CEO & President Member Newsletters

Dear Colleague:

I am excited to announce that the ARF will be joined by the Marketing Science Institute (MSI). The combination will provide an unparalleled platform for research, education, thought leadership, and peer-to-peer networking across the marketing, advertising, and research ecosystem. Both organizations have aligned missions and values—objectivity, transparency, replicability, based on empirical evidence—values that lead to better business decisions. Neither has a partisan agenda, nor an ambition to promote the interests of one competitor over another. We both stand as impartial advocates for professionalism and best practices in research and analytics. Combining these two organizations will allow us to advance and amplify the scientific practice of marketing.

MSI has long been distinguished as a bridge between application-minded academics and academic-minded practitioners. It brings to the ARF a formidable network of marketing’s most prominent academics eager to engage with our problems and challenges. MSI will become a division of the ARF and will continue to provide its division members with a host of events, seminars, meet-ups with leading scholars and peer-to-peer networking opportunities. ARF members can elect to join the MSI Division and take advantage of these opportunities to connect with leading business schools to tap into novel insights on pressing problems.

Even if you don’t elect to join the MSI Division, ARF members will now benefit from the vast array of MSI research—analyses, white papers and scholarly content that will now be accessible through the ARF Knowledge Center. MSI’s expertise complements the ARF’s. Traditionally, we at the ARF have focused on advertising topics: media measurement, evaluation of ad creative, and campaign effectiveness (though of course this agenda has broadened as marketing has evolved). MSI has traditionally focused on marketing strategy, consumer behavior, behavioral economics, price-feature tradeoffs, brand and product management, and big-data analytic methods (though its network also includes many at the vanguard of advertising measurement). As advertising has integrated with point-of-sale and marketing has increasingly coordinated inbound with full-funnel, the agendas of these two organizations has increasingly tended to overlap. We plan to bring forward a consolidated research agenda in 2021 reflective of the needs of the broader membership base achieved by this combination.

We are truly excited about this new alignment and are convinced it will enhance the value of ARF research and of your ARF membership.

Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me or Michael Heitner.

You can find a copy of the ARF/MSI press release on the ARF website.

Sincerely,

Scott

Scott McDonald, Ph.D.
President & CEO

P: 646-465-5720
432 Park Ave S., 4th Floor, NYC 10016