Growth Council Alignment with ANA Business Practices

Activating industry business systems to accelerate economic and societal growth.

To effectively tackle the challenges we face today, the ANA and Cannes Lions established the Global CMO Growth Council. Over the past eight years, the Growth Council has guided the development of operational business systems organized around the 8-point Industry Growth Agenda introduced by the ANA in 2016.

The ANA Industry Growth Agenda

The Growth Agenda serves as the unifying framework for collective industry action. The Growth Council is organized in Working Teams that are formally aligned with the ANA Board of Directors and are resourced by eight fully operational ANA business practices to drive the outcomes of the Growth Agenda.

Each practice is managed as a world-class business unit:

Built with operational infrastructure, subject-matter expertise
Led by cross-industry leadership councils composed of senior practitioners and leaders with deep domain expertise.

GROWTH COUNCIL WORKING TEAM

ANA BUSINESS PRACTICE

BRAND WORKING TEAM INITIATIVES

The Growth Council is committed to clearly establishing marketing’s role as a growth and value driver for businesses and shareholders.

Codify brand as an essential, measurable driver of sustainable business growth and financial performance.
Establish a unified global standard for marketing metrics that directly align marketing investment with enterprise value.
Promote adoption of The Multiplier Effect, integrating brand building and performance marketing to significantly elevate ROI.

BRAND

The ANA Brand Practice’s mission is to establish brand as a key source of measurable business growth by elevating brand as a business driver, delivering operational tools to enable modern brand excellence, and fostering a community of growth-first marketers.

MEDIA

Empower media professionals to drive growth, innovation, and accountability. As a hub of knowledge, influence, and collaboration, it delivers bold initiatives, practical events, and actionable content.

DATA, TECHNOLOGY, AND MEASUREMENT WORKING TEAM INITIATIVES

The Council emphasized the need for trust, governance, and fluency in data and AI to realize their full potential.

Build a trusted enterprise foundation for data and AI through shared standards, common language, and enterprise-wide training.
Close the $420 billion data maturity gap by advancing the ANA Marketing Maturity Model.
Align data strategy to business impact by defining core marketing processes, organizational enablers, and investment frameworks.

DATA

Help members address the $420 billion data maturity gap for their businesses by providing the highest quality leadership content and strategies to transform data and analytics into actionable intelligence.

TECHNOLOGY

Unlock the full potential of tech by simplifying complexity, solving industry challenges, and providing tools, training, and community to build stronger teams, smarter operations, and growth.

MEASUREMENT

TALENT AND MARKETING ORGANIZATION WORKING TEAM INITIATIVES

Prioritize the AI transformation of marketing organizations and capabilities.

Assess marketing talent to close the $25–40 billion annual productivity gap caused by skill shortages.
Empower marketing leaders to unlock growth through AI-driven task optimization and new workflows.
Redefine how talent and technology collaborate to maximize resources, elevate creativity, and focus human potential to create the most value.

TALENT

The ANA Talent & Marketing Organization Practice’s mission is to empower marketing enablement across the organization and along the lifetime of a marketer’s career. From supporting organization transformation, to connecting academia with the industry, to upskilling and career growth, the Practice provides organizations with solutions that support your brand’s talent and growth objectives.

INCLUSIVE AND SUSTAINABLE MARKETING WORKING TEAM INITIATIVES

The Council reaffirmed inclusion and sustainability as enduring growth drivers, now embedded horizontally across all strategic pillars.

In 2026, inclusive and sustainable marketing will be embedded horizontally across each of the Growth Council strategic pillars, with a central business operation fueling its continuous evolution.
Evolve the foundation of inclusive marketing – meaning stronger, accurate representation grounded in a “SeeAll” philosophy.
Acknowledge the business building capability of inclusive marketing investments – an empirically proven growth driver. Expand inclusive marketing as a business driver to optimize performance and close share gaps.

INCLUSIVE MARKETING

Set the agenda for inclusive marketing and transform it into a key brand and business growth driver, making brands matter to each and every consumer.

B2B MARKETING WORKING TEAM INITIATIVES

The Council will champion this initiative, ensuring full accountability for closing the gap for a $20 trillion marketplace opportunity and delivering measurable impact.

Over the next 12 months we will create a playbook that positions B2B marketers as orchestrators of value across the customer journey. The playbook will use plain English and real examples and case studies to outline how value is defined and created, in a way that sales, finance, and product counterparts in B2B organizations can use.
The playbook will feature the GCG’s B2B “Buyability” model. This integrates brand and demand, focuses on the account/opportunity, and explains how meeting the social and emotional needs of buying groups can be put into practice. This will deliver a guide to driving business growth and revenue pipeline a “zero-click,” AI-powered B2B market.

B2B MARKETING

The ANA B2B Practice’s mission is to elevate B2B marketing’s strategic role by empowering marketers to lead with confidence, creativity, and accountability.

SMC MARKETING WORKING TEAM INITIATIVES

Recognizing that innovation must scale across all sectors, the Council committed to ensuring AI-driven growth is accessible to every organization.

Elevate marketing’s role from functional support to strategic growth partnership for smaller enterprises.
Ensure that AI solutions are practical, affordable, and effective across organizations of all sizes.
Beginning in 2026, embed the SMC initiative within each of the six Growth Council teams to enable shared learning and application.

The SMC Working Team is aligned across all ANA Business Practice Areas.