is keen to change that dynamic.

“MMA has always been about the future, and that’s what mobile used to be. Now we’re expanding that into something bigger and better for the future,” Stuart said, adding that he believes he can grow MMA’s membership revenue four to five times. Currently, “we’re only at 20 to 25 percent of our potential, but we can grow five times. We’re a big company and we have some very influential people at the table, but not everyone is at the table.”

While remaining a nonprofit organization whose members are largely CMOs and members of the marketing department, MMA has spent the past 18 months focused on taking a deep dive into how to make generative AI and other AI tools work for marketers.

MMA has funded and executed over 20 AI-driven ad personalization experiments. This resulted in an average performance improvement of +160%, with the best results for machine learning optimization at +272%. MMA has also developed a “growth framework” that doubles campaign effectiveness and exceeds what MMA describes as “measured with other known segmentation models.”

Norm de Greve, General Motors’ global CMO and MMA’s global board chairman, said the repositioning is just a validation of work done over the past few years, including adding “media” to the name for the first time.

“MMA has a number of executives from media companies on its board, which makes it pretty strong,” De Graeve said. “Because if we, as marketers, collaborate with them in an honest, open and productive way, we can do things and get answers that marketers can’t necessarily do on their own.”

He also pointed out that AI personalization research is particularly useful for GM as a marketing machine. AI is “increasingly becoming an element in all aspects of the value chain,” de Graeve said. “Part of the personalization test [delivered] Amazing results – they’re really strong and MMA is leading the way there. ”

Mr Stuart said the repositioning effort was funded in part by the sale of MMA Global’s stake in Possible (a three-year marketing conference co-founded by Mr Stuart and Christian Mouchet, who founded DMexco several years ago) to Hive Group in 2024. The sale generated a $20 million windfall that will be used for future testing, a portion of which was cut to obtain branding help with repositioning from a Midwest agency. Lafayette American.

“I’ve always known what the marketing problems were, and now that it’s taken this long to get the answers, now they’re validated and proven, and this is just a continued extension of that,” Stuart said.