Inside the 2026 MMA CMO + CEO Summit: AI, performance, and proof. InfutorData (from ActiveProspect) Last week, the Marketing + Media Alliance brought its most exclusive gathering back to Santa Barbara for the 2026 CMO + CEO Summit: three closed-door days at The Ritz-Carlton Bacara where CMOs from major brands compared notes on what's actually proven to work in performance marketing as opposed what's now trending. InfutorData was proud to serve as a Supporting Partner for the 2026 Summit, sponsoring Q&A across every session. Session themes this year made the case for what Infutor Data Solutions, LLC see every day: smarter AI, faster performance decisions, and sharper personalization all depend on a solid identity and data foundation. Here are a few key takeaways from those three days in Santa Barbara: AI: Where it's working, and where it's still noise. Unsurprisingly, AI dominated the agenda. Zack Kass, former Head of Go-To-Market at OpenAI, joined the stage alongside MMA's own AI Leadership Think Tank to separate real disruption from passing trends, a theme that carried through sessions on Agentic AI Advertising, AI Creative Effectiveness, and the MMA's new GASP research lab, which measures brand visibility inside AI-generated answers. The consensus: AI is reshaping targeting, creative testing, and discovery, but the brands winning are the ones treating it as an execution layer on top of a proven data strategy. Performance marketing gets a financial translator. Several sessions tackled the long-standing tension between brand and performance spend. New research validating a "Brand as Performance" framework showed brand investment driving measurable long-term sales lift, giving CMOs a CFO-friendly way to defend budgets that don't show up in next-quarter numbers. Sessions dedicated to operating models reinforced that infrastructure, not just strategy, determines whether marketing investment actually converts into growth. Beyond the sessions: the Santa Barbara experience. The Summit's format leans hard into relationship-building, and this year's Tuesday afternoon Foodie Tour was a standout. Small groups wound through Santa Barbara's local food scene, swapping marketing wins and real-world challenges over some of the region's best bites. Conversations naturally carried beyond the event itself - moving from business topics to learning more about people personally - and sharing food proved to be one of the easiest, most genuine ways to break bread and build real connection. InfutorData's role. As a Supporting Partner powering Q&A across the entire Summit, InfutorData had a front-row seat to conversations that echoed exactly what Infutor Data Solutions, LLC aim to help businesses solve every day: connecting fragmented data into a single, trustworthy view of the customer. Whether it's AI-driven personalization or attribution modeling, the throughline from the MMA CMO + CEO Summit was clear: you cannot have an AI strategy without a foundational data strategy. AI cannot work without clean, resolved identity data underneath. Ready to build a stronger identity foundation for your marketing stack?

Hyve makes the POSSIBLE happen in Europe. Hyve makes the POSSIBLE happen in Europe 18th June 2026 | published by Paul Colston SHARE Hyve Group announced, 17 June, the launch of POSSIBLE Europe, supported by 50+ leading organisations from across the marketing ecosystem. The event will run 12-14 October 2027 at the Carlos Lopes Pavilion and surrounding area in Lisbon, Portugal. POSSIBLE Europe is the European extension of one of the marketing industry's fastest-growing global platforms and the new edition aims to serve as a new gathering place for senior decision-makers from across the continent. Since launching in Miami in 2023, POSSIBLE has become one of the industry's most influential gatherings. POSSIBLE Europe extends that platform across the European continent. "Our vision for POSSIBLE was never to build another conference, but to create a platform where the senior leaders shaping the future of marketing, technology, media and culture could come together to build relationships, exchange ideas and create real business outcomes. Bringing POSSIBLE to Europe is the natural next step in building a truly global community," said Christian Muche, co-founder and global president, POSSIBLE. To lead the launch, POSSIBLE has appointed Gabrielle Perez as vice-president, POSSIBLE Europe. She joins from Cannes Lions where she spent more than six years and most recently led the global retention sales organisation. "The demand for a human-first approach to business has never been greater, but is equally matched with the need to drive impact and real business outcomes. We are building an event to do both with POSSIBLE Europe, backed by the global marketing community," Perez said. Like POSSIBLE in Miami, POSSIBLE Europe is developed in partnership with the Marketing + Media Alliance (MMA), one of the world's leading marketing industry associations. POSSIBLE is owned and organised by Hyve Group. 0 comments Latest Issue EW Issue 3 - June/July 2026

Get ready to explore: A dispatch from Possible 2026. Brett wrote about the AI Overload at Possible last week, but there was more to the conversation than LLMs. Here are some of my favorite tidbits from an action-packed conference. 1. Brand creative empirically outperforms pure performance creative. After seven years of tracking and measurement, MMA, in partnership with Ally Financial and Campbell's, unveiled financial results of their Brand as Performance study. The bottom line: brand affinity creative (advertising designed to make a consumer like the brand) converted customers at a higher rate and led to longer customer lifetime value. Not only that, the study showed that sales lift in groups exposed to brand affinity creative extended for six months beyond the three-month study period, showing the long tail of work that makes prospects like you. 2. Reach is worthless, but engagement pays off. Top performing brands that are winning culture and winning at the register, like Kraft-Heinz, Tubi and JCPenney, are winning through engagement. It's not about getting in front of the most people the most times. It's a game of making a deeper impact by delivering things that bring joy and make people want to spend time with you. 3. Use AI to do things you couldn't before. It's a failure of imagination to only look to AI for ways to do what you can already do. Instead, take bigger swings at things that simply weren't possible before. To power their Five-Star Theater holiday effort, Amazon used a customized agent to scrub through tens of thousands of reviews for the most Shakespearean takes on their products, worthy to be read by actors. 4. Everyone's just experimenting. Even the world's biggest companies don't have a playbook for AI and LLMs. The current moment is all about experimentation. Just trying new things is the overriding recommendation from the theorists, marketing leaders and experts. 5. Tentpoles of marketing in the last decade are officially deceased. Before LLMs, social referral traffic to brand and publisher sites was already plummeting. AI answers and summaries are driving search referrals down even further. Video engagement is in decline, too. So stopping customers with video and driving them to your site is officially a dead strategy. It's time to try new things and reexamine old assumptions about what works.