MMA repositions as Marketing + Media Alliance to emphasize in-market collaborative testing

Stuart has long urged MMA’s members to step up and participate in numerous trials, pilot tests and other marketing experimentation to advance the marketing discipline beyond its historical norms. In essence, a lot of what’s still taught today at university marketing courses is outdated but being carried into the workplace — and Stuart is eager to change that dynamic

“MMA has always been about the future, which is what mobile was at one point. Now we’ve just broadened that to a bigger, better orientation of the future,” said Stuart, who believes he can expand MMA’s membership revenue as much as four- or five-fold. Currently, “it’s only 20-25% of its potential, we can grow 5x. We’re big, and we have incredibly influential people at the table, but we don’t have everybody at the table.” 

While remaining a not-for-profit org whose members are predominantly CMOs and members of marketing, MMA has for the last 18 months focused on drilling deeply into how to make generative AI and other AI tools work for marketers.

MMA has funded and performed more than two dozen AI-driven ad personalization experiments, which yielded an average performance lift of +160% — with an upper achievement of +272% in machine learning optimization. MMA also developed a “growth framework” that it said can double campaign impact, outperforming what MMA described as “every other known segmentation model measured.”

Norm de Greve, the global CMO of General Motors who also serves as global board chair of MMA, said the repositioning is just a validation of that work done the last few years — including the first time “media” has been added to the name. 

“There’s a number of media company senior people that are on the board of the MMA, and it makes it pretty powerful,” said de Greve. “Because when you work with them together as marketers in an honest, open, productive way, you can do things and get the answers that aren’t necessarily possible” for marketers alone.

He also noted that the AI personalization studies have been particularly useful to GM as a marketing machine. AI is “increasingly a large component across every aspect of the value chain,” said de Greve. “Some of the personalization tests [delivered] phenomenal results — they’re really strong, and MMA is leading the way there.”

Stuart said the repositioning effort was afforded in part by the sale of MMA Global’s stake in Possible — the three-year-old marketing conference co-launched by Stuart and Christian Muche, who founded DMexco years ago — to Hyve Group in 2024. That sale brought in a $20 million windfall, which will be used for future testing, but a bit was broken off to get the branding assistance in the repositioning from midwest agency Lafayette American. 

I always knew what the problems in marketing were, and it’s taken me this long to get to this point where now I have the answers,” said Stuart. “Now they’re validated and proven — this is just a continued expansion of that.”